Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground Albums Ranked Worst to Greatest

It did not take lengthy for Lou Reed to outgrow the Seaside Boys cash-ins he was making as a contract artist and songwriter and head towards extra fertile land. By 1965, he had met John Cale, and the pair began engaged on the music that will develop into the core basis of the Velvet Underground. Inside two years, they launched one of the vital influential albums ever recorded.

Nonetheless, it was a rocky begin and infrequently a profitable one. From his early doo-wop fixations to a protracted profession crammed with band, solo and collaboration information that have been confrontational, purposely troublesome and designed outright for industrial failure, Reed by no means compromised, as you will word within the record under of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground Albums Ranked.

The 4 albums he made with the Velvet Underground – earlier than he walked away in disgust on the band’s lack of success – are acknowledged classics right now, however they have been industrial bombs after they have been launched. His solo album Transformer gained him High 40 fame in 1972; it wasn’t lengthy earlier than Reed undermined his profession with albums like Berlin (an idea album about habit and suicide) and Metallic Machine Music (typically cited as one of many worst albums of all time).

READ MORE: How Loud Reed Made One among Rock’s Most Hated Albums

Reed was an uncompromising artist till he died in 2013. His closing album, Lulu, a collaborative LP with Metallica, acquired backlash from followers of each artists and incessantly seems alongside Metallic Machine Music on lists of the worst albums ever made. There aren’t too many individuals who’ve made one of the vital influential information ever and one (or two) of essentially the most reviled.

The record of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground Albums Ranked Worst to Greatest consists of solely studio albums, however a few stay releases, each from 1974, are important listens: Reed’s Rock n Roll Animal, which options 4 Underground songs and one from Berlin, and the Velvets’ 1969: Velvet Underground Stay With Lou Reed, which cherry-picks songs from a pair of exhibits in Dallas and San Francisco. They assist inform the story of one in every of music’s most unwavering and contentious figures.