Alexandra Burke was having fun last week. Last year's X Factor winner was in high spirits as she kept her Twitter followers up to date with her journey to Heathrow, her wait at check-in and her arrival in New York. At one point she actually Tweeted from the vocal booth of Beyoncé's producers, Stargate. "Yes! This song is amazing!" she wrote. "It's now finished! Woop Woop!! Thank you Stargate! Bring on the next one!" A little later: "Just met Timbaland! Woowzaa!!"

Back in the UK things weren't going quite so well for Eoghan Quigg, who came third to Alexandra in last year's The X Factor and two weeks ago released the worst album in the history of recorded sound. You'd have been right to have predicted that his self-titled album would be fairly bad, but it's not just bad in the way this sort of album is usually bad. It's not bad like Brookstein, or bad like McManus. It's an objectively bad album so bad that it would count as a new low for popular culture were it possible to class as either culture (its producers barely even approached it as music) or popular (despite Eoghan having won the public vote numerous times during The X Factor, this album was struggling towards 10,000 units after three days on sale).

Ironically, in 2009 we are so numb to hyperbole that totally appropriate phrases like "the worst album of all time" effectively divert attention away from how bad this album actually is. But this album really is phenomenally bad. On first listen it's tempting to say that no effort went into its creation, but on closer inspection it strikes a very clever balance. It is an album which at once satisfies demand for one Eoghan Quigg album and ensures that there will never ever be demand for a second. It's an important balance for X Factor albums like this. If produced cheaply enough (and the karaoke CD backing tracks show that this album has not been an expensive one) there's potential for modest profit on a debut album, but that profit would certainly turn to loss if ploughed into the promotion of a follow-up.

Modern industry thrives on products designed to seem outdated and clunky when the next model turns up, but here the product is a 16-year-old boy. At times Eoghan Quigg feels like a massive joke at Eoghan's expense. This is an album about pathetic loneliness. It includes covers of Ben, a song about a boy so lonely he makes friends with a rat, and Home, in which the singer is surrounded by a million people but is "all alone, I want to go home ... I've had my run, baby I'm done". 28,000 Friends is about a singer and friends who don't exist. Perhaps the cruellest moment is Eoghan singing Take That's Never Forget. It finds this kid who jacked in his GCSEs and waved goodbye to his friends in order to be screwed so hard and so aggressively by pop that you're tempted to call social services singing a song about how this success won't last forever and will, in fact, disappear. "There's a road going down the other side of this hill," he sings. "Someday soon this will all be someone else's dream." Tempted?