The least-loved albums by veteran artists tend to find their way, in time, to critical rehabilitation. It’s practically an inevitability, particularly if the artist in question is deemed sufficiently historic. Lou Reed’s notorious Metal Machine Music was reviled on its release only to become recontextualized as the urtext of the harsh noise genre. What was once dismissed as kitschy and chintzy on Dylan’s ’80s records became a bedrock of the War On Drugs’ acclaimed sound. This website has mounted (partial) defenses of Metallica’s dire St. Anger and Lulu on recent anniversaries, and Pitchfork controversially rescored a bunch of reviews in 2021, elevating onetime duds by Wilco, Daft Punk, and Lana Del Rey to the canon. Stay in the conversation long enough and you might discover that you no longer have any bad albums.