A Day To Remember released Bad Vibrations on September 2nd, 2016, and ten years later, it still carries a reputation among some fans as one of the weaker albums from the band’s classic run. The interesting part is that critics didn’t seem to agree. Bad Vibrations earned a Metacritic score of 81/100, with Kerrang!, Rock Sound and Alternative Press all awarding it the equivalent of 8/10. Commercially, it became the band’s highest charting US album at the time, debuting at number two on the Billboard 200, while also reaching number six in the UK.
Somewhere along the way, however, Bad Vibrations became an album that plenty of ADTR fans seemed far less enthusiastic about than the critics who reviewed it. Part of that may simply have been down to what came before it. A Day To Remember had just produced an incredible run of For Those Who Have Heart, Homesick, What Separates Me From You and Common Courtesy, four records that helped take them from Florida’s hardcore and pop punk scene to becoming one of the biggest alternative bands of their generation.
The expectations following Common Courtesy were therefore enormous, but ADTR also deliberately changed how they approached its follow up. Jeremy McKinnon explained at the time that the band returned to writing together in the same room for the first time since For Those Who Have Heart, rather than McKinnon arriving with much of the material already prepared. The resulting record pushed further towards the darker and heavier side of the band’s sound.
Even within the largely positive contemporary reviews, there were signs of what would later become common criticism of the album. Rock Sound praised the record but argued that it wasn’t quite the career defining milestone some might have expected, while Punknews praised much of what ADTR attempted but described parts of its middle section as tedious. It wasn’t necessarily that Bad Vibrations was considered bad, but that following Common Courtesy with another album capable of matching the band’s previous run was an incredibly high bar.
Ten years later, the divide between critics and listeners hasn’t completely disappeared. Album of the Year currently has Bad Vibrations sitting at 64/100 from more than 300 user ratings, compared with a 78/100 average from critics. That hardly points towards some enormous rehabilitation where everyone has suddenly decided it was an overlooked masterpiece.
There are signs, though, that attitudes towards it have softened. Earlier this year, fans on the A Day To Remember subreddit voted Bad Vibrations the band’s most underrated album, while its current Rate Your Music score places it above And Their Name Was Treason, You’re Welcome and Big Ole Album Vol. 1 among the band’s studio records.
Perhaps that’s ultimately where Bad Vibrations sits a decade later. It wasn’t a commercial failure and critics certainly didn’t hate it, while fans haven’t suddenly decided it’s secretly ADTR’s greatest album either. Instead, it was a darker and heavier record that arrived immediately after four albums that set an incredibly high standard for anything carrying the A Day To Remember name.
Ten years of distance means Bad Vibrations can now be judged without quite as much weight from everything that came immediately before it, and while its reputation hasn’t completely transformed, there is at least evidence that some fans have come back around to it. Maybe it hasn’t gone from hated to loved, but ten years later, has Bad Vibrations grown on you?