Most artists worth listening to tend to slightly change up their style with each release, and sometimes this results in the artist sounding completely different today than it did when it first started (hello, Radiohead). However, some artists forego this gradual transformation and instead entirely change their sound with just one album. Here are six albums that sound totally different from the one that came before it.
1. The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground (1969)
Though the Velvet Underground flirted with noise rock on its debut album, the band dove headfirst into feedback and distortion with its second album White Light/White Heat, which would be the last to feature multi-instrumentalist John Cale. Instead of continuing on the noise rock path, however, the band's eponymous third album strips away most of the band's avant-garde tendencies in favor of a folky, subdued sound.
2. Bruce Springsteen - Nebraska (1982)
The story of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska has been told many times, and here it goes again: after releasing his epic double LP The River in 1980, Springsteen began recording acoustic demos for his next album. However, after Springsteen struggled to effectively arrange these songs with the E Street Band, he decided to release the demos as the actual album, which became Nebraska, a masterpiece of lo-fi folk music. Springsteen would follow it up with Born in the U.S.A., a return to rock music, and wouldn't record another folk album until The Ghost of Tom Joad in 1995.
3. Blur - Blur (1997)
Being the band that practically invented Britpop, Blur was tremendously and proudly British. However, after finding influence in the Jam and the Kinks for its classic "Britpop Trilogy" of Modern Life is Rubbish, Parklife, and The Great Escape, the band needed a new sound, which it found in an extremely unlikely place: America. 1997's Blur was a stylistic overhaul, abandoning the band's bright and crisply produced sound in favor of a gritty, lo-fi sound inspired by American indie rock bands like Pavement and Sonic Youth. Perhaps predictably, this new sound brought Blur its biggest American success, with "Song 2" being the band's best-known song in this country.
4. Bad Religion - Into The Unknown (1983)
In my article on albums hated by the people who made them, I listed Bad Religion's second album Into The Unknown, an inexplicable progressive rock detour in an otherwise punk discography. Though it received good reviews, the album was such a commercial failure for the band that it broke up afterwards, reforming two years later with its original punk sound.
5. Sufjan Stevens - Enjoy Your Rabbit (2001)
Though he hasn't released an album of folk music in nearly ten years, Sufjan Stevens is still the poster boy for sensitive indie folk. His debut album A Sun Came set the banjo-strumming template, but his second album Enjoy Your Rabbit was a complete left turn, an album of experimental electronic music. Stevens wouldn't make another album with electronic sounds until 2010's The Age of Adz.
6. Ty Segall - Sleeper (2013)
With Jay Reatard gone, it's a good thing we still have Ty Segall to carry the torch of one-man garage rock bands. However, with his most recent studio album Sleeper, Segall completely did away with the furious punk sound he's known for and instead recorded an album of beautiful acoustic songs, almost entirely without drums. Based on the teaser for his next album Manipulator, though, it sounds like Segall's returning to fuzz rock pretty soon.
What other albums sound nothing like the one that came before? Let us know in the comments section!
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