Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground Albums Ranked Worst to Greatest

It did not take lengthy for Lou Reed to outgrow the Seashore 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 may change 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 full of band, solo and collaboration information that had been confrontational, purposely tough and designed outright for industrial failure, Reed by no means compromised, as you may word within the checklist 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 this moment, however they had been industrial bombs after they had been launched. His solo album Transformer gained him Prime 40 fame in 1972; it wasn’t lengthy earlier than Reed undermined his profession with albums like Berlin (an idea album about dependancy and suicide) and Metallic Machine Music (usually cited as one of many worst albums of all time).

READ MORE: How Loud Reed Made Certainly one of Rock’s Most Hated Albums

Reed was an uncompromising artist till he died in 2013. His last album, Lulu, a collaborative LP with Metallica, obtained backlash from followers of each artists and regularly 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 probably the most reviled.

The checklist 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 Dwell With Lou Reed, which cherry-picks songs from a pair of exhibits in Dallas and San Francisco. They assist inform the story of certainly one of music’s most unwavering and contentious figures.