They Called It Noise: 10 Artists Who Got Dismissed Before They Changed Everything

There's a certain kind of music critic who hears something genuinely new and immediately reaches for the word "unlistenable." It's a reflex — a defense mechanism dressed up as an opinion. And while criticism at its best is an essential part of how culture processes itself, the history of experimental music is absolutely littered with moments where the gatekeepers got it catastrophically wrong.

At Locrian, we've always believed that the most interesting music lives in the space where listeners feel slightly off-balance. So it felt right to look back at the artists who got there first — the ones who got booed, panned, ignored, or outright mocked before the world finally caught up.

1. Igor Stravinsky — The Rite of Spring (1913)

Let's start with the most famous disaster in concert history. When Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring premiered in Paris in May 1913, it triggered an actual riot. The audience booed, screamed, and reportedly came to blows in the aisles. Critics called it "cacophony" and "musical anarchy." Today it's considered one of the defining masterworks of the 20th century and a cornerstone of the modern orchestral canon. The gap between "riot" and "masterwork" was about a decade.

2. Velvet Underground — Pretty Much Everything (1967–1970)

At the time of their first album's release, The Velvet Underground sold almost nothing and were dismissed by mainstream critics as pretentious noise merchants with a drug fixation. One review called them "a bad trip put to music." Brian Eno famously quipped that while only 30,000 people bought the album, every single one of them started a band. Their influence on indie rock, post-punk, noise rock, and art pop is essentially incalculable.

3. Captain Beefheart — Trout Mask Replica (1969)

Rolling Stone's original review of this album was, to put it gently, confused. Most mainstream outlets didn't know what to do with an album that seemed to deliberately dismantle every rule of rhythm, melody, and song structure. Captain Beefheart was called self-indulgent and inaccessible. Trout Mask Replica now regularly appears on lists of the greatest albums ever recorded and is cited by everyone from Tom Waits to PJ Harvey as a foundational influence.

4. Miles Davis — Bitches Brew (1970)

When Davis went electric and began fusing jazz with rock and psychedelia, a substantial portion of the jazz establishment treated it like a personal betrayal. Critics who had championed his earlier work called Bitches Brew "confused" and "commercial sellout." Jazz purists were furious. The album went platinum and essentially invented jazz fusion as a genre. Davis, characteristically, didn't seem to care.

5. Kraftwerk — Early Catalog (1974–1977)

The German electronic pioneers were initially dismissed in the US as cold, robotic, and deeply weird. American rock critics in the mid-'70s had very little framework for music made almost entirely with synthesizers and drum machines. "Where are the guitars? Where are the real instruments?" was the recurring complaint. Kraftwerk's influence on hip-hop, electronic dance music, synth-pop, and techno is so vast it's almost impossible to overstate. Without Kraftwerk, there's no Daft Punk, no Detroit techno, arguably no modern pop production.

6. Public Enemy — It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988)

The dense, abrasive production style — layers of samples, sirens, noise, and Chuck D's confrontational delivery — baffled plenty of critics who called it "too aggressive" and "sonically overwhelming." Some reviewers struggled to even classify it as music in the traditional sense. It's now considered one of the greatest albums in American history, full stop.

7. My Bloody Valentine — Loveless (1991)

The story of Loveless is almost a cliché at this point, but it bears repeating. The album nearly bankrupted Creation Records, took two years and hundreds of studio sessions to complete, and was initially met with critical bewilderment about its wall-of-noise guitar textures and deliberately buried vocals. More than a few reviewers called it self-indulgent. It's now the defining document of shoegaze and one of the most influential guitar albums ever made.

8. Radiohead — Kid A (2000)

Fresh off the massive commercial success of OK Computer, Radiohead made an album with almost no guitars, heavily processed vocals, and a strong debt to Krautrock and electronic music. Plenty of critics and fans felt genuinely betrayed. "Where did Radiohead go?" asked more than one review. Kid A debuted at number one in both the US and the UK, won a Grammy, and is now consistently ranked among the greatest albums of its era. The backlash lasted about six months. The acclaim has lasted 25 years.

9. Swans — Filth and Early Catalog (1983–1986)

Few bands have generated quite the level of hostile critical response that Swans did in their early years. The New York no-wave scene had already pushed listeners toward discomfort, but Swans took things to a genuinely punishing extreme — slow, brutal, repetitive, and uncompromising. Critics called it unlistenable torture. Michael Gira and company kept going anyway. Swans are now regarded as one of the most important and durable experimental acts in American music history, still releasing vital work decades later.

10. Scott Walker — Tilt (1995) and The Drift (2006)

Scott Walker's late-career transformation from '60s pop heartthrob to avant-garde composer is one of the strangest arcs in modern music. Tilt confused almost everyone who remembered "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore." The Drift, with its blocks of meat being punched in the studio and its harrowing vocal performances, was called "unreleasable" by his own label at one point. Today, both albums are considered singular achievements in experimental music, and Walker is spoken of in the same breath as Beefheart and Eno.

What All of This Is Actually About

The pattern here isn't hard to spot. Genuine innovation almost always arrives ahead of the critical vocabulary needed to describe it. When something truly new shows up, the easiest response is to call it broken rather than admit that the framework for understanding it doesn't exist yet.

That's what makes the name Locrian so fitting for a band committed to exploring music's most unstable harmonic territory. The Locrian mode was dismissed for centuries as unusable — too tense, too unresolved, too difficult. And yet here we are, finding the beauty in it anyway.

The artists on this list didn't wait for permission to be understood. They made the work, trusted the work, and let time do the rest. That's the only playbook that's ever actually worked for experimental music — and honestly, it's the only one worth following.