More brilliant bands whose final albums were disasters, according to our readers
A reader wrote in after our last roundup, telling us that we’d left out an obvious one: Van Halen, twice over, once for the album that actually earned the reputation and once for the one that got unfairly lumped in with it.
Fair point on both counts, and it opened the door to a few more bands whose final chapter didn’t match the ones that came before it.
Van Halen technically has two “final” albums
Only one of them deserves the reputation. Van Halen III came first, in 1998, with new singer Gary Cherone trying to fill a spot that had already burned through two legendary frontmen before him. Critics and fans savaged it. The band largely erased the record from its own history afterward, leaving its songs off every greatest hits collection that followed. For fourteen years, that stood as Van Halen’s final studio album.
Then, in 2012, the band quietly proved that reputation wrong. A Different Kind of Truth reunited David Lee Roth with the group, debuted at number two on the Billboard 200, and earned genuinely warm reviews on release. This became Van Halen’s true final studio album before Eddie Van Halen’s death in 2020, a real send-off after all, just not the one anyone expected.
One review of Mardi Gras still gets quoted 50 years later
Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau called Creedence Clearwater Revival’s 1972 swan song, by the band’s own standards, “the worst album I have ever heard from a major rock band.” John Fogerty had forced a democratic songwriting arrangement on bandmates he’d controlled completely for years, and the experiment backfired so badly the group split within months of release.
Full Circle tried to replace an irreplaceable voice
Jim Morrison was gone. The Doors kept going anyway, splitting lead vocals between keyboardist Ray Manzarek and guitarist Robby Krieger for this 1972 record, the second and final album the surviving members made without him. Neither approached what Morrison had brought to the band, and retrospectives still rank this among rock’s most forgettable exits for a group that had once defined an entire era.
The Beach Boys closed out their run with an album that barely sounded like them
Brian Wilson, the band’s chief songwriting force for decades, had almost no involvement in 1992’s Summer in Paradise. Instead, the album mostly filled the gap with covers, re-recordings, and a glossy early-90s pop sheen that clashed with everything fans associated with the group. Critics tore into it, fans agreed, and it remains the band’s least-loved studio release by a wide margin.
The Clash’s final album doesn’t even appear on the band’s own website
Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon fired guitarist Mick Jones and drummer Topper Headon before recording 1985’s Cut the Crap, replacing them with three largely unknown musicians. UK music press at the time called it flatly one of the most disastrous albums ever released by a major artist. Strummer walked away almost immediately and broke the band up within weeks. It still isn’t listed in the group’s official discography.
The bottom line
Every band here built a real legacy first, which is exactly what made the ending sting as much as it did. A few of them, Van Halen included, eventually proved the story wasn’t quite finished the way everyone assumed.
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