What makes an album flop? Any number of reasons, as time has taught us. Some records just aren't marketed very well. Sometimes artists fall out of public favor and are considered toxic. Some albums might have been a little too ahead of their time. Yet more often than not, some albums simply aren't good. One-time multi-platinum "sure bets" who are no longer tripping atop the pop culture zeitgeist. Heck, some people even consider some of these records good or even "misremembered classics," but no matter how you draw it, these are undoubtedly the biggest flop albums of all time.
Here's a riddle for you: how could a debut album from a new artist possibly be considered a flop by any reasonable metric? Well, when it's advertised like one. Van Dyke Parks was a sincere songwriter who had a deep fascination with American folk music and was not all too thrilled at what The Beatles were bringing to airwaves stateside. After several run-ins with some of pop music's shiniest golden boys (i.e., suggesting Frank Sinatra record his brother's song "Somethin' Stupid", telling Brian Wilson how to improve "Good Vibrations", writing a hit for The Charlatans), he was pegged as the next big thing. Warner Bros. Records tossed him in a studio to create his debut album, "Song Cycle", and spent over three times what it would cost them to knock out a traditional rock record. A dizzying tour through pop music's disparate history (via show tunes and bluegrass and classical orchestration), there was nothing on "Song Cycle" that was even close to being a radio single. Thus, Warner Bros. infamously took out a full-page ad reading "How We Lost $35,509.50 on the Album of the Year (Damnit)." The label's own writeup was sneering: "We sell enough Petula and Crosby and Association, we can afford a Van Dyke Parks." Shockingly, this reverse psychology didn't move units, leaving "Song Cycle" to wallow in bargain bins and recoup none of its expenses. Over time, amateur pop scholars have discovered Parks' indescribable debut all on their own, and it's now rightly considered a misunderstood masterpiece.
Lou Red's solo discography is all over the place. While his last album with his low-selling but incalculably-influential band The Velvet Underground was designed to be "Loaded" with hits, his actual solo career is what got him radio play, with "Walk on the Wild Side" from his 1972 David Bowie-produced record "Transformer" turning into a generational pop classic. The curious horn-driven single "Sally Can't Dance" helped propel his 1974 album of the same name to the Top Ten, setting the Rock 'n' Roll Animal up for possible crossover success. So what does Lou Reed do? Unleashes the most unlistenable record of all time, of course. Stoned out of his mind (by his own admission), Reed was fascinated with recording the endless feedback loop between his guitar and his amplifier and layering the noise over more layers of noise.

The resulting record, "Metal Machine Music", is literally four sides of endless distortion. Despite featuring a commercial-looking cover with Lou donning a leather biker's jacket, most fans caught wind of the reviews and stayed clear away from an album that, let's remind ourselves, was four vinyl sides of unchanging noise. Often cited as "the most returned album of all time," "Metal Machine Music" was self-sabotage of epic proportions, and it somehow still came out on his longtime major-label RCA. He unleashed the much more upbeat and "traditional" sounding "Coney Island Baby" several months later. As these things so often go, "Metal Machine Music" later found a niche audience within the experimental and drone music crowd. Heavy.
After 1970's "(They Long to Be) Close to You" turned Karen and Richard Carpenter into soft-rock superstars, they had a seemingly never-ending run of hits, draping the charts with unstoppable numbers like "Superstar", "Top of the World", and "Please Mr. Postman". They were never critics' favorites, but they never needed to be when the royalties kept rolling in. Yet pop stars tend to have sharp half-lives, and by the time 1976's "A Kind of Hush" dropped, the group couldn't get into the Billboard Top Ten, which is where they've been kicking their feet up over the past five years. Looking for a change in direction, 1977's "Passage" was designed as an attempt to breach a new audience, but it instead became one of the most quixotic major-label albums ever released.

Yes, the buoyant pop of lead single "All You Get from Love Is a Love Song" is one of the duo's most underappreciated classics, but the rest of the album is as strange as all-get-out. Opening with the deeply racist Michael Franks number "B'wana She No Home", the album spans a litany of styles and themes and pulls off none of them successfully. Their medley from "Evita" is remarkably flat, the Muppet-styled ragtime stomp of "Man Smart Woman Smarter" is peak cringe, and the cover of "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft (The Recognized Anthem of World Contact Day" by Canadian faux-Beatles group Klaatu is, without question, one of pop music's greatest curiosities. Their first album to not be certified Gold since their debut, it marked the duo's artistic and commercial decline, to which they never recovered.
Fleetwood Mac has had many members over its many iterations, but in the eyes of many, the Mac will always be Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Christine & John McVie, and Mick Fleetwood. This is, after all, the group that created 1977's "Rumors" amidst intense inter-band conflict, resulting in one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful rock albums in all of recorded history. Following that pressure, it didn't matter what "Tusk" sounded like because there was no possible way it could ever replicate "Rumors" supernova success. With guitarist Lindsey Buckingham handed almost complete control of the album by writing nine of the album's 20 songs (Nicks had five while Christine McVie had six), the allegedly cocaine-addled sessions saw Buckingham get the band members to try a litany of wild new recording techniques throughout the process (some of which is captured in the excellent docuseries "Soundbreaking"). It had well-charting singles (like "Tusk" and the Nicks classic "Sara"), but no real radio hit to anchor its fortunes on, so while "Tusk" debuted at number one and eventually went double-platinum, it was considered a flop simply due it existing in the shadow of the band's own pop-culture juggernaut. Decades removed from its release, many now consider it a masterpiece that stands apart from the rest of the band's discography.
The Neil Young of the late '60s was a promising talent. The Neil Young of the '70s was nothing short of definitive. The Neil Young of the '80s was ... well, it wasn't Young's best era. Not by a long shot. Following 1981's messily-received "Re·ac·tor", Young left his longtime home of Reprise Records for Geffen (which, ironically, are both housed under the umbrella of Warner Bros.). While Young wanted to mark his new label with a new sound, Young's five-album run on Geffen is one of the most notorious disasters in rock music history. His first album for his new home, 1982's "Trans", was as far removed from Young's country-rock sound as you could imagine: vocoders, synthesizers, and digital beats abound, all wrapped up in a series of deeply confusing electro songs. Horribly dated but considered innovative by some, the album still debuted in Billboard's Top Ten, a fate that his follow-up, 1983's "Everybody's Rockin'", failed to achieve. Suddenly in a 1950's rockabilly getup with a new backing band called The Shocking Pinks, Young is plowing through doo-wop and faux-Elvis numbers aplenty, with jokey titles like "Kinda Fonda Wonda". David Geffen himself was infuriated with Young and eventually sued him for making music that was "unrepresentative" of his trademark sound. His remaining Geffen records veered closer to his usual style, but by 1988, he was back on Reprise, officially ending his somewhat intentional flop era.
Following their breakout song "She's on It" from the soundtrack to the 1985 cult classic "Krush Groove", it was just a hop, skip, and B-boy stance away from stardom for the Beastie Boys. Their 1986 debut album "Licensed to Ill" was an instant classic, featuring hits both goofy ("Brass Monkey", "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)") and envelope-pushing ("Paul Revere", "No Sleep till Brooklyn"). The album was certified platinum a few months after its release, and as the radio hits kept pouring out of the New York City rap trio, anticipation began building for their follow-up. "Paul's Boutique" caught many off guard, as after establishing their goof-metal sound with producer Rick Rubin, their sophomore album was based all on samples. Producing duo the Dust Brothers built the album's sonics off of nothing but existing samples of everyone from James Brown to Diana Ross to Paul McCartney, clearing them for minuscule rates compared to what it'd cost today. The single "Hey Ladies" barely entered the Top 40, but by and large, the record was considered a massive commercial letdown compared to what came before. Some fans found it too abstract, experimental, and not as bro-y as their first full-length. Shame, too, as "Paul's Boutique" has amassed a cult audience over the years, and now it's considered their masterpiece and one of the best rap albums ever made.
Yes, Wham was big in the '80s but nowhere near as big as George Michael was when he broke out onto his own. "Faith", his 1987 solo debut, was nothing short of a must-hear pop event, popping off legendary numbers like "I Want Your Sex" and U.K. chart-toppers like "Faith" and "Father Figure". After winning the Grammy award for Album of the Year, it was clear that George Michael's profile had reached the pop stratosphere, and the deeply-private Michael wanted to step back from pop idol worship and be treated as a serious artist. Thus, his sophomore record, with the all-too-serious title of "Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1" (there were no further volumes), tried to be a George Michael album without traditional promotion. His face wasn't on the cover, the music video for "Praying for Time" was little more than text on screen, and his big pop hit "Freedom! '90" had a supermodel-filled music video that showed the iconic "Faith" jukebox being blown up and his leather jacket set on fire. While it still moved units in his homeland, Michael's retreat from the zeitgeist worked, and worldwide it did less than half of the sales of "Faith". In many ways, this was by design, as Michael's release schedule winded down in the years that followed, and the returns continued to diminish. However, this didn't seem to bother Michael as he spent his twilight years revered as both a queer icon and one of pop music's elder statesmen.
Many artists helped water the seeds of the '80s "Madchester" scene in the U.K., wherein dance beats merged with psychedelic rock in strange and interesting new ways. Manchester's own Stone Roses ended up being one of the scene's first true success stories, as the dry and pompous lyrics of Ian Brown worked well against John Squire's elaborate webs of guitar tones, Mani's funky basslines, and Reni's ever-adaptable percussion. That rhythm section could turn any hippie into a raver. The group's self-titled debut was a slow and steady seller, eventually winning over fans and critics, and is now rightly heralded as one of the best British rock albums ever made. The only problem? A protracted multi-year royalties dispute with their record label left any prospect of the band recording a follow-up in legal limbo. When the band finally signed to a major label years after their debut and were granted seemingly unlimited time in the studio, rumors were that the group spent most of it lounging around, only banging out a proper record when Geffen forced them to. Thus, "The Second Coming" came out five years after their legendary debut and added nothing good to the mix, fully signifying that their moment had passed. It did sell decently at first, but mixed-to-poor reviews sunk any enthusiasm. While their debut remains rightfully revered, "The Second Coming" is considered a massive flop. Unsurprisingly, The Stone Roses disbanded not too long thereafter.
For a spell, it seemed that U2 was indestructible. While 1987's "The Joshua Tree" cemented them as The Biggest Band Alive, the grunge movement of 1991 was picking up steam and destroying entire genres that were thought to be "inauthentic" (like hair metal). Lucky for U2, their music was heading in a post-ironic direction, so 1991's "Achtung Baby" mixed rock music with electronics that were still authentically true to U2's spirit. Some hardcore fans bemoaned the shimmering keyboards and processed drum sounds, but Bono and co. ended up finding a new audience with this aesthetic, which they continued with on 1993's deeply underrated "Zooropa". Despite promises to return to their rocking ways, "Pop" arrived like a slap in the face to their most feverish of devotees, as spelled out with its deliberately unironic title. The lead single, "Discothèque", was dismissed as flashy dance nonsense, and goodwill dropped off sharply because while most of "Pop" doesn't sound as sell-out-y as its title suggests, the damage was done. It remains one of the least popular records they've ever released. While their resulting "PopMart" tour made bank, the record itself sold a fraction of what the band was capable of in their heyday, which is why 2000's "All That You Can't Leave Behind" course-corrected and abandoned all pretenses of dance-rock entirely.
Van Halen has survived frontman changes before. After all, when David Lee Roth left the group to go solo in 1985, it was Sammy Hagar who stepped up to the plate and helped keep the group's winning streak going, even if critics and some fans lamented that Hagar wasn't as good a foil for Eddie Van Halen's endlessly inventive riffing. When Hagar left in 1996, the group decided to look for another singer, eventually settling on former Extreme vocalist Gary Cherone. It made some sense on paper, as the band was adapting to a new rock radio landscape, but Cherone simply didn't have the charisma to make a group as legendary as Van Halen relevant in the alternative-rock era, making their attempts to sound both contemporary (like on failed lead single "Without You") and like their old selves ("Fire in the Hole") sounding flat as the CD the songs were etched onto. Cratering on the charts because the band was deeply considered past their prime, "Van Halen III" forced Van Halen into hiatus. Adding insult to injury and cementing "III" as a legendary flop, the group's 2004 "Best of Both Worlds" compilation featured no songs from Cherone's brief time with the band.
There are vanity projects, and then there's Garth Brooks' going full Chris Gaines. While Brooks spent most of the '90s as the world's biggest country act, bringing arena-rock sensibilities to his massive live shows, he increasingly became interested in rock music, unfortunately to his detriment. Every detail about his promotion for his alter-ego persona of Chris Gaines is more insane than the last: he created the character to be a multi-year multimedia event, culminating with the release of a movie about Chris Gaines's life called "The Lamb". The album that Brooks put out "as" Gaines is listed as a "pre-soundtrack" to "The Lamb" as if that ever was a thing. As if switching up his sound to cover rock music and Beatlesque pop wasn't enough, the liner notes feature full mockups of fake albums with titles like "Fornucopia". He filmed an entire fictional episode of VH1's "Behind the Music" in character and then later hosted "Saturday Night Live" as himself and had Gaines on as the musical guest with no acknowledgment of how ridiculous it all was. Despite snagging his only pop crossover hit with the song "Lost in You", the bizarre character alienated his core country fanbase, and despite selling "just" two million copies, it was easily the lowest-selling album of his career to that point, forcing Brooks into retirement not long thereafter. Per one of his own Gaines songs, he was raisin' up his "White Flag".
Master P's No Limit Records was known for its terrible album covers. Lookup any one of them from their late-'90s heyday and marvel at the hurried, horrid image quality. Yet all it took was a few breakout artists to help put No Limit on the map, and for a brief period, Mystikal was the hottest rapper they had. A dexterous wordsmith with a voice that was often compared to James Brown, Mystikal's skills were dulled by No Limits' knack for often recycled beats and hooks. Yet it was 2000's full-length "Let's Get Ready" that broke Mystikal through to the mainstream, riding a hit song with a hot beat by a new upcoming production duo called The Neptunes all the way to pop radio. That song, "Shake Ya Asş", has become an era-defining staple, and its followup, "Danger (Been So Long)" with Nivea, did equally well.

The record went multi-platinum, and with guests like Da Brat and OutKast on his album, it seemed the Mystikal was about to be a household name. Smelling success and not wanting to mess it up, No Limit ensured that the follow-up full-length "Tarantula" did everything it could to repeat the success of "Let's Get Ready", right on down to having a Neptunes-produced lead single called "Bouncin' Back (Bumpin' Me Against the Wall)". Not only did it underperform, but it also tanked, debuting all the way down at #25 on the Billboard 200. It was the last hit of any sort that Mystikal had, and in just over a year's time, public interest had quickly moved on. His 2003 guilty plea to sexual battery and six-year jail sentence put the final nail in the coffin: Mystikal's solo career was over.
For over a decade, Mariah Carey had a certain lifestyle to which she had become accustomed: that of opulent success. Her multi-octave range left other singers in the dust, she co-wrote every song she ever sang, and she topped that off by having incredible looks. It's no surprise that her albums regularly sold over ten million copies worldwide (if not more), even as some wondered when the diva might stumble. Unfortunately, the higher your peaks, the harder your fall, and her multimedia star vehicle "Glitter" is as hard a fall as we've ever seen. "Glitter" was designed to be the film that would launch Mariah as an actress, and the soundtrack album's lead single "Loverboy" managed to debut at #2, which itself was breaking a streak of Mariah lead singles occupying the Billboard penthouse. Despite the sparkly appearance, some fans felt something rotten was underneath the "Glitter" veneer.
They weren't wrong: "Loverboy" was soon followed by her infamous appearance on MTV's "Total Request Live" where she inexplicably handed out ice cream, which was then followed by a series of cryptic voice messages she posted on her website (she was later hospitalized for "extreme exhaustion"). Then, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 forced the film and soundtrack to be delayed, but at that point, it was clear that one of the most tried-and-true hitmakers of the last decade was going through a breakdown of epic proportions. The album (her first for her new label Virgin) underperformed due to its poor song selection and expectation that her Lambs would eat up anything she puts out. The film flopped with abysmal reviews and was lambasted as one of the worst ever made. Heck, even Carey's follow-up "Charmbracelet" fizzled out pretty quickly. Lucky for her, 2005's "The Emancipation of Mimi" revitalized her career, and even she can laugh about her "Glitter" era now.
After Blur helped define the modern Britpop sound on their seminal 1994 album "Parklife", their subsequent press-fueled rivalry with Oasis made the artsy pop-rock quartet reluctant superstars. As such, their subsequent records strayed from familiar commercial patterns. Following singer Damon Albarn's surprise success with animated alternative hip-hop outfit Gorillaz, another Blur album was scheduled to be recorded, but Albarn's desire to make more accessible music collided with a fresh-out-of-rehab Graham Coxon, the band's brilliant guitarist who was making quite the living with solo records all his own. Coxon always served as a good foil for Albarn, and Coxon no doubt tried to tell his friend that his plan for the album-- mixing worldbeat sounds with Fatboy Slim production and making it all sound as commercial as possible -- was a fool's errand. Friction emerged, and Coxon left the group, playing only on closer "Battery in Your Leg". Unsurprisingly, the strange new direction of Blur's seventh album "Think Tank" failed to impact, and Blur's streak of U.K. platinum records ended abruptly. With the group allegedly having to hire multiple guitarists to replace the sound that Coxon alone could make during live dates, fans and critics were quick to point out just how out of sync the band was without their founding guitar god. The group went into hibernation but thankfully reunited several years later for a series of huge live dates and even managed to put out a new album in 2015 that was fun if inessential. Then again, almost anything would sound better after listening to "Think Tank".
If you don't know that Madonna is the master of sonic reinvention at this point, then you haven't been paying attention. While the heavy turn towards electronica with 1998's "Ray of Light" cemented her status as a maker of boundary-pushing masterpieces, 2000's "Music" continued to spin off one giant hit after another, embellishing her to a brand new audience yet again. She was feeling great at the time, but following the war on Iraq, the ever-outspoken Madge decided to set her politics to a beat but failed to see that in this extremely divided and jingoistic time, no one wanted to listen. The title track for the eventual album "American Life" was the lead single, and a typically-controversial music video involving throwing grenades on a fashion runway was pulled shortly after release. The second single, "Hollywood", became Madonna's first song in over two decades to not even hit the Billboard Hot 100. While the harsh beats of her producer du jour, Mirwais Ahmadzaï, worked on the glammy sound of "Music", they bordered on atonal here. Dismissed in a way that Madonna albums rarely are, the album became her lowest-selling full-length since her debut, but, being Madonna, she course-corrected with 2005's career-revitalizing discorific "Confessions on a Dance Floor".
At the turn of the millennium, Ja Rule was the crossover king. While critics often dismissed the Queens-bred rapper for his one-2-many 2Pac-isms, Ja didn't mind much, as his collaboration tracks with Christina Milian, Jennifer Lopez, and especially Ashanti gave him more than a few chart-toppers to his credit. Yet all of that changed when 50 Cent broke through the mainstream at the top of 2003, saturating the airwaves with smashes and taking shots at anyone he didn't like, with Ja Rule as his chief target. Unfortunately for Ja, he didn't have the dexterity to counter 50 Cent's jibes, making it a one-sided beef. By the end of that year, Ja responded with the rushed and wildly uneven "Blood in My Eye", a record so hurried and slapdash we're surprised we're not hearing DJ Drama jump in during every song outro. Designed to boost his street cred, Ja dismissed big-name guests like Nas, Ashanti, and Bobby Brown (all who appeared on his full-length prior) to keep things real, but since he was best known for his Top 40 club bangers, few wanted to spend time with his rhymes when not bumping from club speakers. Lead single "Clap Back" didn't even crack the Top 40, and it was his first album in years to not go platinum. In 2012, his comeback album "Pain is Love 2" debuted on the charts at #197, and right after that was his megaton blunder of a live event that was Fyre Fest. While 50 Cent went on to play the Super Bowl halftime show, no one was mesmerized by Ja anymore.
Guns N' Roses' "Chinese Democracy" is over a decade old at this point, but it's better remembered as a punchline than an actual album. After all, sessions began on this record in 1998 but didn't wrap until 2007, and, most critically, most of the band had been replaced at this point. Slash and Duff McKagan were long gone, and in their place were people with serious hard rock credentials who were mainly just hired guns. While Rose considered himself a perfectionist, spending over $13 million over a decade of sessions should have yielded the next generation of studio perfectionism, and "Chinese Democracy" sadly ended up being just another rock album.

Sonically, it wasn't the disaster all the years of bad press made it out to be, but few critics outside of the old scenesters at Rolling Stone were considering it "worth the wait." It sheepishly debuted at #3 on the charts with 261,000 units sold -- a good number, but not the kind of sales that would make up for over ten million dollars worth of polish. In sharp contrast, AC/DC released their 15th studio album "Black Ice" just one month prior and moved 784,000 units within the same period. At the time, AC/DC was curating lucrative sponsorship deals and getting their faces out there, but as much as Axl Rose is a mythmaker by his own design, he rarely wanted to be a part of his own story, which is why the alleged "event album of the decade" only ended up selling as well as their infamous 1993 covers record "The Spaghetti Incident?". Since then, the band has toured with moderate consistency, but few people ask the setlists to be filled with tracks from "Chinese Democracy".
When not fronting Soundgarden, Audioslave, or Temple of the Dog, Chris Cornell made a decent living on his solo records. Songs like 1999's "Can't Change Me" became rock radio favorites, and 2006's "You Know My Name" was the theme song for the first Daniel Craig as James Bond film: "Casino Royale". Ever open to new styles and ideas, Chris Cornell found a deeply unlikely partnership with genre-bending hip-hop producer Timbaland. In 2009, they unleashed an inexplicable album-length collaboration called "Scream". While the concept on paper left many people scratching their heads, hearing the finished product confirmed everyone's fears: it's exactly what you expected it to sound like. Cornell's scratchy and powerful pipes were echoing around cold, shiny waves of synths and mid-2000s plastic guitar sounds. Every song felt flat, which was shocking given even a bad Audioslave song at least had Cornell's caterwaul as an emotional anchor point, often saving the most boneheaded of compositions. Misogynistic single "Part of Me" made enough movement to get the album to debut at #10 in the U.S., but dismissive fans and the worst critical notices of Cornell's career were enough to make the record disappear from the charts not long after. Nowadays, it's viewed as a pop culture curiosity, but certainly not the record the late Cornell will be best remembered for.
While Christina Aguilera moved units in her "Stripped" era, some still dismissed the pop diva as a powerhouse vocalist with no real musical identity. She fixed this with her big, brassy 2006 double-album "Back to Basics", which put her back on the radio with an image that felt authentically her. Unfortunately, when Lady Gaga and the EDM-lite movement entered the picture by the end of the decade, Aguilera felt the need to imitate instead of innovating, and the lead single to her new album "Bionic" was called "Not Myself Tonight". She wasn't lying: the sexually-charged digi-pop number sounded more like RedOne and Timbaland than it did Xtina, and the rest of "Bionic" followed suit, awash in wannabe Robyn bangers and strange electroclash experiments. It debuted at the top of the U.K. charts, but the following week it dropped to #29, one of the biggest drops in chart history, proving that hardcore fans were turning out to listen to "Bionic", but casual passerbys were spending their time listening to Gaga and the new crop of pop icons. After getting used to multi-platinum success, Aguilera's career never fully recovered. However, one-off singles with Maroon 5, A Great Big World, and Pitbull still cemented her all-time belter status. Ironically, many fans have come around to enjoying "Bionic", citing it as a misunderstood record that may have just been ahead of its time.
Liz Phair has never been a chartbuster in the way most of these artists on this list have been, but her influence is inescapable. "Exile in Guyville", her 1993 debut album, changed the way people talked about women in rock music, as her frank and sexually confrontational lyrics were considered game-changing. Along with contemporaries like Ani DiFranco, Sleater-Kinney, and PJ Harvey, it was clear that the boys club that was indie rock music was unsustainable. Phair had other hit albums after "Exile", but she was branded a sell-out in 2003 for working with Avril Lavigne's go-to production team The Matrix on a self-titled album that was desperate for a hit. The gambit worked, and Liz Phair got her long-coveted Top 40 single, but not all of her fans followed her new musical direction. In fact, by the time Phair released 2010's "Funstyle", it was clear no one was following her whatsoever.
A mawkish parody of the major label machine she was no longer a part of, "Funstyle" spends as much time featuring spoken-word send-ups of label execs as it does give us actual songs with choruses. Her voice is looped and sampled, and tablas are brought in for flavor, but "Funstyle" sounded more fun to make than it was to listen to. It was released digitally in July of 2010, and it became her first record that failed to chart. In an attempt to sweeten the deal for her hardcore fans, the physical release came a few months later, coupled with a bonus disc of her long-lost and highly-coveted "Girly-Sound" recordings, the basis of which eventually made up "Exile". It was a gambit that didn't work, and seeing the way things were going, she didn't release a new album for a decade. (When she finally did, with 2021's "Soberish", it also failed to chart but managed to net her the best reviews since her run in the '90s.)
How could the only album by a band possibly be considered a flop? When you consider the superstar pedigree. SuperHeavy, for those who don't know or had missed it or just forgotten, was a group whose aim was to have a global appeal, featuring Mick Jagger, the Eurythmics' Dave Stewart, Damian Marley, sometime hit-haver Joss Stone, and two-time Academy Award-winning Indian composer A. R. Rahman. If that sounds like a confusing mix of influences, just wait until you hear the full-length record they made together! "SuperHeavy" wants to be everything to everyone, going from staid reggae vamps to having a song where Jagger sings in Sanskrit. After allegedly recording 29 songs in under two weeks, it's remarkable that "SuperHeavy" fails to have much of an identity. Stone and Marley disappear for stretches of time, leaving Jagger as the star of the show, thereby making the whole thing read like an unintentional worldbeat vanity project. People with ears by and large stayed away from the strange affair, with the album sheepishly debuting at #26 in the U.S. and lead single "Miracle Worker" topping out at a laughable #136 in the U.K. SuperHeavy disbanded shortly thereafter, as their only real legacy is appearing on lists like this. SuperBummer, man.
The year 2012 was supposed to be huge for Green Day. The Tony-winning "American Idiot" musical was doing its second U.S. tour, the band was having fun in their secret side project Foxboro Hot Tubs, and they announced that in the fall, they'd release not one but three new albums: "¡Uno!", "¡Dos!", and "¡Tré!". Four days prior to the release of "¡Uno!", a performance at the iHeartRadio Music Festival saw an agitated Billie Joe Armstrong rant in front of cameras about his set time being cut short then smashed his guitar on stage. Days later, he checked in to rehab following a relapse. This caused the band to cut all media appearances and pull tour dates, but that was only a part of their problem with promoting three brand new albums. The main issue with their new album trilogy came down to release dates: an album a month for three months. On the surface, there's nothing wrong with this strategy, but when singles were serviced to radio, it became unclear which album housed which song, and buying three separate full-priced albums versus a single triple-disc set was too high a bar of entry for some. Thus, first album "¡Uno!" debuted near the top of the charts in most countries and sold well, but from then on, it became diminishing returns, and "¡Tré!" became Green Day's first album not to hit the U.S. Top 10 since, well, before their seminal classic "Dookie". "¡Tré!" has found scant defenders in the years since its release, and the trilogy era is more appreciated than fully enjoyed by even the most ardent of Green Day fans.
When Canadian singer-songwriter debuted in 2000, her album "Whoa, Nelly!" garnered kudos for its expansive sound, combining folk and bossa nova elements with sticky pop choruses. She made a name for herself, but 2006's "Loose" found her switching labels and dropping the NPR crowd in order to go full radio popstar. Amazingly, it worked, and her Timbaland-laced club thumpers like "Maneater", "Promiscuous", and the ballad "Say It Right" all took her to the top of the charts. Yes, the songs were a bit more trend-chasing than artsy, but the result was that "Loose" doubled the worldwide sales of her debut. Furtado had a big and bright future ahead of her -- so what happened? Her spirit wandered, initially releasing 2009's Spanish-language album "Mi Plan" to mixed reviews and then returning to her club-oriented sound with 2012's "The Spirit Indestructible". Swapping out Timbaland for Rodney "Darkchild" Jerkins is no compromise, but if she sounded a bit more anonymous on "Loose", she sounds utterly indistinctive here. At some points on "Indestructible", she's trying to sound exactly like M.I.A., and at others, she's falling into the drum-n-bass traps of stars that want to sound trendy but end up sounding lost. Fans reacted as expected: after "Loose" topped the charts, "Indestructible" cratered with a #79 entry, and her 2017 follow-up didn't even make the U.S. Billboard listing. We still love her songwriting and artistry, but unfortunately for Nelly, this "Spirit" ended up being very destructible.
Britney Spears is an icon, a legend, and following her 2007 public meltdown and the demeaning conservatorship that followed, she is finally a free woman. While the music she released during that dark period (2007's forward-thinking electro panorama "Blackout" and the sleek pop confection that was 2008 "Circus") was indisputably good and even 2011's "Femme Fatale" netted some big hits, "Britney Jean" was where it all started to fall apart. While the preview single to her "Britney Jean" era was an instant classic ("Work B----"), it was her first lead single to not land the in the U.S. Top 10 since 2003's "Me Against the Music", and unfortunately, that was her last true-and-proper hit to date. "Britney Jean" was marred by unimaginative productions across the board, with far too many will.i.am cuts and songs that sounded like imitations of other, better Britney hits. Heck, even the Katy Perry co-write "Passenger" sounds like Britney doing a Katy imitation instead of sounding like a Britney song proper. Whittling down her fanbase to just the hardcore, "Britney Jean" marked the turning point in her career and became her first studio album not to go platinum, ever (although 2016's "Glory" repeated this feat). Given what we now know so much more about her conservatorship during this era, certain things, like the awkward Jamie Lynn Spears duet "Chillin' With You", make more sense, but any commercial or artistic missteps can be blamed squarely on the people managing her, and not Spears herself.
Fame was the worst thing to happen to MGMT, as inevitable as it was. Their 2007 debut "Oracular Spectacular" was dotted with a seemingly endless amount of glittery synth-psych classics, from "Kids" to "Time to Pretend" to "Electric Feel". They became headliner huge on their first go, and the sudden rush of notoriety was almost too much for the oft-unshod duo of Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser. Deliberately sabotaging themselves 2010's "Congratulations" only kind of worked: the bitter, stranger record did away with their radio-friendly pop gloss but still netted a whole different set of fans who were growing accustomed to their offbeat artistry. Thus, 2013's eponymous record saw the boys alienate their fanbase all the more, and this time it worked. Full of almost-songs and constant abstract synth squiggles, "MGMT" saw them whittle down their followers to only the hardest of hardcore, making their record debut at #14 in the U.S. and an embarrassing #45 in the U.K. In retrospect, it's easily their worst album, which makes it hard to feel bad for their conundrum. They were still signed to major label Columbia but didn't want to be famous anymore, and they finally forced their fans to grant them their wish.
There are two eras of Robin Thicke: before "Blurred Lines" and after. Before, he was an whiteboy R&B songwriter with a soulful voice and a great musical relationship with Pharrell Williams. Thicke wrote and produced a lot of his own hits as well, but his musical persona was that of a ladykiller, going so far as to name one of his albums "Sex Therapy: The Session". Yet 2013's "Blurred Lines" became an out-of-nowhere Diamond-certified cultural event, which Thicke relished in. Then came the justified backlash to his lyrics. Then came the industry-changing copyright infringement lawsuit. Then came the downfall of Robin Thicke, complete with the separation of his wife, Paula Patton. While the couple's divorce was finalized in 2015, it wasn't without Thicke doing his best to make amends, which included making the now-recognized cringe classic that is 2014's "Paula".

Filled with titles like "Get Her Back", "Still Madly Crazy", and "Love Can Grow Back", the album wasn't designed with a general radio populace so much as an audience of one. Unfortunately, as earnest as the effort was, Thicke's toolkit only consists of loverman ballads and outright sex jams, so an emotionally candid record about lost love simply didn't work. The album stalled by all metrics, garnering little fan interest and hilariously selling only 158 copies in Australia in its first week. Nowadays, Thicke is guessing which celebrity is under what ridiculous outfit in "The Masked Singer", which is a good gig for him given his 2021 album failed to chart anywhere. Has-been status confirmed.
Slate's Chris Molanphy refers to it as an artist's "Imperial Period": a time when their popularity and cultural capital is so great that anything and everything they release turns into a megahit. During Molanphy's excellent Hit Parade podcast, he focused on the Imperial Periods of Elton John and George Michael , but recent examples include everyone from Lil' Wayne to Justin Bieber to none other than Katy Perry. Her 2010 album "Teenage Dream" was a hitmaking machine of impossible breadth, culling no less than five chart-toppers off of the standard edition and unspooling, even more, #1's in the years that followed. Unfortunately, we now know that her Imperial Period started early because by the time we got around to "Witness", Katy Perry was no longer synonymous with "instant hits."

In creating an album of "purposeful pop" following the 2016 presidential election, Perry's musical compass went haywire, giving fans used to colorful ear candy a record full of strange textures and underbaked lyrics. Her sex jam with Migos ("Bon Appétit") wasn't as clever as she thought it was, and her alleged diss track about then-rival Taylor Swift ("Swish Swish") got too lost in its own metaphors to be even remotely effective. While lead single "Chained to the Rhythm" hit the Top 5 due to hype alone, her other singles tanked, with latter-cycle tracks like "Save As Draft" and the atonal "Hey Hey Hey" failing to even chart. She returned to her sunshine-pop aesthetic on 2020's "Smile", but by then, the damage was done, and Perry's main source of income was now being a judge on the somehow-still-on-the-air "American Idol". Safe to say, her Imperial Period is over.
Do you know what kills your momentum as a breakout pop star? Waiting a whole decade before you release more music. When Black Eyed Peas' singer Fergie stepped out on her own with 2006's "The Dutchess", it was expected to do well, given Fergie's fame and clear vocal prowess. What the industry wasn't expecting was the album to churn out one monster smash after another, resulting in radio staples like "London Bridge", "Big Girls Don't Cry", and "Glamorous" (which Jack Harlow sampled for his own 2022 chart-topper, "First Class"). She stuck around with B.E.P. for their next two albums and even played the Super Bowl halftime show with them, but after that, she left the outfit altogether. While Fergie wasn't out of the spotlight since her 2006 solo firecracker, waiting over ten years to release your next album means you either have to keep up with the times or watch helplessly as the trends overtake you. As 2017's "Double Dutchess" proved, Fergie was out of step with the moment.

She made the record a "visual album", where a video accompanied every track and most of them were pretty forgettable. (She didn't fare well on our list of the definitive ranking of every visual album.) The beats were staid, the hooks were obvious to the point of insulting, and, saddest of all, the songs simply weren't memorable. The overly naughty track "M.I.L.F. $" found some defenders, but after her debut effort went five times platinum, "Double Dutchess" debuted in the U.S. at #19 and dropped off the charts quickly after that. The London Bridge isn't going down anymore: just Fergie's commercial prospects.
If you weren't around when Shania Twain's "Come On Over" came out in 1997, you might not understand how seismic that album was. While most country acts had the rare and occasional crossover hit, Shania's third album built bridges between country and pop radio that didn't exist before, saturating the airwaves for years with legendary and instantly-catchy hits like "Man! I Feel Like a Woman!", "That Don't Impress Me Much", and the torch song "You're Still the One". They all came from the same massive album that sold 40 million copies worldwide, putting her in a rare superstar echelon. Her 2002 follow-up "Up!", with two discs of the same songs in different styles (and a third disc to be found for hardcore collectors), topped the charts and still sold in droves. Yet the wait between albums after that was almost painful. Admittedly, Shania had a lot going on in her personal life, specifically in divorcing her husband/producer in 2008, then performing her old hits on sporadic live dates.

The fifth full-length album "Now" finally arrived in 2017, but the country landscape changed a lot in 15 years, and the contemporary Nash Vegas sound had little to do with Shania's buoyant country-pop efforts. Admittedly, "Now" itself was polished to the point of being ineffective, with any personality trapped under an airless studio sheen. The fun, the quirkiness: it was all gone. The album still debuted at the top of the charts because it was a new Shania album, but it didn't stick around very long, as every single she put out did worse than the last one. A bad mix of bland material and a changing marketplace made "Now" the first true flop of her still-legendary career.
When Zayn Malik announced he was leaving the boy band One Direction in 2015, the band's teenage fanbase was inconsolable. While no one denied Malik was the group's most talented vocalist, most thought that unofficial frontman Harry Styles would break from the pack first, what with his handsome face and multiple songwriting credits for both 1D and other artists. Yet Malik stunned the world when his 2016 debut single "Pillowtalk" became a global chart-topper with little to no effort. People were hungry for his music, and his duet with Taylor Swift for the "Fifty Shades Darker" soundtrack also established him as the next big pop star. Then, suddenly, it all stopped.

His sophomore album "Icarus Falls", a double-disc epic designed to spin off singles for years to come, was originally going to come out in 2017 but kept being delayed and delayed because none of the songs were sticking. "Let Me", the main event of a track, underperformed, and then every single released after the fact charted lower or failed to chart at all. Six singles were released from this garish monstrosity, and it soon became clear that once you remove Zayn from the hype, there's remarkably little personality in his music. Fluke one-off releases with Sia and PartyNextDoor kept his commercial fortunes afloat, but they weren't added to the "Icarus" tracklist until a digital re-release in 2020. Much like its namesake, "Icarus" flew too close to the sun and failed spectacularly, debuting at #77 in the U.K. and #61 in the U.S. -- a far cry from topping the charts just two years prior. When he finally put out a new album in 2021, he seemed to be aware of his position in the pop sphere by giving it the immensely self-deprecating title of "Nobody is Listening".
Sufjan Stevens bristles at the idea of fame and notoriety. He's an intensely private guy who became quite popular with his unique, sometimes-whimsical, sometimes-unflinching tales of romantic woe and state history. Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song for his stellar contribution to the "Call Me By Your Name" soundtrack, he described performing at the Oscars as "one of the most traumatizing experiences of my entire life" and the awards themselves as "everything I hate about America." Thus, it shouldn't be too much of a surprise that after the grim bloodletting of his 2015 record "Carrie & Lowell", Stevens distracted himself with numerous side-bands and New Age projects to soften the Sufjan brand and perhaps take some attention off himself. 2020's "The Ascension" was his formal comeback to the electronic-cathartic sound he perfected on 2010's great "The Age of Adz", but something was off this time.

It's unclear if the record was made out of genuine enthusiasm or a sense of obligation because while he was messing around with synth-pop in his usual way, this time it was in a drab, plain manner, forgoing the cinematic complexity that made "Adz" so compelling. Indie record shops overordered on vinyl because while "Adz" hit the U.S. Top Ten, "The Ascension" unexpectedly debuted at #90. The teaser tracks weren't doing much teasing, and while the record still has some notable fans (one New York Times writer even called it the album of the year), the expectations of Sufjan returning to one of his more popular sounds may have set unfair expectations, leading to "The Ascension" doing nothing but descending the charts. Some may call it a flop, but late-period Sufjan has little concern for the commercial performance of his records, and fans have been reacting in kind.
Modest Mouse is one of the most unexpected groups to find superstardom, but after the erratic scream-yelp sounds of frontman Isaac Brock started coalescing into recognizable pop song shapes, all it took was one breakthrough single ("Float On") to move the Mouse into the mainstream. Their records in the mid-2000s were commercial and critical successes, but as Brock and co. are wont to do, the break between albums proved long. While 2015's "Strangers to Ourselves" sold well enough, enough fans criticized the songs for being a bit slapdash and certainly not worth the seven years of waiting since their last release. Six years after that, "The Golden Casket" finally materialized. While the songwriting was more consistent and streamlined, most fans were either unimpressed or simply unaware that the Mouse was putting out any new material. (The absolute garbage cover art didn't help matters either.) After "Stranger to Ourselves" debuted in the U.S. at #3, "The Golden Casket" was properly buried on the charts by debuting at #87 in the U.S. and failing to even chart in the U.K. We don't want any band ever to rush their art, but it's bad news to leave your fans without any news of what you're up to.
Bebe Rexha is a polarizing figure. While she's been a working songwriter since the late 2000s, she's managed to secure some high-profile guest spots on hits but rarely snag one that's all her own. Her 2017 country crossover megasmash "Meant to Be" with Florida Georgia Line seemed to be the kind of thing that would make her pop star royalty, but her snotty meltdown at a pre-Grammys party proved that for all her success, she remained deeply entitled and had more passerby fans than hardcore "Rexhars" (her name for them, not ours). When it came to promoting her sophomore full-length "Better Mistakes", she made numerous claims about the material, including having one song that was "gonna give the gays everything they want".

Unfortunately, the gays, along with most sentient life forms, largely stayed clear because, for all her credits and guest spots, few people knew who Bebe Rexha was, much less what defined her signature sound. Even after securing cameos from Doja Cat, Rick Ross, Lil Uzi Vert, and Travis Barker, "Better Mistakes" sounded like a mistake, zinging between styles with such desperate abandon. All the songs were commercial in appearance but oozed a deep-seated desperation to enter radio rotation. Instead of being a multi-platform hit, "Better Mistakes" appealed to pretty much no one, as all of the singles underperformed and the album debuted at a shocking #140 on the charts. Rexha tweeted about the performance by calling it "upsetting" but that she wouldn't give up. We have no doubt we'll be hearing from Rexha in the future, but hopefully, it'll be under her own sound instead of trying to sound like everyone else.
After dropping the star-making hit that was 2013's "Pure Heroine" and the critically-adored 2017 record "Melodrama", Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor (perhaps better known as Lorde) was in the position to do whatever she wanted, so long as she continues waiting about four years before releasing another record. While "Solar Power" came with waves of hype, the resulting record was something drastically different from her usual brand of dramatic piano pop. Instead, she dropped an album of lazy, laid-back, acoustic songs, an unwitting sonic companion to Sheryl Crow's 2002 beach-ready record "C'mon C'mon" but without that same level of energy or punch. Lorde's fanbase is a rabid one, and many defend this sunbaked and stoned sleepwalk of a long-player, but given it rarely rises above a midtempo murmur, several Lorde fans wrote the record off as a stumble. While her last two records had follow-up singles that lingered for months after release, the "Solar Power" preview tracks all floated away, with "Fallen Fruit" and "Secrets from a Girl (Who's Seen It All)" even failing to chart in her native New Zealand, the first time that's happened to her since 2014. While Jack Antonoff was her collaborator for her last two albums, maybe it's time Lorde started working with another "Team".
An album doesn't need to flatline on the charts to be considered a "flop." Sometimes a flop record refers to something so massively disappointing it turns off a majority of an artist's fanbase. This is exactly what happened with Kanye West when he dropped "Donda 2". Since 2016's loose and wild "The Life of Pablo", Ye's sonic output has been wildly inconsistent, his music often overshadowed by his public antics, controversial political stances, and overall erratic behavior. Some fans found something to be hopeful about with 2021's "Donda", as it felt like the first album from Ye in years to have some sort of focus, but the slapdash, unfinished-sounding sequel is the kind of thing that exists more as a curiosity than it does a musical statement. To top it off, the album was released only through his strange handmade mixing device called the Stem Player, which has a debatably high price point of $200. Fans still bought it, but the reviews were universally scathing, calling the music unfocused and the album more akin to a collection of drafts or demos than actually completed songs. Incidentally, the three-part Netflix docuseries "jeen-yuhs" started airing right around the time of this release, and its raw and unfiltered footage transported fans back to the era of Kanye's groundbreaking early work, digging up old musical memories while making "Donda 2" look even more paltry in contrast. Here's hoping "Donda 3" isn't currently in progress.
Evan Sawdey is the Interviews Editor at PopMatters and is the host of The Chartographers, a music-ranking podcast for pop music nerds. He lives in Chicago with his wonderful husband and can be found on Twitter at @SawdEye.
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