List of music considered the worst
This list consists of notable albums or songs considered the worst examples of popular music, based on reviews, polls and sentiment from music critics, musicians and the public.
Albums
1960s–1970s
;Philosophy of the World, the Shaggs : The Shaggs were formed in 1965 by the teenage sisters Dorothy, Betty and Helen Wiggin. Though they had no interest in becoming musicians, they were forced to write, rehearse and record an album by their father, who believed that his mother had predicted their rise to fame. They composed bizarre songs with untuned guitars, erratic time signatures, disconnected rhythms, wandering melodies and rudimentary lyrics about pets and families. The journalist Irwin Chusid noted that many listeners wondered if their album Philosophy of the World was the worst ever recorded, including the Rolling Stone writer Chris Conelly. In 2022, Vice wrote that the Shaggs were the "best worst band of all time", and a 2025 Guardian article described them as "the world's worst band".;Lord Sutch and Heavy Friends, Screaming Lord Sutch : Screaming Lord Sutch, a pioneer of shock rock, was backed on this album by a supergroup including some of Britain's best-known rock musicians, such as Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page and John Bonham, Jeff Beck, session keyboardist Nicky Hopkins, and Noel Redding of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Many of the guest musicians disowned the album upon its release. It was mentioned as the worst record ever released in a 1998 BBC poll. Rolling Stone called Sutch "absolutely terrible" and lamented that the guest musicians were made to sound "like a fouled parody of themselves".
;Attila, Attila : Attila is the only album by the psychedelic rock duo Attila, which featured a young Billy Joel. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic called it "the worst album released in the history of rock & roll—hell, the history of recorded music itself." Joel described it as "psychedelic bullshit".
;Having Fun with Elvis on Stage, Elvis Presley : The album is a compilation of excerpts from Presley's concerts, containing almost no actual music and instead consisting mainly of banter and jokes between numbers without context. The album was devised by Colonel Tom Parker to serve as a Presley recording for which he would own all of the rights and thus be entitled to all of the profits, since there would be no songs; the plan failed as Presley's label RCA Records claimed the rights to the record anyway. It topped Jimmy Guterman and Owen O'Donnell's titular list in the 1991 book The Worst Rock and Roll Records of All Time.
;Metal Machine Music, Lou Reed : Consisting entirely of manipulated recordings of audio feedback, Metal Machine Music was ranked at number two in The Worst Rock 'n' Roll Records of All Time. In 2005, Q magazine included the album in a list of "Ten Terrible Records by Great Artists" and ranked it No. 4 in its list of the 50 worst albums of all time.
;Soundtrack to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, various artists : The glam rock and disco Beatles cover soundtrack album was named the "worst ever" on Maxims April 2000 list of pop albums from the 1970s to 1990s. The Sgt. Pepper's movie soundtrack was the first album in history to achieve "return platinum" status as stores took over four million copies of it off their shelves to ship back to their distributors. RSO Records destroyed hundreds of thousands of copies, crippling the company with a large financial loss.
1980s–1990s
;Elvis' Greatest Shit, Elvis Presley : A posthumous bootleg compilation album consisting largely of outtakes and a selection of Presley's movie soundtrack songs of the 1960s that was made to deliberately highlight the worst of his career. Critics largely agreed that the compiler of the record succeeded in picking Presley's worst work.;Thank You, Duran Duran :Thank You is a cover album named the worst-ever album by Q magazine in March 2006. Qs deputy editor Gareth Grundy said: "Duran Duran was the one that united everyone in agreement. We put it on in the office to remind ourselves how bad it was. Sometimes these things are redeemed by some sort of kitsch or novelty value, but it didn't even have that. It's not funny for even a split second and not even the sort of thing that you would put on for a laugh if you were drunk." Ken Scott, the engineer of the album, also thought "it turned out pretty badly" and the band considered it commercial suicide. Chris Gerard of Metro Weekly ranked it as Duran Duran's worst album.
2000s–2020s
;Playing with Fire, Kevin Federline : The only album recorded by Kevin Federline, ex-husband of Britney Spears, Playing with Fire is review aggregator Metacritic's lowest-scoring album to date, with a rating of 15. It was also a commercial failure, with first-week sales of only 6,000 in the U.S.;Chinese Democracy, Guns N' Roses : This album was mired in development hell for eight years, and it received widely polarized responses ranging from very positive to scathing. Popular music historian Stephen Davis named it "the worst album ever." Music editor Ayre Dworken wrote: "Chinese Democracy is the worst album I have heard in years, if not in all my life of listening to music." It was included in Wired magazine's unranked list of the "5 Audio Atrocities to Throw Down a Sonic Black Hole" and placed first on Guitar Players "10 Awful Albums by 10 Amazing Bands" list. Chinese Democracy was ranked as the worst record of 2008 by several publications, including Time Out New York, Asbury Park Press and IGN. The Chicago Tribune noted the record in its end-of-year appraisal of 2008's worst in arts and entertainment. However, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Spin, ABC News and Ultimate Classic Rock all included the album on best-of year-end lists.
;Eoghan Quigg, Eoghan Quigg : Quigg's only album was met with derision and has been described by numerous reviewers as the worst record ever made. One such writer was Peter Robinson of The Guardian, who called it an "album so bad that it would count as a new low for popular culture were it possible to class as either culture... or popular". and said on his Popjustice website that "decades into the future, Eoghan Quigg's album Eoghan Quigg will be the one that scoops the accolade" of worst record of all time. Gigwise placed the album at number one on its 20 Worst Albums of 2009 list.
;Lulu, Lou Reed and Metallica : Pitchfork Media's Stuart Berman awarded the album a score of 1.0/10 and wrote that Lulu disappoints even in its "worst of all time" status; "for all the hilarity that ought to ensue here, Lulu is a frustratingly noble failure." NME also noted that the album was "one of the worst reviewed albums ever" and "one of the most critically panned albums of recent years". In response to massive backlash from Metallica fans, Lou Reed stated: "I don't have any fans left. After Metal Machine Music, they all fled. Who cares? I'm in this for the fun of it." David Bowie and Reed's widow Laurie Anderson, however, have praised the album.
;Streets in the Sky, the Enemy : Daily Record writer Rick Fulton reported that several of his readers considered Streets in the Sky to be "among the very worst releases of the year , and indeed, all time". Critics were similarly harsh; the album is the second-lowest-rated ever at review aggregator site AnyDecentMusic?, and was the worst-reviewed of 2012 at fellow aggregator Album of the Year. John Calvert of Drowned in Sound awarded the record an unprecedented 0/10 and described it as "the un-music"; Neil Kulkarni in The Quietus agreed that the album is not "actually music" and is akin to "shite, in the noonday sun, attracting flies". Both critics wished for no further recordings from the band.
;Nine Track Mind, Charlie Puth : Doreen St. Félix in The New Yorker wrote, "Full of bland doo-wop ballads, Nine Track Mind was, according to Metacritic, one of the worst-reviewed albums of all time. Puth seemed a genuine talent strained by nostalgia-baiting and the exigencies of social media." Pitchforks Jia Tolentino wrote, "Puth cannot fill this frame of sentimentality with any genuine sentiment: The album's emotional range covers the spectrum from light longing to light infatuation, contributing to the overall sense that 'Nine Track Mind' is aimed exclusively at hairlessness: children, prepubescents, the discomfitingly waxed."
;Father of All Motherfuckers, Green Day : Loudwire reported the album was the worst-reviewed rock album of the 21st century, based on a study of the harshness of language in negative and mixed critical reviews as well as listener reception.
;143, Katy Perry : Described as "uninspired" by the Associated Press, Mikael Wood for the Los Angeles Times wrote that Perry's seventh studio album " bad, and not even in a fun way. 143 is an oddly cold dance-pop album with boring melodies, utilitarian grooves and vocal performances that feel vaguely AI-derived." It is currently the worst-reviewed album of 2024 on Metacritic, with an average score of 37.
Songs
The following songs have been named by critics, broadcasters, composers, and listeners as the "worst ever". Examples of sources include VH1's "50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs Ever" and Blender's "Run for Your Life! It's the 50 Worst Songs Ever!".1950s–1960s
; "Yes, Sir, That's My Baby", Harry Kari and His Six Saki Sippers : The mock-Japanese novelty record was one of many released by dialect comic Harry Stewart under an alias. While Stewart's records routinely got bad reviews in the press, a brief but particularly scathing review in Billboard may have earned the record enough publicity to chart on the magazine's own charts and prompted radio stations to play it. One radio disc jockey disparaged the record on-air as "the worst record ever heard" when playing it, and the record's poor quality inspired those in the music industry to record intentionally bad songs in the belief that they could become hits, such as "There's a New Sound".; "!aaaH-aH,yawA eM ekaT oT gnimoC er'yehT", Napoleon XIV : The B-side of "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!," a novelty hit for Jerry Samuels as Napoleon XIV, consists solely of the A-side played in reverse. In Dave Marsh's 1981 book The Book of Rock Lists, Marsh describes the song as the most obnoxious song to have ever been placed in a jukebox, noting that it once caused a diner with 40 customers to be evacuated in the time it took to play the record in its entirety.
; "Paralyzed", Legendary Stardust Cowboy : This record features T Bone Burnett on drums and consists of one-chord strums, mostly unintelligible screaming, and an abrupt bugle solo. It was identified in the 1994 book The New Book of Rock Lists as the worst song ever released by a major label. Rhino Records also included it on The World's Worst Records.
; "MacArthur Park", Richard Harris : In 1992, Miami Herald journalist Dave Barry conducted a poll among his readers, who selected the Harris original as the worst track ever recorded, both in terms of "Worst Lyrics" and "Worst Overall Song". This is despite the fact that it topped the music charts in Europe and Australia, won the 1969 Grammy Award for Best Arrangement Accompanying Vocalists, and would again become a number-one hit during the disco era in the form of a 1978 cover by Donna Summer; it would also be spoofed by Weird Al Yankovic in 1993 as "Jurassic Park"; and also became a modest hit for country music singer Waylon Jennings in 1969, was nominated for Grammy Award for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal at the 12th Annual Grammy Awards and was re-recorded for his 1976 album Are You Ready for the Country.
; "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da", the Beatles : This Paul McCartney composition was loathed by bandmates John Lennon and George Harrison, and was voted the worst track ever recorded in a listener poll organized by Mars Inc. It was also ranked No. 48 on Blender magazine's "50 Worst Songs Ever".