The Best and Worst Band Names You've Ever Heard

Nathanial Rateliffe and The Night Sweats is pretty badass as for and singer + backup names go.

And the negative side, Moist is a little meh. A weird combination of boring and mildly unpleasant. Good music though..

Diarrhea Planet easily have one of the most actively unpleasant names I have ever encountered, although apparently their work is rather solid (...ew) so I shall try not to hold it against them.

I bought an album by a band called Lubbert Das solely because of their band name, which is a reference to a Breughel the Elder work also alluded to in Wire's "Madman's Honey", a song of which I am quite fond. It was decent.

Bardo Pond have a weirdly memorable moniker.

Also, i remember in the late 90s visiting a used cd/tape store and seeing a album by a group called "Christmas". Talk about a band name that's impossible to find on google search.

To me, these are good and bad band names.

Good: Pantera, Meshuggah, Nirvana, Rolling Stones, Alice In Chains, Deftones, Incubus, Sublime, Jane's Addiction, Dillinger Escape Plan, Mastodon

Bad: Butthole Surfers(Like this band, BTW), Gaye Bikers On Acid, Gay Dad, Nickelback, Puddle Of Mudd, Anal Cunt

edited 17th Feb '17 7:55:50 AM by pointless233

Going to a show where one of the openers was, until recently, going by the deliberately misleading name ACLU Benefit (now he's going by Request Freebird). If nothing else, I guess the idea was worth it to organize his own tribute album, then make the cover art a cease and desist notice from the actual ACLU. It also occurs to me that, since his music is for sale at Bandcamp, and Bandcamp did once give all profits to the ACLU for a day, the name was unintentionally accurate for exactly 24 hours.

On the Bandcamp topic, I was pleased to accidentally discovered that someone registered the group name This One Time At there, resulting in the url thisonetimeat.bandcamp.com.

edited 18th Feb '17 9:15:54 AM by MikeK

Here are some more good and bad band names

Good: Faith No More, Soundgarden, Cynic, Fear Factory, System Of A Down, The Eagles, Primus, Minor Threat, Fugazi, Shudder To Think

Bad: Dying Fetus, Pig Destroyer, The Police, Circle Of Dead Children, Nothingface(I like this band) 21 Pilots, Foster The People

Real Estate. I don't have an opinion on the one song I heard of theirs, but that's pretty bad.

I hadn't thought about it, but it does seem like one of those band names that doesn't mesh well with search engines: If you didn't think to type "real estate band", you'd just end up with actual real estate listings. Actually, if you did type "real estate band", you'd probably also get a few results about Sunny Day Real Estate too.

Two bad band names I encountered while stocking CD shelves at a thrift store: Baby-Free Dumpster and The Bloody Stools. The Bloody Stools at least amused me with a dumb visual pun - their album cover has a bunch of bloody bar-stools on it (as opposed to, you know, the other kind of stools).

edited 11th May '17 10:59:02 AM by MikeK

There was a country music band called Cole Deggs & the Lonesome. I always thought they sounded like "Cold Eggs", and even Bob Kingsley pointed this out more than once on Bob Kingsley's Country Top 40.

Raped Ape.

Autism.

Figure out which one is worse.

edited 23rd May '17 5:52:49 PM by StillbornMachine

Depends. Is "Autism" here being used in a derogatory way like how most edgy teenagers on the internet use it?

Given the band, I have no idea.

NSFW Rate Your Music list

Going by this list, Ed's suggestions need to include "sex, rape and fetuses" it seems.

Some are actually pretty cool though… Also, why is John Lennon in the list? >.>

"Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start" is a waste of a potentially good name. Seriously, I'd totally listen to a band called "Konami Code". X)

And I love "While Heaven Wept".

edited 2nd Jun '17 11:45:42 AM by Lyendith

That's a pretty great list

A few of these aren't bad (Abstract Spirit, Mountains Became Machines, John Lennon, etc.) but for the most part these had be either laughing, rolling my eyes, or just wondering "Why?"

Set Fire to Flames might have been the funniest one on there for me.

x 3 I Am The World Trade Center is sort of an interesting one - they started performing with that name in 1999 and their first album was released in the summer of 2001: So at the time their name was maybe weird and/or pretentious ^note They're a Creator Couple duo and apparently decided on the name because the towers were "equal and independent" parts of a whole, but not at all offensive. So it's not unlike putting, say, Anthrax in there.

edited 14th Jun '17 10:53:42 PM by MikeK

Involuntary Convulsion is a pretty stupid name I must say. I'm pretty sure convulsions aren't supposed to be voluntary. >.>

Some great bad names on the Glastonbury line-up this year - First Aid Kit (who it turns out I actually quite like); Toots and the Maytals; BadBadNotGood; The Moondlandingz. Those are the ones that I particularly noticed.

re: BADBADNOTGOOD: I don't know what it is with really underground electronic artists and terrible names. There's one that's just a bunch of Xs and Ys.

XXYYXX, you mean? He's a really nice guy, I've heard.

Set Fire to Flames is, I think, supposed to be kind of absurd and gnomic. A better example would be We Butter the Bread with Butter, which I think crosses a few too many lines of stupid.

As great as the band is, Teen Suicide is a terrible name.

As others have pointed out, XXXTENTACION sounds like an Xbox Live gamertag. Terrible.

Severed Crotch.

Surprisingly enough, not a goregrind band and rather highbrow musically.

edited 16th Jul '17 10:21:41 PM by StillbornMachine

Someone named their band that?

I remember reading Throbbing Gristle tried to give themselves the most embarrassing band name to ask for at a record store. I like to think they succeeded.