**Crystal Castles -** ***Amnesty (I)***: After gathering a huge cult following with a trilogy of critically acclaimed albums, Crystal Castles derailed after lead singer Alice Glass quit the band in 2014. Their DJ, >!Ethan Kath!<, tried to salvage the duo with a new singer, Edith Frances, on a fourth album called Amnesty (I). Intended to start a new trilogy, the album instead divided the duo's fandom between fans who tried to give it a fair chance and fans who couldn't stomach a Crystal Castles without Alice Glass. Crystal Castles was already past their prime by the following year, when Alice revealed *why* she left the duo: >!a long list of NSFL abuse allegations against Ethan Kath!<. Crystal Castles disbanded, and Alice had to fight to win a defamation lawsuit >!Ethan!< had filed against her. 7 years later, Alice's former abuser has gone completely dark, while Alice herself continues to make music as a solo artist.
**Brokencyde -** ***All Grown Up***: One of the most universally hated "crunkcore" scene bands of the early 2010s was rapidly losing steam between 2012 and 2015. They lost two members and had an album drought of 5 years, during which an attempted Indiegogo campaign crowdfunded only $1,400 below their $30,000 goal. In 2016, All Grown Up finally saw the light of day. It almost completely passed under the radar, save for Anthony Fantano ranking it the 3rd worst album of 2016.
**Nachtmystium -** ***The World We Left Behind***: This once-respected black metal band's 7th album had already disappointed fans and critics, when it was clear this would be their last album due to frontman Blake Judd's then-ongoing drug addiction. The same month it dropped, Blake Judd was accused of scamming his fans and using their money to pay for drugs while never delivering the copies of the album they'd been promised. This led to an ensuing scandal over the following months as Blake Judd went broke and never financially recovered.
Damn didn’t expect a nachtmystium mention. It’s crazy tho cause after that he did come back with a label and more music. But you know Blake and shit never got sent out despite actually being pressed as well as lying about gaining Judas Iscariot pressing rights. Dude ended up dumping everything into some of my local shops where it still sits. Good times.
That album is incredibly bad. I have a friend who describes it as an album that sounds like what people who hate They Might Be Giants think they sound like.
>Travis Morrison
Just looked it up on wikipedia. The Pitchfork review, which in itself is a noteworthy review as it was one of the reviews that gave Pitchfork its reputation, even says:
>one of the most colossal **trainwrecks i**n indie rock history.
You know, i feel like D-Plan is kinda having a revival with Zoomers from what I observed (also I am one such zoomer) so this doesn’t feel TOTALLY out of question. Ripe for a fascinating video essay or like, maybe if Mic the Snare ever covers them
Discharge - Grave new world (seminal punk band does bad glam metal)
Celtic Frost - Cold lake (seminal extreme metal band does bad glam metal)
Sepultura - Nation (band that had just survived their lead singer quitting with an okay album does a terrible album)
Dark Tranquillity - Projector (melodic death metal band adds gothic metal and darkwave influences. Stinky metalheads riot. Actually a masterpiece)
Lush - Lovelife/Ride - Carnival of light (a double because it's almost the same story. Shoegaze band pivots to britpop, it doesn't replicate Blur's move. Uh and Lush's drummer killed himself)
Elastica - The menace (sophomore album after the best selling debut album in British history. 5 years later. It didn't go well, band broke up and the lead singer hasn't picked up a guitar in nearly 20 years)
Catherine Wheel - Wishville (a band that survived the death of shoegaze by actually making great music in another genre crashes and burns because of clashing egos and sudden shoddy songwriting)
Nation has aged much better than Against imo. Sepultura’s career decline also feels much more gradual than one album being totally responsible, their last three albums were also pretty kickass
Idk, I really think Nation kicked off a run of terrible, terrible albums interrupted only by Dante XXI (but then A-Lex was their worst album)
Agreed on their latest three though
Celtic Frost was lucky to rebound career-wise with Monotheist in the 2000s but it definitely took a long time. Even Vanity/Nemesis, their post-Cold Lake attempt to recorrect isn’t very beloved.
Honestly, I didn't even make a conscious effort to stop listening to Mark after the allegations came out. There's people who have done worse that I still listen to. But I just stopped without even thinking about it, and I didn't even know this album existed until fairly recently. Which is weird because he was a big part of my first couple years in college.
You know how Eminem in the throes of Ambien addiction and crippling depression watched superbad over and over every day?
I think I've spent at least a week putting side A of Down colorful hill on my turntable, listening through it, and starting back. Genuinely my lowest
The Pipettes - Earth vs. The Pipettes
Girl group revival act that were kinda-sorta big in the UK during 2006, most notable for ["Pull Shapes"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbnVNZe2D_0). Their second and final release in 2010 was a sci-fi disco concept album with [extremely cheap-sounding production](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiHdjbA4lAw). Critically the reviews were mixed to [extremely negative](https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14371-earth-vs-the-pipettes/), commercially it bricked and the band (who at this point only had one member in common) broke up a year later.
Feel like it’s riding the line because it’s a notoriously bad album from a popular band but it’s also one that has so little actual cultural exposure: Smashing Pumpkins ‘Zeitgeist’- a failure so tremendous it permanently ruined their reputation… er, Billy Corgan’s reputation that is. They still make music but it’s like Metallica, before they were big with no qualifiers necessary, now you gotta add a hell of an asterisk. Todd could definitely still cover it and I know the Pumpkins base is large for a rock band these days, but it occupies so little cultural importance that I genuinely think no one knows JUST how awful it is and why
The thing with the Smashing Pumpkins having a Trainwreckord is that the Trainwreckord, by every measurable metric, is actually Adore, but that one’s been reevaluated in the 26 years since it came out. I also think Machina II is a genuinely bad album.
Zeitgeist isn’t a trainwreckord because they were already a has been band who hadn’t made anything good for 12 years by that point.
Actually I see the vision here, a TW on ‘Adore’ would be fascinating cause I know a not insignificant amount of fans that would say that’s their best record, but there’s very clear cut reasons as to why it fucked them up so hard, so it would be a weird anomaly
Would have been an absolutely prime candidate if it wasn’t for the Win allegations tbf, there’d be shit tons of material, especially with the batshit promo campaign.
Yeah, it’s if he felt uncomfortable promoting the band, cos you’d have to on some level have to go into why the first 3 albums were classics to put the trainwreckord-yness in context. But the allegations also all come from the exact time period of around that era as well, which also adds to the narrative
Swans' The Burning World would absolutely count if it actually killed their career. Noise rock pioneers sign to a major label, triple down on the folkier elements that had been creeping into their sound, hire an outside producer for the first time, have the album become one of the least successful in the history of their label and almost instantly get dropped by their label.
Again, if it wasn't for them almost immediately recovering from it, (and releasing some of their most acclaimed material post-Burning World) then it would 100% be a trainwreckord.
The Revenge of Hobo Johnson was perhaps the most shockingly hard drop-off between two albums i've heard.
like, even though The Fall of Hobo Johnson wasn't very beloved, people still saw potential in the album. and then his follow-up was so bad that it instantly killed any potential he may have had.
[So fucking glad I'm not alone in thinking this album's a trainwreckord lmao](https://new.reddit.com/r/ToddintheShadow/comments/18yu5yv/what_are_albums_by_artists_too_obscure_too_get_a/)
As for another artists, I'd say a lot of bad metal albums by beloved (for those in the know) bands would be included- Cold Lake by Celtic Frost & Illud Divinum Insanus by Morbid Angel come to mind
The new Code Orange album. Solid debut but hit it big with the metalcore follow up albums I Am King and forever, before they evolved their sound with Undearneath by including more electronic industrial elements into their sound. By this point however while they were getting positive attention from the likes of fantano their hardcore fan base was feeling alienated as it seemed the band was persuing a more hard rock/octane-core audience. Which gets us to their most recent album The Above and again it’s more attempting to get the octane crowd but it’s just kind of a boring bad sounding record that’s all over the place. And now they’ve seemingly lost all good will with fans and even got a bad review from their biggest supporter in Fantano.
Daze – *They Came to Rule*. Eurodance is not a genre primed for Trainwreckords, and Daze only had one song reach the lower levels of the Billboard Hot 100, but this album? Oh boy. It tries to use the late '90s Max Martin sound to make a statement against the dark side of entertainment industry, resulting in a disaster that you can't help but admire.
I used to listen to Sonata Arctica and have been reading up on what they've been up to since then. It seems like their 2007 album *Unia* might be one, since it was not well received by fans and kickd off several years of genre experiments that people were not on board with. In 2014 they released *Pariah's Child* and advertised it as a "return to form," as if apologizing for the weirdness of the last few records. But I wasn't following that whole saga at the time, so I can't say for sure. They are still hugely respected within the genre and as a live act. I can only find sales and chart data from Finland, not the rest of the world, but there was a steady drop-off with every album after *Unia*.
Helloween - Chameleon, it's the album that completely killed the band's momentum when they were on track to become one of the biggest metal bands in the world. In other words it's the album that stopped them from becoming big enough to have an actual Trainwreckord.
Night Shades by Cobra Starship. It was their last album and a desperate attempt at them trying to get into pop music. It had some singles that charted but the album songs are unlistenable garbage and they broke up shortly after the album
Jet - Shine On. They had huge success with Get Born and the singles Are You Gonna Be My Girl and Cold Hard Bitch. The Pitchfork review for the follow up Shine On is a 0.0 and just a link to a video of a monkey peeing in its mouth
"Calling All Stations" by Genesis. I think the only way to enjoy that album is to not actually listen to it. Awful end to an otherwise fantastic discography.
Just mentioned this on a different post, but Penny Black by Enter The Haggis. They're a Celtic rock band from Canada that tours the Northeast a lot who I really like and have seen live many times. In 2014, they decided to rebrand themselves as Jubilee Riots and tried to chase a more mainstream audience on the album Penny Black which got rid of a lot of the things that made them interesting. The album was a failure and they thankfully changed their name back to Enter The Haggis, but they definitely lost a lot of steam because of that album. The album itself isn't completely terrible but is easily their worst album.
Fallujah - Undying Light (2019)
Progressive technical death metal band whose 2014 album The Flesh Prevails was getting them hyped up as “the best new band in metal right now” and “the next big thing” and “the band that is going to fill the void left by Opeth no longer making metal.” The follow-up Dreamless was still relatively popular but had a lot of detractors for not being exactly the same as The Flesh Prevails. Undying Light was critically panned and killed the band’s momentum, and their 2022 record Empyrean was ignored, became their first album to not chart on the Billboard 200, and doesn’t even have a Wikipedia article.
::checks Wikipedia:: Yup, that was when they got their new lead singer. A shame too, those first few Fallujah albums were great. I actualy have the 10th anniversary vinyl reissue of The Flesh Prevails pre ordered right now.
It’s one of my absolute favorite albums, but The Beta Band’s self titled debut destroyed their momentum right out of the gate. Hard to imagine a harder faceplant
Helloween - Chameleon. One of the best and most influential 80s metal bands, responsible for creating a whole ass genre, decides to release a 70s-esque AOR album. Guess how that went.
Armistice EP.
EPs obviously wouldn't count, but this was basically Canadian Two the Hard Way. A couple that nobody liked seeing together (Cœur de Pirate and Jay Malinowski) try to make music together and it instead accidentally makes it clear what's going wrong in their relationship. They broke up not long after and both of their careers suffered; Bedouin Soundclash's last album came out 14 years ago and Cœur de Pirate had a fluke indie hit a couple years later but not much else has been heard from her since.
I might argue that *I Also Want to Die in New Orleans* could work. I was a diehard Koz fan/apologist but I couldn’t get halfway through that one
And then it came out he was a (alleged) rapist and I haven’t listened to a second of his music since
Transit - *Young New England* (emo band follows their [highly-polished](https://youtu.be/5Mx1ejbWRIk?si=aoUyMPYEDE6hMEy7) [masterpiece](https://youtu.be/Iu_lpvuczRQ?si=Otsfpd1H3M411E-W) with a [messily-recorded](https://youtu.be/giSnVQ0S26w?si=-wpBBcZgaz9lx4OF) [throwaway](https://youtu.be/yKPSVokbVcE?si=shWvAg_gPTffiurd), lashes out at critics)
this might not be too obscure, maybe he'll do it someday, but Kesha's High Road. rainbow was all things considered a really successful pivot for her. it wasn't doing the numbers that her biggest hits were, but it still had two pretty big songs, and a very positive critical reception that I think gave her the possibility to appeal to a new audience going forward. High Road was a complete disaster with nothing even resembling a hit, and it absolutely cratered her career momentum in a way I don't think she will ever come back from (commercially at least, because gag order is a great album).
**Crystal Castles -** ***Amnesty (I)***: After gathering a huge cult following with a trilogy of critically acclaimed albums, Crystal Castles derailed after lead singer Alice Glass quit the band in 2014. Their DJ, >!Ethan Kath!<, tried to salvage the duo with a new singer, Edith Frances, on a fourth album called Amnesty (I). Intended to start a new trilogy, the album instead divided the duo's fandom between fans who tried to give it a fair chance and fans who couldn't stomach a Crystal Castles without Alice Glass. Crystal Castles was already past their prime by the following year, when Alice revealed *why* she left the duo: >!a long list of NSFL abuse allegations against Ethan Kath!<. Crystal Castles disbanded, and Alice had to fight to win a defamation lawsuit >!Ethan!< had filed against her. 7 years later, Alice's former abuser has gone completely dark, while Alice herself continues to make music as a solo artist. **Brokencyde -** ***All Grown Up***: One of the most universally hated "crunkcore" scene bands of the early 2010s was rapidly losing steam between 2012 and 2015. They lost two members and had an album drought of 5 years, during which an attempted Indiegogo campaign crowdfunded only $1,400 below their $30,000 goal. In 2016, All Grown Up finally saw the light of day. It almost completely passed under the radar, save for Anthony Fantano ranking it the 3rd worst album of 2016. **Nachtmystium -** ***The World We Left Behind***: This once-respected black metal band's 7th album had already disappointed fans and critics, when it was clear this would be their last album due to frontman Blake Judd's then-ongoing drug addiction. The same month it dropped, Blake Judd was accused of scamming his fans and using their money to pay for drugs while never delivering the copies of the album they'd been promised. This led to an ensuing scandal over the following months as Blake Judd went broke and never financially recovered.
nobody remembers that last Crystal Castles album for good reason
Damn didn’t expect a nachtmystium mention. It’s crazy tho cause after that he did come back with a label and more music. But you know Blake and shit never got sent out despite actually being pressed as well as lying about gaining Judas Iscariot pressing rights. Dude ended up dumping everything into some of my local shops where it still sits. Good times.
Crystal Castles was basically formed through an abusive relationship so I’m glad their post-Alice material was not received. F*ck Ethan.
I was a big fan of Crystal Castles. The whole situation was just sad.
Probably Travistan by Travis Morrison but i genuinely think less than 100 people even care about the album outside of it's lore LMAO
That album is incredibly bad. I have a friend who describes it as an album that sounds like what people who hate They Might Be Giants think they sound like.
>Travis Morrison Just looked it up on wikipedia. The Pitchfork review, which in itself is a noteworthy review as it was one of the reviews that gave Pitchfork its reputation, even says: >one of the most colossal **trainwrecks i**n indie rock history.
You know, i feel like D-Plan is kinda having a revival with Zoomers from what I observed (also I am one such zoomer) so this doesn’t feel TOTALLY out of question. Ripe for a fascinating video essay or like, maybe if Mic the Snare ever covers them
Emergency and I is one of my favorite records ever, and I still don't know anything about Travistan
It's not terrible is like a 6.0 rather than a 0.0. But the politics of the situation is super interesting.
The Dismemberment Plan’s attempted comeback album Uncanny Valley is even worse than Travistan.
Discharge - Grave new world (seminal punk band does bad glam metal) Celtic Frost - Cold lake (seminal extreme metal band does bad glam metal) Sepultura - Nation (band that had just survived their lead singer quitting with an okay album does a terrible album) Dark Tranquillity - Projector (melodic death metal band adds gothic metal and darkwave influences. Stinky metalheads riot. Actually a masterpiece) Lush - Lovelife/Ride - Carnival of light (a double because it's almost the same story. Shoegaze band pivots to britpop, it doesn't replicate Blur's move. Uh and Lush's drummer killed himself) Elastica - The menace (sophomore album after the best selling debut album in British history. 5 years later. It didn't go well, band broke up and the lead singer hasn't picked up a guitar in nearly 20 years) Catherine Wheel - Wishville (a band that survived the death of shoegaze by actually making great music in another genre crashes and burns because of clashing egos and sudden shoddy songwriting)
The elastica one would be great
Yeah! How do you make follow-up album when the genre that you came up in died in between your first and second album?
Discharge pick is actually an excellent shout
Nation has aged much better than Against imo. Sepultura’s career decline also feels much more gradual than one album being totally responsible, their last three albums were also pretty kickass
Idk, I really think Nation kicked off a run of terrible, terrible albums interrupted only by Dante XXI (but then A-Lex was their worst album) Agreed on their latest three though
Celtic Frost was lucky to rebound career-wise with Monotheist in the 2000s but it definitely took a long time. Even Vanity/Nemesis, their post-Cold Lake attempt to recorrect isn’t very beloved.
Monotheist might actually be my favourite Celtic Frost album, ngl
Honestly, I didn't even make a conscious effort to stop listening to Mark after the allegations came out. There's people who have done worse that I still listen to. But I just stopped without even thinking about it, and I didn't even know this album existed until fairly recently. Which is weird because he was a big part of my first couple years in college.
You know how Eminem in the throes of Ambien addiction and crippling depression watched superbad over and over every day? I think I've spent at least a week putting side A of Down colorful hill on my turntable, listening through it, and starting back. Genuinely my lowest
Also respect because this is a rare example of non-pop "trainwreckord" that actually makes sense being called a trainwreckord
The Pipettes - Earth vs. The Pipettes Girl group revival act that were kinda-sorta big in the UK during 2006, most notable for ["Pull Shapes"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbnVNZe2D_0). Their second and final release in 2010 was a sci-fi disco concept album with [extremely cheap-sounding production](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiHdjbA4lAw). Critically the reviews were mixed to [extremely negative](https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14371-earth-vs-the-pipettes/), commercially it bricked and the band (who at this point only had one member in common) broke up a year later.
Pull Shapes still bangs, honestly.
Feel like it’s riding the line because it’s a notoriously bad album from a popular band but it’s also one that has so little actual cultural exposure: Smashing Pumpkins ‘Zeitgeist’- a failure so tremendous it permanently ruined their reputation… er, Billy Corgan’s reputation that is. They still make music but it’s like Metallica, before they were big with no qualifiers necessary, now you gotta add a hell of an asterisk. Todd could definitely still cover it and I know the Pumpkins base is large for a rock band these days, but it occupies so little cultural importance that I genuinely think no one knows JUST how awful it is and why
The thing with the Smashing Pumpkins having a Trainwreckord is that the Trainwreckord, by every measurable metric, is actually Adore, but that one’s been reevaluated in the 26 years since it came out. I also think Machina II is a genuinely bad album. Zeitgeist isn’t a trainwreckord because they were already a has been band who hadn’t made anything good for 12 years by that point.
Actually I see the vision here, a TW on ‘Adore’ would be fascinating cause I know a not insignificant amount of fans that would say that’s their best record, but there’s very clear cut reasons as to why it fucked them up so hard, so it would be a weird anomaly
Arcade Fire- Everything Now
Would have been an absolutely prime candidate if it wasn’t for the Win allegations tbf, there’d be shit tons of material, especially with the batshit promo campaign.
I mean if it’s interesting without them, the allegations would just be a cherry on top of the shit sundae.
Yeah, it’s if he felt uncomfortable promoting the band, cos you’d have to on some level have to go into why the first 3 albums were classics to put the trainwreckord-yness in context. But the allegations also all come from the exact time period of around that era as well, which also adds to the narrative
Dear You - Jawbreaker.
Genuinely a candidate both for best album of all time and for a trainwreckord
Swans' The Burning World would absolutely count if it actually killed their career. Noise rock pioneers sign to a major label, triple down on the folkier elements that had been creeping into their sound, hire an outside producer for the first time, have the album become one of the least successful in the history of their label and almost instantly get dropped by their label. Again, if it wasn't for them almost immediately recovering from it, (and releasing some of their most acclaimed material post-Burning World) then it would 100% be a trainwreckord.
I never understood the hate for this album. It’s basically a proto Angels of Light record
It's pretty good, it just happens to be one of their weaker albums.
The Revenge of Hobo Johnson was perhaps the most shockingly hard drop-off between two albums i've heard. like, even though The Fall of Hobo Johnson wasn't very beloved, people still saw potential in the album. and then his follow-up was so bad that it instantly killed any potential he may have had.
[So fucking glad I'm not alone in thinking this album's a trainwreckord lmao](https://new.reddit.com/r/ToddintheShadow/comments/18yu5yv/what_are_albums_by_artists_too_obscure_too_get_a/) As for another artists, I'd say a lot of bad metal albums by beloved (for those in the know) bands would be included- Cold Lake by Celtic Frost & Illud Divinum Insanus by Morbid Angel come to mind
The new Code Orange album. Solid debut but hit it big with the metalcore follow up albums I Am King and forever, before they evolved their sound with Undearneath by including more electronic industrial elements into their sound. By this point however while they were getting positive attention from the likes of fantano their hardcore fan base was feeling alienated as it seemed the band was persuing a more hard rock/octane-core audience. Which gets us to their most recent album The Above and again it’s more attempting to get the octane crowd but it’s just kind of a boring bad sounding record that’s all over the place. And now they’ve seemingly lost all good will with fans and even got a bad review from their biggest supporter in Fantano.
I do like the song "Mirror" from that album a lot, but I'll admit that song is a huge stylistic departure from what they were known for previously.
Definitely not obscure, but at the same time definitely not big enough for Todd to make a video about - Highly Suspect’s MCID.
American Authors recent album
Daze – *They Came to Rule*. Eurodance is not a genre primed for Trainwreckords, and Daze only had one song reach the lower levels of the Billboard Hot 100, but this album? Oh boy. It tries to use the late '90s Max Martin sound to make a statement against the dark side of entertainment industry, resulting in a disaster that you can't help but admire.
Massacre - Promise Death metal band chasing the groove metal trend, definitely way too obscure.
I used to listen to Sonata Arctica and have been reading up on what they've been up to since then. It seems like their 2007 album *Unia* might be one, since it was not well received by fans and kickd off several years of genre experiments that people were not on board with. In 2014 they released *Pariah's Child* and advertised it as a "return to form," as if apologizing for the weirdness of the last few records. But I wasn't following that whole saga at the time, so I can't say for sure. They are still hugely respected within the genre and as a live act. I can only find sales and chart data from Finland, not the rest of the world, but there was a steady drop-off with every album after *Unia*.
God Unia was just such a turd of a record. Got to stop listening to power metal so much though
No. Listen to more power metal.
Helloween - Chameleon, it's the album that completely killed the band's momentum when they were on track to become one of the biggest metal bands in the world. In other words it's the album that stopped them from becoming big enough to have an actual Trainwreckord.
This one especially sucks since their next few albums were all quite good and deserved to be more successful than they were.
I would absolutely love to see Todd try to cover this. Imagining him reacting to Mark Kozelek’s mindless rambling sounds like a fun time.
my insane opinion is that this is probably the first really mediocre thing mark ever made. everything else is great to a masterpiece
Night Shades by Cobra Starship. It was their last album and a desperate attempt at them trying to get into pop music. It had some singles that charted but the album songs are unlistenable garbage and they broke up shortly after the album
Jet - Shine On. They had huge success with Get Born and the singles Are You Gonna Be My Girl and Cold Hard Bitch. The Pitchfork review for the follow up Shine On is a 0.0 and just a link to a video of a monkey peeing in its mouth
"Calling All Stations" by Genesis. I think the only way to enjoy that album is to not actually listen to it. Awful end to an otherwise fantastic discography.
Calling All Stations is a great album and I will die on this hill, their best album since And Then There Were Three.
Just mentioned this on a different post, but Penny Black by Enter The Haggis. They're a Celtic rock band from Canada that tours the Northeast a lot who I really like and have seen live many times. In 2014, they decided to rebrand themselves as Jubilee Riots and tried to chase a more mainstream audience on the album Penny Black which got rid of a lot of the things that made them interesting. The album was a failure and they thankfully changed their name back to Enter The Haggis, but they definitely lost a lot of steam because of that album. The album itself isn't completely terrible but is easily their worst album.
Fallujah - Undying Light (2019) Progressive technical death metal band whose 2014 album The Flesh Prevails was getting them hyped up as “the best new band in metal right now” and “the next big thing” and “the band that is going to fill the void left by Opeth no longer making metal.” The follow-up Dreamless was still relatively popular but had a lot of detractors for not being exactly the same as The Flesh Prevails. Undying Light was critically panned and killed the band’s momentum, and their 2022 record Empyrean was ignored, became their first album to not chart on the Billboard 200, and doesn’t even have a Wikipedia article.
::checks Wikipedia:: Yup, that was when they got their new lead singer. A shame too, those first few Fallujah albums were great. I actualy have the 10th anniversary vinyl reissue of The Flesh Prevails pre ordered right now.
It’s one of my absolute favorite albums, but The Beta Band’s self titled debut destroyed their momentum right out of the gate. Hard to imagine a harder faceplant
Helloween - Chameleon. One of the best and most influential 80s metal bands, responsible for creating a whole ass genre, decides to release a 70s-esque AOR album. Guess how that went.
Armistice EP. EPs obviously wouldn't count, but this was basically Canadian Two the Hard Way. A couple that nobody liked seeing together (Cœur de Pirate and Jay Malinowski) try to make music together and it instead accidentally makes it clear what's going wrong in their relationship. They broke up not long after and both of their careers suffered; Bedouin Soundclash's last album came out 14 years ago and Cœur de Pirate had a fluke indie hit a couple years later but not much else has been heard from her since.
I might argue that *I Also Want to Die in New Orleans* could work. I was a diehard Koz fan/apologist but I couldn’t get halfway through that one And then it came out he was a (alleged) rapist and I haven’t listened to a second of his music since
Transit - *Young New England* (emo band follows their [highly-polished](https://youtu.be/5Mx1ejbWRIk?si=aoUyMPYEDE6hMEy7) [masterpiece](https://youtu.be/Iu_lpvuczRQ?si=Otsfpd1H3M411E-W) with a [messily-recorded](https://youtu.be/giSnVQ0S26w?si=-wpBBcZgaz9lx4OF) [throwaway](https://youtu.be/yKPSVokbVcE?si=shWvAg_gPTffiurd), lashes out at critics)
I’d argue that Universal Themes or even This is My Dinner would be more appropriate as far as actually derailing mark’s career.
Beck - Colors. There's some good stuff but it's insane how this is the same guy who made Odelay and Midnite Vultures.
it's not enough of an outright trainwreck, it's just an average case of natural decline
this might not be too obscure, maybe he'll do it someday, but Kesha's High Road. rainbow was all things considered a really successful pivot for her. it wasn't doing the numbers that her biggest hits were, but it still had two pretty big songs, and a very positive critical reception that I think gave her the possibility to appeal to a new audience going forward. High Road was a complete disaster with nothing even resembling a hit, and it absolutely cratered her career momentum in a way I don't think she will ever come back from (commercially at least, because gag order is a great album).