Early Installment Weirdness / Music

Take note as this was the early fashion sense of Devo, long before the energy domes.^note And yes, they were wearing diapers

Early-Installment Weirdness in Music.

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Artists:

A-C

• ABBA: Their early material is more in the vein of rock, ballads (encompassing several genres such as '60s soft-rock and Latin, which the group would largely abandon following their third album) and showtunes, and often featured Björn or Benny on lead vocals. Later on they'd go in a more pop and disco direction, with Björn only taking one lead vocal per album from their third album onwards (and not on Super Trouper at all).
• Aborted's first album The Purity of Perversion sounds very, very little like their future releases. The production is much rawer, the riffs are for the most part more frantic and less structured, and very few of the band's trademark elements are present. It's still regarded as a good album, though.
• AC/DC: The songs recorded in the mid-1970s sounded very different from their later hits; this was primarily because they weren't quite taking themselves seriously yet, and mostly preferred crude novelty songs (including, most infamously, "Big Balls"). The first album to sound anything like AC/DC as we know them today was Let There Be Rock (1977), and even that had some goofy mid-70s glam influence on it. The difference in style can also be partially attributed to lead singer Bon Scott, who died in 1980.
  • The major influence in their shift was when they hired Robert John "Mutt" Lange as their producer, starting with their Highway to Hell album, the last one with Bon. You can clearly tell it sounds much more like their next few albums than ever before.
  • For even more early installment weirdness, there's their rare debut single, "Can I Sit Next to You Girl"/"Rockin' at the Parlour", their only release to feature original lead vocalist Dave Evans: On one hand, the actual song-writing isn't too different from their Bon Scott material, and in fact the band re-recorded "Can I Sit Next To You Girl" with Scott for the album High Voltage. On the other, Angus and Malcolm Young hadn't found their signature guitar tones yet, and most strikingly, Dave sang in a drastically different way from either of the band's better-known vocalists: Both Bon Scott and Brian Johnson are known for high-pitched, raspy singing voices, while Evans had a lower voice that didn't stand out nearly as much from other hard rock or glam singers of the time. Seeing the rare promo video for the original version of "Can I Sit Next to You Girl" can be surprising too, since the band had a Glam Rock image instead of the more "working class" one they have now - Angus Young still had his trademark schoolboy outfit, but in a way that just makes everyone else look weirder in comparison.
  • Just prior to joining AC/DC, Bon Scott was in a band called Fraternity, who played Progressive Rock - just about the last rock subgenre you'd expect anyone associated with AC/DC to have roots in. In addition to singing with the group, he also played recorder.
• Trace Adkins originally sang in a higher, more restrained voice and sometimes went falsetto (most notably on "Lonely Won't Leave Me Alone"). In addition, almost none of his material was overtly sexual or macho (except for "I Left Something Turned On at Home", which even then is played far more lightheartedly). By Chrome in 2001, he began singing in his deeper baritone and cutting edgier, often more sexualized material such as "Chrome", "Hot Mama", or "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk" alongside more impassioned ballads.
• Aerosmith's first album is different mostly because Steven Tyler doesn't use his trademark singing voice often, frequently using a lower, bluesier vocal tone instead ("Dream On" can be recognized only when he starts a Metal Scream Title Drop).
• Alice Cooper's first two albums were very psychedelic-sounding, influenced by Frank Zappa and Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd. Frontman Vince Furnier (who would only take the band name for his own after it had broken up) hadn't developed his vocal style yet, either, and the albums rely mainly on instrumentals and Word Salad Lyrics.
• Alice in Chains started off in 1986 as a glam metal band that was extremely similar to Guns N' Roses, even appearance-wise. If that wasn't different enough, this group was descended from the glam-rock hair band Alice 'n' Chainz (which, aside from having the same vocalist, are not the same band). The latter band are noticeably... different from the famous Grunge band. Their first album, Facelift, has very obvious glam-influence (especially obvious on the second half) in strong contrast to the dark, gloomy heavy metal of their later albums. The lyrics, while far from upbeat/happy, are also a little lighter and less pessimistic.
• Early on, Gary Allan had a softer and less raspy singing voice, and his material tended toward the upbeat more often, with positive songs such as "Her Man", "Right Where I Need to Be", "Tough Little Boys", and "Nothing On but the Radio" (although he still had the occasional downer, most notably "Smoke Rings in the Dark"). Then after his wife's suicide in 2005, he seemed to undergo a nearly-permanent Creator Breakdown: his voice became raspier and he began singing falsetto more often, while his material became darker and often introspective (such as "Life Ain't Always Beautiful", "Watching Airplanes", or "Every Storm (Runs Out of Rain)").
• Listening to GG Allin's first album Always Was, Is, And Always Shall Be can be a strange experience if you're only familiar with his later works. In many ways it is a very typical late-'70s punk rock record, but as such, it actually has some power-pop and new-wave influences (yes, really!) and GG's voice is still youthful and melodic compared to the drug-and-alcohol-ravaged raspy bark he developed in his later years. The lyrics are still crude and misogynistic, but nowhere near as over-the-top gruesome and hateful as the stuff he would become (in)famous for.
• Alter Bridge's first album, One Day Remains, has a far stronger Post-Grunge influence and a heavy Creed feel in its songwriting (considering the band was made up of 3/4 of Creed). It did however have a couple songs (most notably the title track and "Metalingus") that are more like what they'd write later.
• Aly & A.J.: Their first album had more Christian elements than later material.
• Tori Amos: Her first band and album of the same name, Y Kant Tori Read, a few years before she became famous with her new style. Amos pretended for decades that it had never happened, though more recently she has "made peace with it." She even approved a limited edition reissue of the band's sole self-titled album in 2017.
• Lynn Anderson: First rising to prominence in 1967 and promoted primarly as the daughter of singer-songwriter Liz Anderson, virtually every one of Lynn's early hits – all for Chart Records – were chirpy, uptempo happy songs. That trend continued with her first single releases in 1970, when she signed a new contract with Columbia Records ... until she got a hold of a new Joe South composition called "Rose Garden." Not particularly well known at the time, South agreed to allow Anderson to record the song and even produced it, using a much different arrangement than any of her previous songs – still positive but a decidedly country-pop sound. The new sound caught on and not only gave Anderson her biggest hit ever (No. 1 for five weeks country, No. 3 pop and still among the biggest country crossover hits ever), but it moved Anderson's sound into a new pop-country direction with her 1970s and early 1980s releases.
• Andrew W.K.: Everyone knows him for his songs about partying, partying, and even more things related to partying. However a track he recorded when he was 17 would have fans a little....scared
• Animusic and its gravity-defying drumsticks in three of the seven videos.
• Anthrax:
  • Their debut, Fistful of Metal is more of a Speed Metal / Traditional Heavy Metal album than the rest of their 80's output, featuring more melodic riffs, lead guitar harmonies and less overt punk influences. It is also the only album to feature Neil Turbin, who sounds completely different from Joey Belladonna, and only album to not feature long time bassist Frank Bello. The whole thing, not unlike Slayer's Show No Mercy mentioned below, sounds like an American NWOBHM album.
  • The first album with John Bush, Sound Of White Noise, is a bit different from their later Bush-era albums. Its production is rawer, its songs are more brutal, and Bush uses far more multilayered vocals and high pitched screaming than on the following three albums.
• While a well-regarded classic in its own right, Aphex Twin's debut album, Selected Ambient Works 85-92 stands out in his discography due of its lack of weirdness. It's a relaxing ambient techno album, a far cry from the frantic, mind-bending, and decidedly not relaxing braindance he would later be known for.
• Aphrodite's Child are mainly known for their double Concept Album 666: completely composed by their percussionist and keyboarder Vangelis Papathanassiou, it was an early Prog Rock album which spent several years in Development Hell. Before 666, however, they made two albums that sound vastly different. They can be described as "vaguely psychedelic pop, but so kitschy it borders on schlager".
  • Aphrodite's Child as a whole are Early-Installment Weirdness for Vangelis (see below).
  • 666 is Early-Installment Weirdness for Aphrodite's Child's singer Demis Roussos who continued in the band's old style and eventually fully embraced German schlager after the band had split.
• While Louis Armstrong's influence on jazz is undeniable, most audiences are familiar with his '50s/'60s crooner-era where he mostly sang crossover traditional pop and R&B ballads; his trumpet solos during this era also tended to be slower and simpler. It can be quite a shock for these audiences to listen to his more acclaimed '20s/'30s work, where he played fast-paced Dixieland jazz, mostly playing instrumentals with occasional vocals here or there. His trumpet and cornet playing was also a lot faster and more intense around this period.
• Rodney Atkins: On his 1997 debut single "In a Heartbeat", he sang in a tremolo-heavy voice like Roy Orbison. He is barely recognizable on the single's cover, wearing a pressed shirt and cowboy hat, and sporting a mustache. After a five-year hiatus, he returned as an expy (both visually and vocally) of then-labelmate Tim McGraw with the album Honesty. One more hiatus, and he came back again with If You're Going Through Hell, which established his Signature Style: baseball cap and blue jeans, a high gravelly voice, and often-uptempo songs about family and fatherhood.
• Gene Autry: Some of the recordings he did in the early 30s contained themes of bootlegging, corrupt police and women who worked in vice type occupations. These and similar topics tended to largely absent in the work he did afterwards.
• The Avalanches' El Producto EP did have the same dense layers of samples as their more well-known Since I Left You^note (The parrot sample that would later show up in "Frontier Psychiatrist" even makes an early appearance in "Rap Fever"), but used them to a somewhat trippier and slightly less danceable effect. More importantly, El Producto featured the group themselves rapping Word Salad Lyrics over most of the songs - whenever vocals appear on later albums, they're either samples or guest performers.
• Avenged Sevenfold:
  • Avenged Sevenfold's first effort, Sounding the Seventh Trumpet (2001), resembles their later works very little. First, the bassist wasn't Johnny Christ but Justin Sane^note not to be confused with the Anti-Flag frontman, Zacky Vengeance was the sole guitarist, M. Shadows screamed for 90% of the album, and drummer The Rev was in the middle of his 'Pinkly Smooth' period (a Mr. Bungle-inspired side-project). The result was a pretty messy metalcore album produced with close to no budget under a Belgian label, that featured none of the epic riffing and soloing of later albums (save for the remade intro track "To End the Rapture", recorded after Synyster Gates joined the band as lead guitarist). The album does feature a Power Ballad though, which is pretty jarring. The untitled demo made the year before with original bassist Matt Wendt, is even weirder.
  • Their second album Waking the Fallen also qualifies, but to a lesser extent — while it has a melodic Metalcore style and still a lot of screaming, the core of their later material is already there, and the final track "And All Things Will End" largely prefigures the style of City of Evil.
• Ayria's style has always generally been electro-industrial/futurepop, but her first album, Debris, is definitely lighter and more trance-influenced than later productions.
• Bad Religion:
  • Their second album, Into the Unknown, wasn't a punk album at all but a PROGRESSIVE ROCK album!
  • Even their first album How Could Hell Be Any Worse?, which was punk, is more Hardcore Punk-influenced than most of their better-known material, with rougher production, less melodic vocals, and almost none of the harmonies that became part of the band's signature sound. You could say that on their first album, the music was recognizable as Bad Religion, but the vocals weren't, whereas on their second album, the exact opposite was true.
• Baroness:
  • The early extended plays use Harsh Vocals that the band was starting to move away from around the time of full-length debut Red Album.
  • Red Album itself is largely instrumental. Subsequent albums feature vocals more prominently.
• Beastie Boys started out as a Hardcore Punk group. No, really! That didn't last long, however- they quickly realized that punk wasn't going to be profitable and switched to rap. Considering how successful they were, it was probably a wise choice - specially as their musical instruction allowed for songs where they played the musical backing such as "Sabotage".
  • The unexpected success of early single "Cooky Puss" was what eventually led them to start performing hip-hop, but even that release was pretty far from what they'd sound like on their first full album: The title song was a parody of instrumental breakdance music, with the group's voices mainly being heard in the form of prank calls to a Carvel restaurant and samples from their previous hardcore punk songs; the only B-side track that wasn't a "Cooky Puss" remix was "Beastie Revolution", a dub reggae jam ^note the liner notes to the Some Old Bullshit compilation explain that for these sessions, they ended up in a studio normally used for commercial jingles and couldn't get their punk songs to sound the way they wanted with the equipment provided, so they just started messing around with other styles.
• The Beatles:
  • First, they were originally far rougher around the edges than we know them today, to the point where they could be described as whatever the late '50s/early '60s equivalent of punk rock was. They had much shorter hair than we remember, sported leather jackets, performed in a surly and indifferent manner, ate fried chicken onstage (leaving the bones behind them), and sneered at the audience. In general, they were probably more performance artists than musicians in those days.
  • Before the band recorded what is often referred to as their first single, "Love Me Do/P.S. I Love You", they recorded various cover songs as a supporting act for rock and roller Tony Sheridan. Two of these songs, "My Bonnie" and "The Saints" were released as their actual first single, although those songs are largely forgotten by the vast majority of music listeners. The other songs the band recorded with Sheridan were released on various obscure compilations later on.
  • Even when compared with their other early rock and roll-style songs, "Love Me Do" is very musically and lyrically primitive. The song consists of three identical verses, a short bridge, and no chorus (as was typical for the A-A-B-A structure), with every sentence rhyming with an "oo" sound and only nineteen different words used in the song: "Love", "me", "do", "you", "know", "I", "I'll", "always", "be", "true", "so", "please", "whoa", "someone", "to", "somebody", "new", "like" and "yeah".
  • "Love Me Do", "Please Please Me", "From Me to You", "Thank You Girl", "I'll Get You", "Chains", "There's a Place", "Little Child", "I Should Have Known Better" and "I'm a Loser", all stand out for the use of harmonica, an instrument they rarely revisited after 1964.
• The Bee Gees: While their legacy will always be known as one of of the biggest disco bands ever, the Bee Gees started with a more folk rock, vocal harmony sound that was more along the lines of The Beatles. Then they entered the latter half of the 60s as a five-piece, producing psychedelic Baroque Pop.
• Ludwig van Beethoven's early period (particularly the years while he lived in Bonn) is both heavily influenced by Mozart and Haydn, and radically different to the later pieces such as the 5th and 6th Symphonies when he had developed his own style.
• Big & Rich: Before the band was founded, members Big Kenny and John Rich cut solo albums (which went unreleased until 2005). Although Big & Rich's music was silly, fun country-rock with some rap, Big Kenny's solo album was more indebted to synthpop and psychedelic rock, and John Rich's was largely slick commercial late-90s country-pop outside a few tracks like "She Brings the Lightning Down" that hinted at the lavishness of Big & Rich.
• Billy Joel is most famous for piano-based soft rock, though he has ventured into pretty much every genre at some point. The work of his that fits this trope is Attila, a Progressive Rock / Psychedelic Rock Concept Album about Attila the Hun performed on a drum kit and a heavily distorted organ. It is widely considered one of worst albums ever.
• Blind Willie McTell, known for his mastery of the 12-string guitar, recorded two songs with a 6-string in his first session and then never again. However, he was often backed by 6-string player Curly Weaver.
• blink-182's material before their commercial breakthrough, Enema of the State, notably sticks out from the rest of their discography. On top of having a rougher, significantly muffled mix, they're considerably more focused on raw song compositions than melodic ones. Several songs also feature recorded non-musical sounds used for comedic effect.
• Blur's debut album, Leisure, owes much more to Madchester and Shoegaze, which were all the rage at the time of its release. The non-album single that followed, "Popscene", signaled their foray into Britpop.
• Boogie Down Productions' 1987 debut album Criminal Minded is mostly Boastful Rap. KRS-ONE wasn't in "The Teacha" mode yet, so much of the album is him bragging about being better than other rappers.
• The Break Up's self-titled album was harder and more EBM-oriented, in contrast with their major-label breakout Synthesis, which is mainly gothic Synth-Pop / New Wave / darkwave.
• Justin Broadrick and Lee Dorian are known for Epic Rocking in their respective bands; ten minute songs are the norm for them. Both musicians first broke out into music by appearing on the first Napalm Death album, Scum, arguably best known for establishing world records in Miniscule Rocking.
• Garth Brooks' debut album has a more traditional country sound compared to the rock and pop-influenced style showcased in his subsequent works, even though "The Dance" remains among one of his most beloved songs. In particular, "Not Counting You" sounds like it could've been cut by nearly any guy in a cowboy hat. What makes this all the more unusual is that his first album had all of the same songwriters, musicians, and even producer who would appear on his later, career-defining albums.
• Luke Bryan's debut album I'll Stay Me is by far his most country-sounding. The production is more driven by fiddle and steel guitar, and the style bears an overall closer resemblance to Billy Currington's "Good Directions", which Bryan wrote just before his breakthrough. Most of his subsequent albums are dominated by a mix of melancholy, electric guitar-driven country-pop ballads such as "Do I" and "I Don't Want This Night to End" and harder, rock- and rap-influenced uptempos like "Country Girl (Shake It for Me)", "That's My Kind of Night", and "Kick the Dust Up".
• Tyler Bryant started off in his teens as a purely blues artist, with his first album, Born In Texas, featuring a Texas-style blues sound that is very different from the Hard Rock that he would later be known for. In fact, when he first made the switch from blues to rock, some of his earliest fans denounced him as a Sell-Out.
• Captain Beefheart fans who stumble across his first album, 1967's Safe as Milk, will be shocked to find that it's relatively normal, with very little of the weirdness that would appear in Trout Mask Replica and Lick My Decals Off, Baby. (Early Installment Lack-of-Weirdness?) Captain Beefheart's Magic Band actually started out as a solid blues/rock band in the tradition of The Yardbirds or The Rolling Stones in their early days. What's even crazier is that Captain Beefheart were a featured artist on American Bandstand when Safe as Milk was released AND Don Van Vliet took questions via phone from a "Bandstand" kid who actually seemed to be a proto-fan.
• CaptainSparklez' Fallen Kingdom series of songs begins with the self-titled "Fallen Kingdom", which is a cover of Coldplay's "Viva La Vida" with different lyrics. The rest of the series consists of original songs.
• CDR's 1999 debut was written and released before he had decided on a distinct sound. It's longer and more eclectic than much of his output, yet you'd be hard-pressed to draw a link between it and his later works.
• Celtic Woman's first concert focused much more on the solo artists, which makes sense— it was originally intended to be a one-off event at the Helix in Dublin, bringing together five of the biggest names in Irish music. The concert sparked a tour, Celtic Woman exploded onto the World Music scene, and by A New Journey the five artists— and the production team - had gelled into an organic, coherent whole. From A New Journey onward the performances were a pretty solid mix of duets/trios/group numbers and solo numbers, with each of the girls generally having one or two solo songs in the concert, and Celtic Woman had matured into its current form.
• Christmas With The Tabernacle Choir: The first few concerts are fairly spartan in setup and lack many of the elements that are introduced in later years. In addition the editing is more obvious and they have a rather different feel.
  • The Christmas story in Luke 2 is usually read up to verse 14 ("Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, goodwill toward men") which leads into "Angels From the Realms of Glory", but the one read by Angela Landsbury went up to verse 19 ("But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart") and then had a short narration before the final number.
• Kenny Chesney is another pretty extreme example. When he started out in the early-mid 90s, he sang in a very twangy voice, and had a very commercial "neotraditionalist" country sound akin to nearly any other young hunk in a cowboy hat. By the end of the decade, his voice started getting less nasal and his material became slick country-pop that also fit in with the time (interestingly, this transitory era produced two of his biggest hits in "How Forever Feels" and "The Good Stuff"). Starting with 2002's No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems, he finally shifted into his Signature Style: singing without the slightest hint of twang, and alternating between arena rock, Jimmy Buffett-esque beach country, and slow contemplative acoustic numbers. Much of his material since When the Sun Goes Down has also had an introspective bent regardless of tempo, and later albums have found him also downplaying the arena rock somewhat. Also, his first three albums were produced by Barry Beckett instead of longtime producer Buddy Cannon.
• Chevelle has always been an Alternative Metal band, but their first album featured a much closer sound to tool, and Pete's voice was quieter.
• Chicago's first few albums, specifically the frequent left-wing Author Tracts, can be this for relatively younger listeners who remember them for their Lighter and Softer 80's hits.
• Childish Gambino's early work focused on Boastful Raps with plenty of Narm. It wasn't until 2011's Camp that Gambino began finding his voice as a rapper. This trope is even more applicable for people who got into him through his 2013 album Because the Internet, which is a much more experimental Concept Album than Camp, which is more or less straightforward hip hop.
• Chimaira's first album featured a much rawer, lighter sound, leaning towards Nu Metal / Industrial Metal. This sound was largely dropped on their second album, in which they found their signature groove / death / metalcore hybrid sound.
• Chrome's first album, The Visitation, recorded before Helios Creed joined, lacks the wild guitar effects and production trickery of their later album.
• Kelly Clarkson's first album Thankful is quite different from her later albums, as it's considerably softer and more R&B influenced, only occasionally showcasing the hard rock influences that would permeate subsequent albums. Clarkson's voice is also different, sounding more like a Mariah Carey knock-off than the gruff Southern belle she became on Breakaway.
• Clutch's first LP, Transnational Speedway League is a gritty metal album with a few lyrical homages to southern life. While there are some of Neil Fallon's trademark spacy lyrics, the blues influence that is currently a hallmark of the band's music is almost nonexistant.
• Cocteau Twins: Their trademark Dream Pop sound didn't really emerge until their second full-length album, Head over Heels. Garlands, their debut album, has all the instrumentation in place but it hews much closer to Goth Rock than what would come later, to the point where they were often unfavorably compared to Siouxsie and the Banshees.
• Combichrist: Despite being known as an industrial band, their debut The Joy of Gunz is closer to hardcore techno. None of the songs have actual vocals, but most have spoken dialogue, taken from various sources or read by a computer voice, mixed in. While songs like these still made up half of their second album, Everybody Hates You, the style was completely abandoned from their third album onward.
• Coldplay are best known for songs based on pianos ("Clocks") or sonic landscapes ("Viva La Vida"), but their debut, Parachutes, is mostly filled with acoustic guitars.
• The Commodores: The five-man group from Tuskogee, Alabama, was virtually all-uptempo funk in their first two years. Then in 1976, they had lead singer Lionel Richie step to the microphone and belt out "Sweet Love," a ballad that was unlike anything previously released. A line was drawn between their early sound – which, truth be told, would always remain a part of their style— and the group that released some of pop music's biggest and best-known hits of the late 1970s and early 1980s ("Easy," "Three Times a Lady," "Sail On," "Still" and many others).
• Covenant's first couple of albums were darker and harder, closer to electro-industrial. They didn't take on the familiar Futurepop style until Europa, their third album.
• Cult of Luna's self-titled debut album wasn't different from their later sound by much, but was far more hardcore based. The quality improved on the following albums.

D-F

• Da Yoopers: The Michigan-based group, known mainly for their novelty songs about the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, are rife with weirdness on their first albums:
  • In terms of content, 1986's Yoopanese has two completely serious songs ("My Shoes" and "Critics Tune"), two songs with surreal science-fiction references ("Robot Girl" and "I Don't Wanna Glow"), and a parody song ("Road to Gwinn", a parody of Willie Nelson's "On the Road Again"). It is also their only album besides 1992's Yoopy Do Wah to have no guest musicians or sketch comedy interludes. Culture Shock still has surreal sci-fi themes on "Chiquito War", along with another song parody in "Rusty Chevrolet" (although that remains one of their signature songs), while both it and Camp Fever feature several traditional Finnish folk songs near the end.
  • Even their sound was different early on. On the first two albums, Lynn Bellmore (then under her maiden name Lynn Anderson, and not the same woman who sang "Rose Garden" (see above)) largely plays an analog synthesizer instead of more traditional keyboards. "Last Frontier", the opening track to Culture Shock, even has a drum machine! Original bassist Jim Pennell gets two turns on lead vocal, singing "Smeltin' USA" on Yoopanese and "Chicquito War" on Culture Shock. Pennell's short-lived replacement, Joe DeLongchamp, sang and wrote the title track to Camp Fever. Finally, most of the second halves of Culture Shock and Camp Fever, even beyond the folk song covers, rely on "folksy" instrumentation such as jugs, spoons, washboards, and gutbucket bass (interestingly, this includes the Signature Song "Second Week of Deer Camp" from the former). By Yoop It Up, their sound was almost fully established.
• Dead or Alive: Early material was guitar-oriented Post-Punk with some Goth Rock vibe. Starting with fifth single "Misty Circles" they adopted their New Wave Music / Synth-Pop sound they would become known for.
• The Dear Hunter: Act I: The Lake South, The River North is much shorter than all of the other albums in the group's overarching story - it has eight tracks and runs just shy of forty minutes, while most of the others have fifteen tracks and run upwards of seventy minutes ^ExceptionsThe Color Spectrum and Migrant both run shorter, but the former is largely a collection of songs from their EP series of the same name, and neither is not part of the story. Act III: Life and Death is the sole exception among the Acts, but it still has fourteen tracks and runs just under sixty minutes. In addition, it's largely told from the point of view of the main character's mother - the Boy himself does not become a viewpoint character until the second-to-last track.
• Deathspell Omega started out performing conventional Black Metal inspired by Darkthrone. On Si monumentum requires, circumspice, they started performing much a weirder, more technical and progressive form of music that was probably heavily influenced by Gorguts and 20th century classical composers,^note "Probably" because the band haven't given an interview since 2004, and in fact no one is even 100% certain who the band members are now and they haven't looked back since. The lyrics also count, as they became much deeper and more philosophical in the band's later era. Possibly something of an inversion of this trope, as their early music is weird in the context of their discography by not being weird.
• Deep Purple: If you know them primarily as the hard rock band who brought you heavy rock albums like Deep Purple in Rock, Machine Head and Made In Japan, then Deep Purple Mk. 1, with Rod Evans on vocals, will come as a surprise to you. Their keyboard-heavy Epic Rocking and penchant for bombastic covers made them sound a lot like an English Vanilla Fudge, while Evans' deep, soulful vocals are a sharp contrast to the shrieking, screaming Ian Gillan, who would come on board in mid-1969, ahead of In Rock. To top it off, their first record with Gillan, Concerto for Group and Orchestra, was a collaboration with an orchestra.
• Def Leppard's first two albums On Through the Night and High 'n' Dry have a much more straightforward heavy metal (for the time) sound. Not until Pyromania with a new guitarist and "Mutt" Lange on production duty did their signature melodic hard rock sound coalesce.
• Demon Hunter's first album featured heavy Nu Metal influence, and Ryan uses a much different harsh vocal style than he does on all albums succeeding it.
• Depeche Mode began life with Vince Clarke as their keyboardist and primary songwriter, and his contributions to the group's first album, Speak & Spell, are appropriately upbeat and positive. After he left, the band's music rapidly became much Darker and Edgier. This is perhaps one of the better known examples of this trope, as "Just Can't Get Enough" remains one of their best known songs even as it bears little resemblance to the style Depeche Mode is best known for.
• Descendents' first single, "Ride the Wild / Hectic World". As opposed to the melodic Hardcore Punk they'd become known for, the two featured songs were sort of a mix of Power Pop and New Wave, prominently featuring a Surf Rock-influenced guitar-playing style with no distortion. In addition, Milo Aukerman hadn't joined the band yet, so members Frank Navetta and Tony Lombardo sang one song each - neither Frank nor Tony considered themselves singers, so they basically recorded and self-released the single as a tool to recruit a full time vocalist. The songs were later included on the compilations Bonus Fat and Two Things at Once, and their contrast with the rest of the compilations' material can be sort of jarring. The songs would be later re-recorded with Aukerman and the band's current style for their 2021 album 9th & Walnut.
• Devo started out as a punk rock band who did crazy things like wear diapers onstage (which is this page's image) before getting into their famous yellow suits and then switching to new wave and gaining the Energy Domes with Freedom of Choice. Some songs were performed faster at first, and oddly enough, a bootleg recording of a 1978 concert has Jerry's yell of "Satis... FACTIIIIIIIIIION!" in the "Satisfaction" cover simplified to just "SATIS-FACTION!"
  • Some of the tracks from this era collected on the Hardcore Devo compilations are more profane than anything on their studio albums.
• Die Ärzte were marketed as a teeny boyband type of act in the early 1980s (something which they themselves never fully bought into and soon mercilessly lampshaded) and while their "bad boy" image dates to their very first days (their first ever LP angered the Moral Guardians so much it spent years being banned for under 18 years olds), their humor and stage antics only developed into a beloved part of their routines much later into their career. The predecessors of Rodrigo Gonzalez at the bass also got in way fewer words edgewise (despite Sahnie's protestations that the band "needed his face" shortly before being kicked out)
• Ronnie James Dio is best known for his work with Rainbow, Black Sabbath and Dio, but he initially started out in the late 1950s... as a teeny-bopper doo-wop musician. His work with Ronnie and The Red Caps and Ronnie Dio and The Prophets is vastly different from anything he would spend the majority of his career on, with the former band cranking out this Bobby Darin-esque number from 1960. Ronnie and the Prophets, on the other hand, were dangerously close to Lou Christie territory with this particular song from 1967. Even Dio's pre-Rainbow band The Elves (and later, Elf) was more psychedelic hard rock than heavy metal, as evidenced by this cover of The Faces' "Stay With Me".
• The Divine Comedy have disowned their first album, Fanfare for the Comic Muse, and it's not hard to see why. It was a ramshackle jangle-pop album with no trace of the group's signature orchestration, recorded by a lineup that fell apart soon afterwards.
• Dixie Chicks' first three albums were straight-up bluegrass, with Laura Lynch and Robin Lynn Macy alternating on lead vocals on the first two, and just Lynch on the third after Macy quit. After Lynch was replaced by their more famous lead singer Natalie Maines, the band shifted to a more mainstream blend of country-pop with bluegrass influences.
• DJ Earworm: "United State of Pop 2007", the first installment of the "United State of Pop" series, is musically, but not lyrically cohesive. This contrasts with future mashups, where rearranging the component songs' lyrics to write an entire new song is a defining trait of his style.
• If the work they released as MINX is included, then it is very weird to see and hear one of the darkest groups in the Korean Pop Music industry, known for their Goth image and prominent rock and electronic music influences, having started out doing straightforward bubblegum pop before rebranding as Dreamcatcher.
• Dream Theater's first album, When Dream and Day Unite, is the only album by them to feature Charlie Dominci as the lead vocalist. The album is the most metal-oriented of any of their releases (even more than Awake or Train of Thought), being a Power Metal album that is informed by prog rock but owes far more to Fates Warning and Crimson Glory than to Yes. The songs are shorter and less elaborate (none reach the nine minute mark and several are under five minutes), John Myung is much more active in the bass, and John Petrucci plays a lot more riffs and fewer solos. Their next album, Images and Words, brought a new singer in James LaBrie and a more accessible sound that is as much Progressive Rock as metal and ultimately defined them as a band.
• Before joining Eiffel 65, vocalist Jeffrey Jey was in a group called Bliss Team which had a different-sounding techno, most of their discography was composed of covers of popular rock songs, and not even a single song of the band had Jeffrey's trademarked robotic-sounding voice.
  • By the way it's interesting to know how his normal voice sounded like. It sounds more baritone than his later songs.
• Eisenfunk: The Industrial/EBM band's self-titled first album was nothing special compared to other bands. The only thing that distinguished them from others was the heavy use of electronic music and sampling. In their next album, 8-Bit, they kept the electronic music but overhauled everything else, becoming much Lighter and Softer (and humorous) and incorporating numerous references to geekdom. It was these changes that made them well known. Their third album, Pentafunk stayed the course (for most part), leaving Eisenfunk as the odd ball album.
• Eminem's first album Infinite had more of a low-key feel and sounded more like the other hip-hop artists of the time that inspired him, and even contained less profanity. It wasn't until Slim Shady EP and The Slim Shady LP that Eminem established his more "unique" style and his eponymous psychotic alter-ego, as well as more story elements in his tracks.
  • Slim Shady EP and The Slim Shady LP both have him using a high-pitched voice that he mostly dropped after the albums, with a lot more style elements drawn from his Battle Rapping writing. Slim also undergoes some changes in concept — he's presented in these albums as a parody of Gangsta Rap tropes, with his poverty, friendlessness, suicidality and the uselessness of his crimes in the focus. Starting with The Marshall Mathers LP, Slim becomes a more Campy horror-movie themed Serial Killer character, gains his signature association with a Hockey Mask and Chainsaw, and starts getting obsessed with celebrities, all of which remain consistent throughout the entire rest of Eminem's discography.
• Evanescence had an early demo EP of slow, almost dirge-like music with lots of quiet pianos and a violin. They quickly evolved into a rock band, but there's a large catalog of demos and unreleased songs that occasionally veer into other genres, and the loud guitars weren't prevalent until the release of Fallen.
• Sara Evans' debut album Three Chords and the Truth in 1997 was far more traditional than everything that came afterward. It even had covers of Patsy Cline, Buck Owens, and Bill Anderson. Her second album, despite having her Breakthrough Hit in the lush pop ballad "No Place That Far", also had some more twangy traditional sounding material such as "Cryin' Game", and vocal contributions from George Jones and Alison Krauss. From Born to Fly onward, she had fully established her more pop-sounding style of country.
• Fear Factory initially sounded nothing like they are known for. Their early material up to the first album, Soul of a New Machine, had a much rawer sound and their music featured a strong death metal/grindcore influence. Compare this with alequent releases; if you're unfamiliar with the band, you might be shocked by the difference.
• Flaming Lips' first EP was heavily psychedelic-influenced punk rock, with very low-pitched monotone vocals (courtesy of Wayne Coyne's brother Mark — Mark left the group shortly after the EP's release, so Wayne got promoted from guitarist to lead singer). While psychedelia has pretty much always been a part of their sound, the first EP is barely recognizable as the same band. Even after switching singers, it sort of took a while for their sound to evolve — for instance, Wayne Coyne took a few albums to start using the higher-pitched vocal style he's now known for.
• Before Fleetwood Mac had their most popular lineup of Mick Fleetwood, John McVie, Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham and of course, Stevie Nicks, Fleetwood Mac alternated with a more blues-rock, psychedelic sound that sounded more like Jefferson Airplane or The Grateful Dead than the sophisticated pop-rock sound they were known for later.
• Florence + the Machine's "Kiss with a Fist" is more rock-esque than the rest of Lungs, due to being an earlier recording. Even earlier tracks that have more indie rock vibes.
• The Foo Fighters' self-titled debut album was made solely by Dave Grohl, as a way to try to cope with Kurt Cobain's then-recent death, so most of its songs, particularly "I'll Stick Around", sound a lot more like Nirvana than future Foo Fighters songs would.
• Radney Foster: As half of Foster & Lloyd in The '80s, he pursued a slick country-rock sound with a bit of an edge (as exemplified on "Crazy Over You"). As a solo artist from The '90s onward, his sound became softer and twangier, and his lyrics more thoughtful and introspective (such as his biggest solo hit, "Nobody Wins").
• Robin Fox: The One-Hit Wonder's early works, such as "Seduction", recorded in 1999 but not released until 2004, were nothing like the trance of I See Stars, consisting mainly of funky house with a touch of breakbeat.
• Glenn Frey was a Michigan teen in the mid-'60s playing with a band called the Mushrooms, faking an English accent in their song "Such a Lovely Child". Meanwhile, in Texas, Don Henley was lead singer and drummer for Felicity, his voice instantly recognizable in songs like "Hurtin'". Either way, it's a far cry from what they'd put out as members/creative leaders of Eagles.
• Front 242 are best known as the Trope Namers of the Electronic Body Music subgenre, however, their debut album Geography was primarily experimental electro-industrial in the vein of Skinny Puppy, with hints of coldwave.
• The Frozen Autumn's first album, Pale Awakening, consisted mostly of ballads, rather than their trademark driving mid-uptempo darkwave style.
• The Future Sound of London's 1992 debut album, Accelerator, showcased mainly New Beat and progressive house, rather than the experimental ambient techno that became their signature style starting with the follow-up, ISDN.

G-J

• Kenny G started out as a smooth jazz saxophonist as he primarily played the tenor saxophone while occasionally playing the alto and soprano saxophones as well as the flute and lyricon as his first three albums strongly suggest. But when he released his breakthrough album Duotones thanks in large part to his top 10 hit "Songbird," he would eventually become one of adult contemporary's biggest stars as he shifted his preference towards the soprano saxophone while occasionally playing the alto and tenor saxophones on some songs afterward.
• Gaither Vocal Band: Today, the band is primarily known as the face of gospel impresario Bill Gaither's Homecoming tours, which are strongly southern gospel oriented. The band itself has a strange history. They were formed because of Gaither's love of southern gospel quartet music, but their first album contained only a few songs one might classify as "southern gospel". By the mid-80's, there was practically no southern influence on the group's albums at all (though they held to the four-part structure). By the early 90's, they could easily be thought of as adult contemporary. Then came Homecoming, intended to be the band's last album, wherein Gaither did what he always wanted to do; gathered a number of his southern gospel heroes in one room to record a song together. After that he re-invented the group as a southern gospel quartet, and hasn't looked back since. True, their sound is still very progressive for southern gospel, and Gaither claims that he doesn't limit the sound of the group to a single genre, but he's not fooling anyone; the GVB is a southern gospel quartet (and as of 2009, a quintet).
• Genesis:
  • The first album, From Genesis to Revelation, featured shorter, more straightforward songs far closer to baroque pop and art rock than their well-known brand of progressive rock. Their second album, Trespass', though far more progressive, was still slower and more folk-based. Nursery Cryme was their first album to truly show their talent at making lively and complex progressive rock.
  • The entirety of the prog rock Peter Gabriel era can be this for those who discovered the band during their more commercially successful and longer-lasting "pop" era, with Phil Collins on lead vocals. Listen to anything from Selling England by the Pound and then listen to Invisible Touch — yep, they're the same band, hard as it is to believe (albeit with two members missing). Worth noting that they never totally abandoned their prog rock roots, however, as every Collins-era album features at least one track that hearkens back to their progressive sound.
• GFOTY (Girlfriend of the Year), one of the bigger names of the online PC Music label, has a distinctly wild, deconstructionist, and semi-parodic sound, based on taking pop music sensibilities and dialing their most loud, experimental, and hedonistic traits up to eleven. Her debut single, "Bobby", however, is a rather straightforward pop ballad with an unusual amount of sincerity from her, though it didn't take her too long afterwards to develop her signature Mind Screw-y and post-ironic style.
• Vince Gill: As lead singer of Pure Prairie League in the late 70s-early 80s, he was somewhat stuffy voiced, and performing saxophone-drenched soft rock and Adult Contemporary. During the mid-late 80s as a solo artist on RCA Records, his Country Music material was very keyboard driven and had a lot of reverb. By The '90s, upon moving to MCA Nashville, he hit on his signature style of silky-voiced country ballads with strong bluegrass influences, and his fluid understated guitar playing was pushed to the forefront.
• The Go-Go's: Another band that sounded a hell of a lot more "punk" at the beginning of their career. They who got their start in punk clubs before significantly turning up the pop quotient and transforming themselves into more of a '60s beat combo-type band.
• Goldfrapp are constantly changing styles, so those more acquainted with the electro/dance of Black Cherry, Supernature and Head First will probably be quite surprised at Felt Mountain, their first album, which featured incredibly trippy downtempo and about as far from dance as it gets.
• Selena Gomez mentioned that when making her first album as "Selena Gomez And The Scene", Kiss + Tell, she hadn't yet decided on a style, so she imitated all of her favorite female singers. The album explores pop-rock, pop-punk, new wave, electro-dance and hip-hop styles in a way she wouldn't for the rest of her career. It was only when the synth-electro-dance-styled "Naturally", her personal favorite, became a Top 10 hit, that the style for her next two albums would be decided on.
• Delta Goodrem's first single ("I Don't Care") and the first two videos she recorded were decidedly pop to take advantage of the trend of the time. It was 2001 and she was finding her feet, but contrast incredibly with her Innocent Eyes and Mistaken Identity albums, which are singer/songwriter and extremely autobiographical.
• Goo Goo Dolls started off with bassist Robby Takac as the lead vocalist. The musical style matched the rougher vocals, and was very indebted to the punky college-rock style of their biggest influence, The Replacements. John Rzeznik didn't sing on any tracks until the third album, Hold Me Up, and didn't really take over as the lead singer until the sixth album, Dizzy Up the Girl, which still featured a few tracks sung by Takac, and harder tracks sung by Rzeznik. Fans who bought the album for "Iris" were probably a bit surprised, but wouldn't even have recognized the band on their self-titled debut album. Fans who started with Let Love In would be even more surprised by their early works.
• Gorguts' first two albums are solid, but relatively typical, Death Metal. Their third album, Obscura, was so weird that it took them five years to even find a record label interested in recording it. A large part of this is because the band essentially abandoned traditional Western conceptions of melody, choosing instead Eastern music and 20th-century Classical composers such as Dmitri Shostakovich as musical inspirations. It also uses a bunch of weird song structures and time signatures, resulting in an incredibly disorienting and often frightening sound for first-time listeners. Nonetheless, it established the core elements of their Signature Style found on all their subsequent releases, and today it is a seminal Technical Death Metal album. (So chalk up another Early Installment Lack-of-Weirdness entry.)
• Green Day's first two albums were recorded at indie label Lookout! Records, and feature a noticeable lack of polish than their later albums. 39/Smooth also featured their original drummer John Kiffmeyer rather than Tré Cool, who'd join Billie and Mike on Kerplunk when Kiffmeyer left the band to go to college. They also feature a more straight Punk sound than they're usually known for.
• Hunter Hayes was originally a Cajun musician who had been playing professionally since age 4 and cut his first album at 8. His major-label debut "Storm Warning" was a punchy country-rock song, but the rest of his career has been defined by lightweight teen pop-styled country as exemplified by "Wanted" only one single later.
• Walker Hayes (no relation) started out with a country rock sound comparable to Eric Paslay or Frankie Ballard, with whom he shared producer Marshall Altman. This sound was exemplified on his debut single "Pants". After a six year hiatus, he returned in 2017 with a style clearly influenced by Sam Hunt, with wordy songs that consist mostly of half-sing/half-talking over an electronic beat, as exemplified by Hayes's first major hit "You Broke Up with Me" and especially his 2021 comeback hit "Fancy Like". (This is likely due to a second producer overlap, as the corresponding album was produced by Hunt's producer Shane McAnally.)
• The Hellacopters were clearly rawer and angrier on their first two albums Supershitty to the Max! and Payin' the Dues, garage punk albums with a clear The Stooges and MC5 influence. In Grande Rock onwards, vocalist Nicke Andersson shifted to a more melodic singing style, with the band transitioning from pure garage rockers to a garage-influenced, yet melodic hard rock band.
• Faith Hill originally recorded mainstream female-oriented country music in The '90s, with songs that could just as easily have been cut by Reba McEntire, Trisha Yearwood, or any other leading lady of the time. But starting with her duet with Tim McGraw on "It's Your Love" in 1997, she soon pushed to a more lushly produced, bombastic, pop style, culminating in her crossover smash "Breathe" in 1999-2000.
• Faith No More's earliest material had a sound more oriented towards post-punk, back when Chuck Mosely was the vocalist. By their third studio album The Real Thing (also their first one with Mike Patton), all the post-punk elements were shed.
  • The band had roots in an even more heavily Post-Punk inspired group called Faith No Man, which featured the same rhythm section of Bill Gould and Mike Bordin, but with keyboardist Wade Worthington and vocalist / guitarist Mike Morris filling out the lineup - contemporary reviews of their only single "Quiet In Heaven / Song of Freedom" frequently compared them to Killing Joke and Public Image Ltd., perhaps especially because of Morris' harsh guitar playing style and Fake Brit singing.
• Hot Hot Heat started out with a much heavier, Post-Hardcore / "synthpunk" sound, original vocalist Matthew Marnik mainly did a lot of screaming, and part of their signature style was that rather than have a lead guitarist, they had Steve Bays play lead synthesizer. After adding guitarist Dante DeCaro and having Bays take over on vocals (as well as synthesizer), they started playing the catchy New Wave Music and Dance-Punk they're known for now. Scenes One Through Thirteen, a compilation of their earliest material, hardly sounds like the same band as their other releases.
• The Human League were one of several bands who pioneered dark Synth-Pop, recording two very dark albums, Reproduction and Travelogue. A few years later, they dropped two of their original members, hired two female vocalists and gradually began turning into a pop-disco band. They were eventually ridiculed for another change in sound, this time to Minneapolis-inspire synth-funk, and have begun re-embracing their old style.
• Hunters And Collectors took their name from a Can song, but you wouldn't know it from the "Oz Rock" or "Pub Rock" sound they cultivated from Human Frailty onwards. However, in their early years they released two albums and two EPs that reveled in the sound of Krautrock with a bit of post-punk thrown in. Their third album The Jaws of Life takes those influences and applies them to traditional song structures and is considered by some to be their best, but their mid 80s to early 90s work garnered more acclaim and especially more sales.
• Ice Nine Kills are a metalcore band that started out as a ska-punk band; tellingly, they no longer keep their first album on streaming platforms. They're known for their horror themed lyrics and image, but while their lyrics on all their metalcore material are typically dark, they didn't have any songs directly themed around existing horror works until the album Every Trick In The Book: Even then, as the title implies, the songs were inspired by books rather than movies, and not always ones from the horror genre - source material ranged from Dracula to The Diary of a Young Girl, though the lyrics tended to focus on the darker or more macabre themes present in the books.
• ill niño has always been a metal band about evolution, but if you're familiar with their discography's second half, their first few albums will sound absolutely jarring. Seriously, compare "All the Right Words" to "La Epidemia". It's like hearing Linkin Park turn into All Shall Perish. The difference is absolutely staggering.
• Imagination Movers: The original 2003 incarnation certainly was a lot... stranger.
• Imagine Dragons had female backup singers on their early EPs, while today the band consists only of male musicians.
• In This Moment: Comparing their older music videos and their future ones is especially jarring. Compare "The Promise" from 2010 and "Beautiful Tragedy" from 2011 to 2014's "Big Bad Wolf" and "Sick Like Me". Their sound and especially music videos make them seem like two different bands. Their older videos were far less theatric and their songs more subdued sounding.
• Information Society's obscure Insoc EP, released in 1983, had an analog techno/industrial-pop vibe more reminiscent of Kraftwerk or The Human League's aforementioned Mk. 1 material than their relatively mainstream freestyle/electropop from later on.
• Insane Clown Posse are best known (at least by those not in their hatedom) for their Horrorcore stylings and elaborate "Dark Carnival" mythology. Almost all of this is missing from the first "Joker's Card", Carnival of Carnage, which is for the most part straight-up gangsta rap more in line with the group's original incarnation as the Inner City Posse, which is even more surprisingly different from their current style. The only real similarity between tracks like "Life At Risk" and their recent songs are the bleak picture sometimes painted by the lyrics. As the Inner City Posse (named after their actual street gang at the time), they didn't even wear their signature paint, and had a third rapper in the mix: Shaggy 2 Dope's brother, known as John Kickjazz (which made the "Posse" thing make a lot more sense). Their "Dark Carnival" style is a result of the group wanting to try something new after realizing that every other rapper out there was doing gangsta rap, making it hard for ICP to distinguish themselves.
• Iron Maiden, under original vocalist Paul Di'Anno, had a patently punk vibe that lasted for the two original albums. Then (in order from each album following the second), guitarist Adrian Smith, vocalist Bruce Dickinson and drummer Nicko McBrain joined the band and they started showing their more familiar sound. If one compares the songs from the album The Final Frontier with Killers or The Number of the Beast, one might think of three completely different bands (and that's not counting the period when Blaze Bayley was the singer).
• Janet Jackson's first two albums, released in 1982 and 1984, were generic 80's pop-R&B riding on the same formula as big brother Michael's classic album Off the Wall, causing Janet to be written off as just another Jackson riding Michael's coattails. Her desire to get away from her family is what led to her 1986 breakthrough album Control.
• Michael Jackson:
  • Michael's first solo album was 1972's Got to Be There, which was released when he was only 13 years old and best known for being the lead singer of The Jackson 5. It kicks off with a more-than-respectable cover of "Ain't No Sunshine," but from that point forward is very ballad-heavy. Even the more well-known stuff ("Rockin' Robin" and the title song) don't hint at any aspect of the post-disco dance pop that defined the style of his '80s albums. His next three albums are more of the same, and even Off the Wall was far more disco/quiet storm than one might expect from his later work, without any rock crossovers or anthemic ballads about saving the world.
  • For that matter, Michael's first chart-topping single, "Ben," sticks out like a sore thumb compared to what followed — not just because of his age (he was 14 when he recorded it), but because it's a movie tie-in about a boy and his violently-protective pet rat. This is probably why the different versions of his Number Ones compilation album either omit the song or use a later live recording from when Michael was an adult.
• Japan's first album Adolescent Sex is camp glam rock with frequent use of the words "dancing" and "babe" and vocals delivered in quite a high range. Japan would become famous for melancholic New Romantic music with baritone vocals and oriental influences. So anyone who was into the later stuff picking up their first album out of curiosity without reading about it first would have been shocked. Their second album, Obscure Alternatives is very experimental and has Sylvian singing in both his older falsetto style and his later baritone style, with a mix of both the glam rock songs and the Post-Punk/new romantic style they would evolve into. Unsurprisingly, David Sylvian wishes Adolescent Sex never existed and that Obscure Alternatives should have been their first album, which is quite a brave statement considering many fans of the band discredit the first two albums entirely and start with their third Quiet Life, which sounds like the band's signature style coming into place but not being quite there yet. Possibly because of this dramatic change in style, the compilation Assemblage was released at the height of their popularity in 1981. It features some of their early work and but also most of their later work that didn't appear on albums.
• For decades, Jean-Michel Jarre pretended that he had had no releases prior to his break-through album Oxygène. Anything he had made before 1976, be it as himself, be it under various guises, was never re-released until Francis Dreyfus released the 1973 soundtrack to Les Granges Brûlées on CD, which he owned the rights to, to cash in on the fans who were paying ridiculous sums for Jarre's early works. It wasn't until the 2010s that Jarre started putting pre-Oxygène material such as the extremely rare "La Cage"/"Erosmachine" single from 1971 on compilations.
  If you listen to these tracks on compilations such as Essentials & Rarities (which re-used the cover of the famous Rarities bootleg, which in turn re-used the "La Cage"/"Erosmachine" cover) or Planet Jarre, or if you even look up something on YouTube that Jarre has yet to re-release, you'll see why: These pieces of music are all somewhere between very experimental and quite cheesy, a far cry from the lush, warm, organic sounds of Oxygène and Équinoxe that made Jarre famous. Granted, the same goes for everything Jarre made after these two albums as well, but it's easy to see how his early music can be embarrassing.
• Jethro Tull: Their first album, This Was, mostly sounds like a Cream rip-off. This began to change with their second album, Stand Up, when original guitarist Mick Abrahams left, and front-man Ian Anderson started to monopolize the band's song-writing duties.
• Elton John's first album, Empty Sky, had many psychedelic overtones and Purple Prose lyrics (courtesy of his lyricist Bernie Taupin). The album was relatively lo-fi (on four-track tape) and featured session musicians. Elton's use of session musicians continued until 1972, along with the heavy use of dramatic orchestral accompaniment. The earlier albums were very much in the "singer-songwriter" mold, and had considerably less of a rock feel or band sound as he'd be known for, as he was on a limited budget and his songs contained strict arrangements to the note to conserve money and time. By 1972, Elton decided to use his live backing band (Davey Johnstone on guitar, Dee Murray on bass, and Nigel Olsson on drums) full-time, recorded in France instead of England, and developed more of a rock feel than previously, making less blatant use of orchestration (though he still used it). The resulting release, Honky Château, featuring the hit "Rocket Man", established the sound he'd be known for, and helped make Elton a superstar.
• Jamey Johnson's first major-label album, 2006's The Dollar, was by far his most mainstream. He had only a short, neatly trimmed beard; his delivery was more upbeat; and the sound was slick yet twangy, making it more akin to the early-90s "neotraditionalist" boom. After a management change caused the album to lose promotion, Johnson's life spiraled out of control, even though a few other artists had cut his songs. He got cleaned up, then grew his hair out much longer, and took on a more "outlaw" image, recording somewhat darker albums that are widely praised for recapturing the spirit of Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings. The cute, heartwarming When You Coming Home, Dad? story of "The Dollar" is certainly a far cry from him singing about "cocaine and a whore" on "High Cost of Living" (most certainly an autobiographical cut) only one album later, or even the moody and nostalgic "In Color", his only big hit. The Dollar also stands out as his only album not to use the Idiosyncratic Album Theming of the word "song" being in all of his album titles.
• Journey was a jazz-based progressive supergroup with a hint of a commercial touch, but mostly with an anti-pop attitude. The first album had relics of Santana (understandable since the guitarist Neil Schon and singer Gregg Rolie were members of Santana's band before starting Journey), the second was more Zeppelin-ish, and the third had influences from (and on) Rush.
• Joy Division's first EP and their even earlier output as Warsaw were much closer to their punk roots than their studio albums. Of particular note is Ian Curtis's vocals, which, while firmly in the baritone range, sounded thinner and less refined than the cold crooning that he was known for later.
• Judas Priest's Rocka Rolla is a fairly ordinary and unambitious Hard Rock record, without any of the soaring vocals or sinister aesthetics or blistering speed of their later work.
  • Also, Rob Halford (and, by extension, the rest of the band) wouldn't adopt the now-iconic and highly-influential "leathers and studs" look until 1978, around the release of Killing Machine/Hell Bent For Leather, the band's fifth album.
• Cledus T. Judd has this in spades. His first release, "Indian In-Laws", doesn't match the source material (Tim McGraw's "Indian Outlaw") as closely as his later parodies do, with many notable music variations from the latter. Its B-side was a rap cover of John Anderson's "Swingin'", something that he never did again. The first two albums had parodies of songs significantly older than the album's release date (for instance, his first in 1994 parodied "Hotel California" and "We Are the World" — which also happen to be among his only non-country parodies — and the second parodied "Jackson", "The Devil Went Down to Georgia", and "Cadillac Style"). From 1998's Did I Shave My Back for This? onward, he mostly limited himself to country songs within a year or two of the album's release date. His appearance and sound are also vastly different: the first three albums have a more Stylistic Suck approach with off-key vocals and the occasional intentionally flubbed note or Musical Gag, while around Juddmental (his last for Razor & Tie before moving to Monument), he began singing more normally and recreating the songs more accurately. He also changed his appearance at this point, going from an obese redneck to a more polished look with bleach-blond hair. Juddmental was also the last album where he referred to himself as "Cledus T. Judd (No Relation)", a reference to The Judds.

K-L

• Karma To Burn are primarily an instrumental stoner metal band, who usually name their songs after numbers based on the order they were written in. Their self-titled debut had Jay Jarosz singing lead on every track, and the songs had conventional titles. This was partly down to Executive Meddling, as the first label they signed to insisted they hire a full-time singer before they enter the studio. Since then, they've made primarily instrumental albums, and only their occasional songs with guest vocalists break from their usual numbered song titles.
• Toby Keith is known for his macho, swaggering, patriotic style. But his albums on Mercury Records in The '90s are dominated by ballads and midtempos about a relationship, such as "Who's That Man", "Me Too", "Does That Blue Moon Ever Shine on You", or "We Were in Love". Debut single "Should've Been a Cowboy", despite being one of his signature songs, also stands out for its romantic cowboy imagery that he never used again (he's done a few more "cowboy" songs since, most notably "Beer for My Horses", but they were far from romantic). In addition, all of his Mercury albums except for 1997's Dream Walkin' (his last for that label) have very dated sounding production with lots of electric piano and reverb, due to being produced by Nelson Larkin instead of James Stroud or Keith himself. The swagger, though occasionally present as early as "A Little Less Talk and a Lot More Action", didn't really come in full force until he switched from Mercury to DreamWorks Records at the Turn of the Millennium and released the in-your-face "How Do You Like Me Now?!". Despite containing this song and the equally in-your-face Country Rap "I Wanna Talk About Me", his first two DreamWorks albums still had some older-style ballads on them such as "You Shouldn't Kiss Me Like This" and "My List". The Patriotic Fervor didn't show up at all until his post-9/11 song "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)", the lead single to his third DreamWorks album.
• KISS' second studio album, Hotter Than Hell (1974), never became a huge hit with anyone other than die-hard Kiss fans, even in the wake of their later mega-stardom, and it's not hard to understand why: the record hardly fits the Kiss stereotype at all. Although the band already had their "kabuki/dungeon porn" look by then (as opposed to their original incarnation of Wicked Lester, where they were simply in street clothes and plain whiteface), only about two or three of the songs were similar to "Rock and Roll All Nite" or other classic Kiss hits. "Parasite" was more of a "stoner metal" song (seriously, you can just picture Beavis and Butt-Head rocking out to it, especially the Anthrax cover version), while "Goin' Blind" has a very low-key, almost '90s alternative sound to it. Quite a few of these songs were written by guitarist Ace Frehley, who had much less of a "pop" sensibility than the other band members.
• KMFDM's second (and breakout) album, What Do You Know Deutschland, had more of a proto-EBM or industrial electro type sound, similar to Microchip League, early Ministry, and Nine Inch Nails' first album, rather than their signature Industrial Metal style. Their obscure first album, Opium, was more experimental and thus even weirder. It took a few weird installments for KMFDM to find their sound, with three more albums between "Deutschland" and "Naive" where they really started flirting with industrial metal, even though much of the album still had kind of a dance vibe to it. They were releasing albums for almost a decade before finally doing a full-on industrial metal album with "Angst" (and even that had a couple of dance songs on it).
  • Their third album UAIOE is unique for sort of being a Genre Mashup of industrial dance and dub reggae - several songs incorporate reggae rhythms and / or "toasting" style vocals by Morgan Adjei. Morgan never appeared on a KMFDM album again, and the reggae influences seemed to disappear with him.
• Korn:
  • Listen to Korn's self-titled debut album. Then listen to every single other one they made. Sure, it's all Nu Metal, but none of their later work sounds as angry and raw as their first album, which sounds almost like if the groovy bass-driven funk of Primus and sludgy misanthropic self-hatred of Buzzov•en fused together.
  • Furthermore, there are some noticeable Progressive Metal influences on their first three albums, through the inclusion of Throw It In! jamming, multiple riffs and tempo-shifting in songs, elements which gradually disappeared and were simplified afterwards.
• Kraftwerk started as a fairly conventional Krautrock band, with guitar, drums, bass and flute, even releasing three albums (Kraftwerk, Kraftwerk 2 and Ralf & Florian). In 1973, the band bosses Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider-Esleben fired their guitarist Michael Rother and their drummer Klaus Dinger due to their constant arguing, and so they were down to synthesizers plus Florian's flutes. As a replacement drummer, they hired the percussionist Wolfgang Flür, but since neither he nor Kraftwerk had a drum kit, they built an electronic one, thus becoming the world's first mostly and later fully electronic band. Autobahn, recorded in 1973 and released in early 1974, was so revolutionary for not only the music scene, but also Kraftwerk themselves, that they refused to re-release their KrautRock albums, which therefore have never become available on CD, and still pretend these albums were never made in order not to taint their reputation as the Synth-Pop pioneers.
• Lady Antebellum didn't have the big, grandiose, orchestral sound (e.g. "Need You Now") that much on their first album. They instead had a bit more of a rock edge, as evidenced on "Love Don't Live Here" and especially "Lookin' for a Good Time". Also, "Love Don't Live Here" stands out as being one of their only singles to be sung entirely by Charles Kelley, while most of their other songs since have been duets between him and Hillary Scott.
• Lady Gaga: If you met Lady Gaga from "Bad Romance" onward, listening to The Fame will be weird, as it's mostly standard electropop with a bit of Genre Roulette (including two piano ballads, a pop-rock song, and even a rap song) that mostly lacked the Darker and Edgier shock-rock/pop elements from the newer tunes (except maybe "Paparazzi").
  • Even more jarring is her pre-Gaga work as the namesake of the Stefani Germanotta Band. Their one EP, Red and Blue, features mostly (as phrased by Gagapedia) "female-vocal ballads with a glam rock edge," very similar in style to her acoustic versions of "Poker Face" and "Paparazzi". Though the title track is more in the vein of No Doubt than anything else.
• Laserdance's early singles, including their self-titled debut, had a more traditional Italo/post-disco Hi-NRG sound. It was only starting with their 1987 full-length album Future Generation that they exhibited their signature "spacesynth" style.
• Although The Lemonheads spent most of their career as a Power Pop band, with Evan Dando as the only consistent member - they started out as a Punk Rock band, and Dando only sang half of their songs; vocals and songwriting were split evenly with Ben Deily, who left the band after their first three albums to concentrate on his education.
• Huey Lewis and the News didn't hit mainstream success until their New Sound Album Sports, their music before then having a variety of new wave, jazz, and funk influences. This was famously lampshaded in the film adaptation of American Psycho, where Patrick Bateman delivers a monologue about the band's career trajectory before murdering Paul with an ax.
  Patrick: Do you like Huey Lewis & The News? Their early work was a little too new-wave for my taste, but when Sports came out in '83, I think they really came into their own, both commercially and artistically. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost.
• Limp Bizkit's debut album Three Dollar Bill, Y'all$ featured hints of psychedelia experimentations, as well as a 16-minute long Post-Rock closer, of all things.
• Linkin Park, in their Hybrid Theory EP era circa 1998-99, had a fairly creepy and somber sound with somewhat less conventional song structures than their first two albums.
• Little Big Town's Self-Titled Album in 2002 was a lot more slick and polished, making them sound more like a generic country vocal group than the earthy sound they had on subsequent albums. Also, despite the group's reputation as a Vocal Tag Team, both of the singles on the debut album were sung by Kimberly Schlapman (then Kimberly Roads) and Philip Sweet. In comparison, their work on the defunct Equity Music Group was more varied (to the point that their Breakthrough Hit "Boondocks" has all four members singing at various points, along with some uses of counterpoint and polyphony). The Capitol Records albums are largely favored toward songs sung by Karen Fairchild (nearly every single since "Little White Church") or Jimi Westbrook, with Sweet and Schlapman usually getting only one song if at all and almost no shared vocals (The Breaker is their first album where none of the songs have more than one member sing lead).
• Lonestar was radically different on their first two albums. Besides the fact that John Rich (who would later become famous as one-half of Big & Rich) sang lead a few times on said albums, their debut has honky-tonk and country-rock influences not far removed from Brooks & Dunn or Shenandoah, two acts with whom they shared Record Producer Don Cook. The second, 1998's Crazy Nights, is more breezy and somewhat Eagles influenced soft-rock. From 1999's Lonely Grill (the first album without Rich) onward, they switched to producer Dann Huff and dove headfirst into slick country-pop that only got more bombastic and theatrical over time, while Rich's departure left Richie McDonald as the sole lead vocalist. They also became a lot Lighter and Softer, with more songs about family, domestic bliss, and love. It's just hard to believe that their first #1 was the edgy, humorous "No News"; their third was the Power Ballad "Amazed"; and their last two were the soccer mom-friendly "My Front Porch Looking In" and "Mr. Mom". According to band members, their Lighter and Softer sound from "Amazed" onward was the result of Executive Meddling, which ultimately led to McDonald leaving the group from 2007 to 2011.
• Dustin Lynch's debut single "Cowboys and Angels" sticks out as it has a twangy, traditional country sound, while all of his other singles have been very slick, polished, rock and rap-influenced country similar to Jason Aldean.

M-Q

• Bob Marley: During most of the 1960s he sounded more like a smooth Motown soul singer. Marley was inspired by The Impressions and almost sounds like an exact copy. The topics of his early songs are often childlike and banal: "Mr. Chatterbox" is about the irritating aspects of radio, for instance! Also, he only became a Rastafari after 1965. The studio version of "No Woman, No Cry" (1974), found on Natty Dread, sounds almost comedic, compared to the much slower, dramatic and famous live version found on the album Live (1975).
• Maroon 5's early stuff has a bit more soul/jazz influence. That Other Wiki lists one of the genres for their debut Songs About Jane as "blue-eyed soul". If you listen to the demo versions of "Harder to Breathe" and "Sunday Morning" (released as part of the 10th anniversary edition of Songs About Jane), the R&B influence is even more evident. Their later albums are almost completely pop-rock and, starting with Overexposed, electropop.
  • The band started out as a Jellyfish-like Power Pop quartet called Kara's Flowers in the mid-1990s, with Adam Levine as the band's sole guitarist.
  • Even Kara's Flowers' first album We Like Digging? fits this trope, as it featured noisy, lo-fi Grunge that sounded nothing like even the following album.
• Louis Marullo: This is Louis as a 12-year-old boy fronting a preteen band called The Kids. This is Mr. Marullo all grown up, as Manowar vocalist Eric Adams.
• Kathy Mattea is known for her folk/bluegrass influenced country music. But on her first album from 1984, her sound was a lot more pop-driven, with far more keyboard and electric guitar, and even a Barry Manilow cover.
• Matthew Good Band: The first two albums, Last of the Ghetto Astronauts and Underdogs are decidedly different from the next album, Beautiful Midnight, and miles away from Good's solo work. The sound is different (Astronauts in particular is fond of guitar-strumming instead of the guitar-playing in later albums), the themes are different, and the lyrics are much heavier on repetition. They're not bad albums, but the jump from Underdogs to Beautiful Midnight, or from either to Avalanche (Good's first solo album) is jarring.
• Martina McBride's first album was more neotraditional country, with a twangier feel. The Way That I Am and Wild Angels are slightly poppier, but outside "Independence Day", the material is fairly subdued and still about normal country topics. By Evolution, she had moved to a full-on country-pop style with heavier production, melismatic belting, and a great deal of Issue Drift, as codified by such songs as "A Broken Wing", "Love's the Only House", "Concrete Angel", etc.
• Tim McGraw was a lot more neotraditional on his early albums. His little-known self-titled debut has his only song to date not produced by Byron Gallimore ("What Room Was the Holiday In"), and the video for "Welcome to the Club" has him strumming a guitar, something he hasn't done since. His breakthrough albums Not a Moment Too Soon and All I Want relied heavily on novelty numbers like "Indian Outlaw" (his Breakthrough Hit) and "I Like It, I Love It", along with slick ballads like "Not a Moment Too Soon" or "She Never Lets It Go to Her Heart" that could've been done by just about anyone in a cowboy hat. Starting around 1997, he started to move into a mature and more pop-oriented sound as seen by the crossover successes of "It's Your Love" and "Please Remember Me", respectively the lead-off singles from Everywhere (1997) and follow-up A Place in the Sun (1999). Even on these songs, though, his voice was still fairly high and whiny. He didn't settle into his slightly lower register until around the next album, 2001's Set This Circus Down. Despite the marked change in sound, "Indian Outlaw", "I Like It, I Love It", and "Not a Moment Too Soon" remain among his Signature Songs.
• Sarah Mclachlan's first album, Touch, is very strange sounding, mostly because Mclachlan hadn't mastered her vocal ability at the time.
• The Meat Puppets are primarily associated with indie and Alternative Rock, but got their start as an abrasively noisy Hardcore Punk band. A couple of the original songs on Meat Puppets calm down just long enough to hint at the country-punk style of Meat Puppets II, and there are also a couple punk-ish covers of country standards ("Walkin' Boss" and "Tumblin' Tumbleweeds"). Especially odd is Curt Kirkwood's Vocal Evolution - he spent much of the first album yowling and shrieking unintelligibly, as opposed to the more sleepy-sounding, monotone vocals he'd start using later on. Additionally, drummer Derrick Bostrom used to write all their lyrics - not that you could tell without looking them up, but Derrick's lyrics were straight-foward and full of dry humor, as opposed to the Word Salad Lyrics Curt would become known for.
• Melvins are known for slow, heavy songs and Epic Rocking, but started as a Hardcore Punk band with fast tempos and songs that were generally under two minutes long.
• Mercury Rev: The first two albums, which had David Baker sharing lead vocal duties with Jonathan Donahue, bear the influence of Pink Floyd filtered through punk and noise bands, with some elements of world music and pretty much everything but the kitchen sink thrown in. In other words, nothing like the band's Lighter and Softer (but fucking awesome) breakthrough fourth album Deserter's Songs. The aptly named third album See You on the Other Side sounds closer, but is more of a palette cleanser than a bridge between the two eras.
• Merzbow, of all people. His earlier stuff put far more emphasis on avant-garde than it did noise. For example, compare Merzbient (a box set of twentysomething-year-old recordings on CD) with the more recent (2009-2010) 13 Japanese Birds series.
• Meshuggah's first album Contradictions Collapse and the preceding EP-both recorded as a quartet with Jens Kidman on rhythm guitar-sound very different from the sound they would become known for. The music can basically be described as Thrash Metal with progressive elements, and Kidman's vocals are delivered in a half-sung, half-shouted style. The lyrics are different too, being political in nature as opposed to the complex philosophical themes expressed in their later work.
• Metallica:
  • Kill 'Em All contains some weirdness that wouldn't be found in their next several albums, stemming directly from their then-still major influence from Diamond Head. To start off, James Hetfield sings in more of a "shriek" than on later albums. While the music is as fast, loud and optimistic as they arguably never repeated, the production is kind of muddy and the instruments can be hard to discern at times (particularly the drums). Lastly, there are two songs ("Hit the Lights" and "Whiplash") with lyrics that are, in Hetfield's words, "Sort of Judas Priest, 'let's go rock out..'", contrasting with the songs on their later releases, which tend to be about social or political issues.
  • This is not to mention their pre-Kill 'Em All demos, featuring original lead guitarist Dave Mustaine. "Thrash" is not the word that comes to mind when listening to the demo song "the Mechanix"^note which Metallica rewrote as "The Four Horsemen", while Mustaine retained it as the faster "Mechanix" on Megadeth's debut. Hetfield, imitating English vocalist Sean Harris, sings in a glam rock style and puts on an English accent on occasion while singing Mustaine-penned lyrics about sex. The guitar solos are different for these songs, because Mustaine's replacement Kirk Hammett re-wrote them.
• Metric: When they first formed in 1998, they had a different stage name (Mainstream) and very different musical output compared to their later releases. The Mainstream EP had little to none of the signature sound the group would codify on Static Anonymity and Old World Underground, was much more downtempo and electronica-based, and didn't have supporting bandmates Joules Scott-Key and Joshua Winstead (they hadn't joined the band yet).
• Mindless Self Indulgence, in spades. Before they found the Black Comedy-filled, synth-heavy Genre Mashup they're infamous for, they were actually a relatively straight, dance-heavy Industrial outfit. It's... strange to hear Jimmy Urine taking his vocal duties seriously.
• Ministry's first album With Sympathy was a synth pop album in which Al Jourgensen attempted to sing in a fake British accent. Their next album, Twitch is an album of aggressive EBM. Neither prepared anyone for their third album, The Land of Rape and Honey, which premiered the harsh industrial sound they became famous with. Jourgensen has disowned With Sympathy, calling it "an abortion" and reportedly buying and destroying every copy of it he runs across, and has been varying in his press statements on Twitch.
  • I'm Falling, a 12" single released two years before With Sympathy is also somewhat unique in the band's catalog: The title track is Post-Punk heavily influenced by The Cure and Joy Division, while the other two tracks, "Cold Life" and "Primental", do hint at the synth pop of With Sympathy, but with more of a funk influence - "Primental" would be reworked into the With Sympathy track "I Wanted To Tell Her".
• The Misfits:
  • Their debut single, "Cough/Cool" b/w "She", was pretty typical for the Glenn Danzig-fronted version of the band... Except for the fact that it was recorded by a lineup that was temporarily without a guitarist, so in addition to singing, Danzig also filled in the rhythm by playing electric piano. In a way, it sort of worked: Turns out if you take early Misfits and replace the guitar with a keyboard, it sort of sounds like a Punk Rock version of The Doors. Both songs were later re-recorded with proper lead guitar.
  • Likewise, the entire early 80s period for the band is much darker in tone, as Glenn focused heavily on themes of death and murder. Jerry Only would maintain much of this when the band reformed in the 90s, but the overall theme toned it down some and allowed Jerry to experiment more with references to campy 50s-era music styles and movies. Sound production quality is also much higher than in the early days, mostly due to the band actually having better equipment now. Danzig would maintain the overall dark themes with his solo career though it would result in him being more or less a One-Hit Wonder as a result (unless you're a regular fan of his music, odds are "Mother" is the only one of his songs you are familiar with).
• Montgomery Gentry had fewer Vocal Tag Team moments on their first two albums. Troy Gentry sang "Hillbilly Shoes", but Eddie Montgomery sang every other single until My Town, when they began releasing more songs with both of them alternating on lead vocals. Also, Troy sported a beard on the first album's cover, but was clean-shaven after that.
• The Moody Blues are commonly known as one of the codifiers of psychedelic, progressive, and symphonic rock, with songs like "Nights in White Satin", "Tuesday Afternoon", and "Question" blending classical and popular influences, and prominently featuring flute solos from Ray Thomas, the symphonic textures of the mellotron courtesy of Mike Pinder, and spoken poems written by drummer Graeme Edge. You'd never guess that their first album, 1965's The Magnificent Moodies, was straightforward R&B (hence why they're called the Moody Blues) as sung by lead guitarist Denny Laine, exemplified by their chart-topping cover of Larry Banks and Milton Bennett's "Go Now". Within two years, Laine and bassist Clint Warwick left the band and were replaced by Pinder and Thomas' former El Riot and the Rebels bandmate John Lodge on bass and Wilde Three guitarist Justin Hayward, Pinder started using a mellotron instead of a piano, and the band were introduced to producer Tony Clarke... and the rest is history.
• Before Alanis Morissette broke out with Jagged Little Pill, she was a teenage pop sensation in her native Canada producing music reminiscent of Paula Abdul and Janet Jackson, complete with big hair and choreography.
• Early Giorgio Moroder is mostly associated with Disco, i.e. his work as Donna Summer's producer in the mid- and late '70s, and especially with the hypnotic proto-EDM smash hit "I Feel Love". Even earlier Moroder, however, stood for bubblegum pop, songs like "Looky, Looky" or "Son Of My Father" released under the name Giorgio (Chicory Tip's cover of the latter became quite a hit, though, but you wouldn't associate it with Giorgio Moroder). It was so cheesy that even late-'70s Moroder saw his own career ruined by it and mostly retreated to the studio to henceforth act as a behind-the-scenes composer and producer. When he became associated with the invention of a wildly popular new sound with "I Feel Love", he was confident enough again to release new material under his own name such as the single "From Here To Eternity" and the soundtrack to Midnight Express.
• My Bloody Valentine started very far from shoegazing, playing Post-Punk/Goth Rock in their early days. It took several EPs (some of which they disowned) and a new lead singer before they found their signature style.
• My Chemical Romance tries new things on every studio album they make, but compare their debut I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love to their sophomore Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge. Bullets is rawer in production and doesn't have as much of a theatrical feel as subsequent releases, in addition to having prominent screamo influences that are mostly absent in subsequent releases.
• Willie Nelson began his country music career in the early 1960s as a clean-cut young man in sedate, tailored suits and ties. This is not a joke. It took well over a decade before he developed his signature outlaw image and sound.
• Neurosis is one of the most influential bands when it comes to post-metal. Their first two albums were very much hardcore punk though. Though The Word as Law showed a bit more of their ambient side, it sounded more punk than ambient/post. Compare "Progress" off of Pain of Mind to "Through Silver and Blood" off of the album of the same name.
• Compared to the later albums that New Order would produce, their debut album Movement is a bleak Post-Punk record not unlike their Joy Division output, with synthesizers playing a lesser part in the sound than it would on the band's later material. There is a reason to this disparity, however: during the making of Movement, the band was aiming to try and continue the sound that they had developed in Joy Division, but after the album was released to a mixed reception, they opted to shift away from the sound completely, resulting in the Alternative Dance sound that would help them break out of Joy Division's shadow.
• Olivia Newton-John was a country-pop singer early on, with songs such as "Let Me Be There" and "If You Love Me (Let Me Know)" that sounded completely in line with other mid-70s country-pop ladies. Over time, the few remaining country elements disappeared, leaving her more familiar style as exemplified by the Grease soundtrack and her Signature Song "Physical".
• Nickelback's debut Curb and the follow-up album The State were a far cry from the Post-Grunge Pop-Rock sound that they're famous for. Those albums were much more in the vein of Godsmack as they were much heavier with more of an alt-metal/hard rock sound and Chad Kroeger's vocal style was much louder with a lot more screaming. It wasn't until Silver Side Up that Nickelback found their signature sound.
• Nico & Vinz's first album, The Magic Soup and the Bittersweet Faces (recorded under the name Envy), is a hip hop album completely different from the Afro-pop on Black Star Elephant that would grant them international success.
• Nightwish's debut album, Angels Fall First, is their only studio release to feature vocals from keyboardist Tuomas Holopainen. All of their subsequent releases would feature guest vocalists or (after he joined) bassist Marco Hietala singing when a song called for a male vocalist.
• Nine Inch Nails' first album, Pretty Hate Machine, was heavily influenced by the new wave music that Trent Reznor had previously performed, sounding a lot like a darker, more aggresive version of Depeche Mode's Music for the Masses. It would take Broken and The Downward Spiral to transform the band to the Industrial Metal style it's known for.
• Nirvana's debut album, Bleach, takes massive influence from heavy metal — it could reasonably be labelled "punk metal" (if avoiding the term "grunge") — and sounds like a combination of Soundgarden and The Melvins. Grunge music was forced on them by the producers, as the grunge scene was already huge in Seattle by that point. Cobain expressed disdain for this album in later years.
• The Oak Ridge Boys were originally a gospel group, and none of the four most famous members (Duane Allen, Joe Bonsall, Richard Sterban, William Lee Golden) were in the original lineup. That lineup was not in place until 1973, by which point the group had already begun its transition to country music, culminating in their first Top 10 country hit "Y'all Come Back Saloon" four years later.
  • Also from a visual standpoint, baritone singer William Lee Golden had a fairly short beard until Deliver in 1983, at which point it blossomed into the Wizard Beard he's had ever since. (Executive Meddling led to him getting kicked out of the group from 1987-1995 because the label wanted to pursue a Younger and Hipper image and he refused to shave.)
• Oomph!: The German NDH band's first album in 1992 is EBM in the vein of Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb. Their second album, Sperm (1994) had much more of an industrial metal sound, while retaining some EBM influences. It is considered to be the first NDH album, inspiring artists such as Eisbrecher, Unheilig, Megaherz, and most famously, Rammstein.
• Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark: Listening to their self-titled album for the first time is a strange experience for anyone used to the band's later work. It sounds like Seventies German techno rather than Eighties British synthpop. Even the album version of "Messages" is jarringly different from the later recording that became a hit single.
• Emily Osment: The music of the Hannah Montana star might count. Her earlier songs like "Hero In Me" and "I Don't Think About It" are straightforward late-Oughties teen pop, enjoyable, but relatively unremarkable. She hadn't quite found her feet vocally, and the songs were written by outside writers. Her EP, All The Right Wrongs, was more personal and much better sung, and musically more Adult Alternative-influenced and harder-edged. Her full-length debut, Fight Or Flight, is well-crafted, catchy Synth-Pop with more poetic lyrics, and Emily's vocals are very strong. She's taken a jazzy/acoustic bent with the "Ramshackle" music she's released on YouTube.
• Jake Owen is known for recording songs with a mellow, summery vibe such as "Barefoot Blue Jean Night", "Beachin'", and "American Country Love Song", which still have very heavy production. Not so much on his first two albums, which were more driven by subdued ballads such as "Startin' with Me" or hard country-rock such as "Yee Haw" and "Eight Second Ride".
• Pantera: Listen to the first works of this band, now known for its heavy, kick-ass "take no shit" music and lyrics, that came out in the early 1980's, then listen to anything from/after Cowboys from Hell. The difference can be...staggering.
  • If you believe Pantera's official website, their first release was Cowboys from Hell. Their early works aren't even listed.
  • While the glam-metal era is a no-brainer, the canon release Cowboys From Hell, while it does have a few songs that are lyrically heavy, is a lot more fun and wild than their later albums (compare the title track for instance to anything out of Vulgar Display). Also Phil Anselmo's vocal-style was a lot more melodic on his first two albums with the group, from Vulgar Display onwards Phil's vocals were much louder and more aggressive with more shout-screaming and very little in the way of clean vocals.
• Parliament and Funkadelic, the influential funk music bands from the 1970s, started out as a Doo-wop group called The Parliaments. The difference between this and this is quite staggering to say the least.
• Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota's Gulp! and Oktubre were produced while the band was still a troupe with a rock band added on top of it, and as such has a female choir and extra instrumentation. The production was also significantly different from the rest of the band's discography, featuring a quasi-electronic sound for its drums, and more acute-sounding guitars.
• Katy Perry, of the gravity-defying cleavage and songs about California, alien sex, partying aftermaths, and getting over break-ups with "the eye of the tiger", started out in the Christian music genre before going secular, and made it big thanks to a song about lesbian experimenting. She also recorded folksy self-penned singer-songwriter type music as a Christian musician (under her real name, Katy Hudson [believe it or not]) that was actually really highly regarded by Christian music reviewers. One review even predicted lots of future success for Ms. Hudson/Perry (little did the critic know how successful she'd be, or what her success would be in).
• P!nk's first album Can't Take Me Home was standard pop/R&B fare, and while it was moderately successful, critics considered it So Okay, It's Average at best and a TLC knockoff at worst. She took these criticisms to heart, and her next album Missundaztood was more rock while emphasizing the "bad girl" elements hinted at in the previous album. Its success set the course for the rest of her career.
• Pink Floyd began in 1965 as a Psychedelic Rock band, indicated by their first two albums. Following the mental collapse of frontman Syd Barrett, bassist Roger Waters and new guitarist David Gilmour took the reins, spending the next few years experimenting in approach before solidifying their signature Progressive Rock sound with Meddle in 1971.
• Dana Jean Phoenix's first couple albums were relatively mainstream electro-Hip-Hop, and it was only by her third album that she began transitioning to the Synthwave she is now known for.
• Pitch Shifter's 1991 Industrial is a far cry from their familiar style, being a blend of Death Metal, Doom Metal, and Industrial Metal.
• The Police's 1977 debut single, "Fall Out", and its B-Side, "Nothing Achieving", are closer to straight punk than the New Wave/Reggae mix that would define the band's sound from their first album onward. Incidentally, the original punk angle is maintained on most of the band's non-album B-sides (albeit polished up a bit), stretching all the way to "A Sermon" in 1980. It wasn't until "Shambelle" in 1981 that the band would carry over the sound on their albums to the original B-sides as well.
• Ray Price: With the country music legend that had equal success with Western swing-infused honky tonk and the pop-influenced Nashville Sound, his voice did not have its unique, distinctive sound on his very earliest single releases from the 1950-1952 timeframe, including "Jealous Lies" and "Talk To Your Heart," where he sounded much smoother in the vein of a pop balladeer with a country twang. Some well-taken advice from Hank Williams and it wasn't long before the sound fans became familiar with became apparent on songs like "Don't Let the Stars Get In Your Eyes" and most notably the two-sided smash hit "I'll Be There"/"Release Me," the first of a string of hits that lasted more than 30 years continuously.
• Project Pitchfork's early works, especially the demo album Embryonal Thoughts they produced under the name Demoniac Puppets, were avant garde-type industrial in the vein of The Art of Noise, Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, etc. rather than the borderline darkwave/EBM they are better known for.
• Queen was more like Led Zeppelin, with much more of a rock feel to them in their early albums. They didn't really hit their stride as a Genre Roulette band until A Night at the Opera, which featured hits like "I'm in Love with My Car", "39", and the wildly popular "Bohemian Rhapsody". Their self-titled debut album in particular featured more morally-focused and religious themes (even including a song called "Jesus"). The latter was almost entirely absent from later releases, until "All God's People" on their Innuendo album 18 years later.

R-T

• Radiohead, whose first album Pablo Honey is cited as not being weird enough and is a fairly standard alt-rock album. They grew much more ambitious with their next album, The Bends, before becoming the wonderfully weird band we know and love with OK Computer onwards.
• Rammstein: One of their defining traits is their legendary Impressive Pyrotechnics, among the most elaborate and extravagant in the music world. Which makes it all the more jarring to see footage of their earliest shows and realise that said pyrotechnics are entirely absent.
• Rascal Flatts sounded very much like a boy band on their first album, particularly on "Prayin' for Daylight" and "This Everyday Love". This basically meant catchy hooky choruses, breezy high-voiced harmonies, and none of the band members playing instruments. By the time the second album came out, they shifted to a more mature country-pop sound, replete with two of the band members playing their own instruments (lead singer Gary LeVox doesn't play anything) and slightly more substantial songs. But even their second and third albums seem radically different than the theatrical, bombastic Power Ballads from "What Hurts the Most" onward; this change was brought on by them switching producers, from Mark Bright to Dann Huff (who is notorious for his bombastic production).
• Eddy Raven and his brand of Cajun country came only during his peak in 1987-1990. His very earliest top 40 hits, from the mid-1970s, including "Good News, Bad News" (from 1975) were very much in the country pop vein.
• Collin Raye's first two albums display this to a great extent. Other than the Tear Jerker "Love, Me", which is still one of his biggest and most popular songs, the first two albums largely consisted of lightweight, forgettable material with dated production. Starting with 1994 album Extremes (his first with longtime producer Paul Worley), Raye began recording much heavier material that often tackled societal issues, such as a story of a recovering alcoholic ("Little Rock"), women's place in society ("I Think About You"), child abuse ("The Eleventh Commandment"), acceptance ("Not That Different", "What If Jesus Comes Back Like That"), while even the more light-hearted fare such as "That's My Story", "My Kind of Girl", or "Little Red Rodeo" had much more edge to it.
• Red Hot Chili Peppers fit this trope to a T with everything before Mother's Milk (or their breakthrough Blood Sugar Sex Magik).
• Malinda Kathleen Reese, of the ''Google Translate Sings'' series on YouTube, takes well-known songs, runs them through a few layers of Google Translate, then sings the results. Her early videos were quite basic, with her singing in front of a blank wall and including a video of the original music video for comparison. This began to change when she did a translated cover of "I'll Make a Man Out of You" from Mulan, which featured Caleb Hyles and some props. By the time she covered "I Just Can't Wait to be King" from The Lion King, she was creating full music videos for the translations and was no longer including videos of the original song with hers. Recent videos have her recording herself singing a line multiple times to create a chorus, or occasionally playing characters in the videos, and sometimes instead of covering a whole song she sings well-known bits of a few different ones in the same video. If you only got into the Google Translate Sings series later on, it can be quite odd to go back to her first video and see how basic it is in comparison.
• The Residents: Their earliest known works were remarkably less coherent than their more recent output.
• Thomas Rhett's first album was more indebted to "bro-country", with light country-rock songs largely focused on hot women. From about "Die a Happy Man" onward, he began to focus more on richer, smoother songs with a more romantic bent. His first album also had a different set of producers (Jay Joyce, Michael Knox, and Luke Laird, the last of whom is far more commonly a songwriter) instead of Dann Huff.
• Kenny Rogers is best known as a singer of both twangy traditional country such as "The Gambler", "Lucille", and slick country-pop ballads such as "Islands in the Stream" or "Lady". But before these, he was the namesake of Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, who are a double example. Their first hit was "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)", a psychedelic rock song about getting high, but they quickly settled into a more folk-rock-country vein with the likes of "Ruby (Don't Take Your Love to Town)" and "Reuben James".
• The Rolling Stones' musical output was very different in their early years, especially for fans who only know of them based on their last two-three decades of work. Their self-titled debut from 1964 consisted almost entirely of covers (with one original song written by Jagger/Richards), and was heavily R&B-oriented. Their debut tour in the United States was a disaster - television hosts made fun of them for dressing as a ripoff of other successful British Invasion groups like The Beatles, and their former manager/publicist Andrew Oldham removed at least one man from the group (including future Stones roadie and session pianist Ian Stewart) because they did not fit the mould of "thin, long-haired boys" wearing identical suits. It was only on 1966's Aftermath that the group began to codify their signature sound, not only making the songs much more otherworldly and darker, but unintentionally ditching the "boy band" image. Also, they became more sexual than The Beatles.
• Mark Ronson's debut album Here Comes The Fuzz is the only one of his albums that's predominantly hip hop. For subsequent albums, he would shift to a more pop and funk oriented sound.
• Darius Rucker: Though they were considered an Alternative Rock band, Hootie & the Blowfish had enough folk and blues influences that Darius Rucker's successful solo career as a Country Music singer isn't too surprising. What is surprising is that his solo debut, 2002's Back to Then, was a Neo Soul / Contemporary R&B album with guest appearances by Jill Scott and Snoop Dogg. Darius has since said that while he enjoyed making the album, it's not a style he plans on revisiting anytime soon.
• Rush: On their self-titled first album, they sound like just another Led Zeppelin clone. This started to change with their second album, Fly by Night, when drummer Neil Peart joined and took over writing most of the lyrics, although it took another couple of albums until they fully developed their sound.
• Sabaton now sings almost entirely about historical battles, but didn't settle on this until Primo Victoria. This can lead to a lot of Mundane Made Awesome, as the style's more or less the same, but you're hearing about the exploits of a random biker gang instead of, for instance, the battle of Wizna.
• Sawyer Brown: In the 1980s they were a very bubblegummy country-pop band, noted for their dance moves, pink tennis shoes, and extremely lighthearted lyrics mostly about girls and cars. By The Dirt Road in 1991, they began changing to a more mature image and sound, helped in part by a shift from Curb Records to Capitol Records Nashville, combined with Mac McAnally (of Jimmy Buffett's Coral Reefer Band) taking over much of the songwriting and production alongside lead singer Mark Miller. The change in sound from completely weightless fluff like "Step That Step" or "Betty's Bein' Bad" to the likes of "All These Years" or "Cafe on the Corner" is staggering, and most of their material from roughly 1991-1998 is usually heralded as their best. Even their more upbeat material in that timespan (such as the witty "Thank God for You" or an impassioned cover of Dave Dudley's "Six Days on the Road") shows massive artistic growth from the 1980s-era band.
• Scatman John's first album, under his real name of John Larkin, was more straightforward piano-driven jazz with scat singing on top, as opposed to the eurodance-scat mix sound he pursued starting with "Scatman (Ski-Ba-Bop-Ba-Dop-Bop)".
• Klaus Schulze's debut album Irrlicht is far more experimental than any of his later works, featuring no synthesizers and instead consisting of unearthly organ drones and heavily modified tape recordings of a classical orchestra rehearsal.
• Screaming Trees: Listening to them evolve from their mid-'80s beginnings to their final album Dust in 1996 is similar to listening to a mid-'60s garage band evolve into an early-mid '70s hard rock band. Consider this 1985 song "Barriers", a garage/new wave-y ditty where Mark Lanegan sounds all of 20 years old. Then listen to the Trees' 1988 song "Ivy" from the album Invisible Lantern. One year later, the Trees started crossing the bridge between psychedelia and grunge/hard rock, as evidenced by songs like "End of the Universe", which features heavier guitars and Lanegan singing in a deeper register.
• Seal's self titled debut album has more of an electronic sound compared to his later albums, which are straight Pop. This is probably unsurprising, given Trevor Horn's involvement. This also extends to Seal's appearance, as he had dreadlocks before he shaved his head.
• Dan Seals is this several times over. His first band Theze Few was a garage-rock band that released one single called "Dynamite". Their membership evolved into Southwest F.O.B., a pop-psych group who had a minor hit (No. 56) with "Smell of Incense". Then he and bandmate John Ford Coley became a soft-rock duo who are best known for their gentle ballad "I'd Really Love to See You Tonight". After this, Seals departed for a solo career, recording a couple unsuccessful pop albums before finally finding his calling as a Country Music singer between the mid-1980s and early 1990s.
• Sentenced: Late band Sentenced began as this with Taneli Jarva on vocals, and ended like this with Ville Laihiala as his replacement. Consider that the guitarists and drummer are the same in both songs.
• Sevendust: If you listen to their later work and then listen to their debut, it's going to sound a little weird. Their self-titled first album had rawer production and was heavier and much rougher than the polished radio-friendly heavy metal sound they are known for.
• Shadows Fall's first two albums, Somber Eyes to the Sky and Of One Blood, feature a rather generic, though not bad, Melodic Death Metal sound. It wasn't until their third album that they would develop the thrashy metalcore sound they are famous for. Even the band themselves were sick of getting their early work compared to Swedish melodeath bands, which is why they changed their sound in the first place.
• Blake Shelton's first three albums had a twangier and more traditional sound, with cover versions of songs by Kenny Rogers, Conway Twitty, Earl Thomas Conley, and Johnny Paycheck, along with co-writes from traditionally-minded writers such as Paul Overstreet, Harley Allen, Shawn Camp, and Bobby Braddock (who also produced those albums). He also wore a mullet and sometimes even a cowboy hat. From Pure BS onward, he began taking a slicker, more mainstream sound, and he ditched the hat in favor of a shorter haircut and beard.
• Sigur Rós's first album, Von, mostly consists of haunting soundscapes, avant-garde sound effects and ambient drone. The end result was considered an ugly and boring mess. The band then released a remixed version of this album, and although it was considered an improvement over the original, it was still viewed as disappointing and too experimental to be enjoyable. The band decided to restart from scratch with their third album, Ágætis Byrjun (A Good Beginning), which is considerably more beautiful, melodic and emotionally powerful while still being experimental, and defined the band's sound from thereon. The band nowadays rarely speaks of Von and its remixed version; the translated name of Ágætis Byrjun effectively pretends they never existed.
• Simon & Garfunkel's first album, which intially flopped, didn't have much of their distinctive mellow sound; in fact, some of the tracks sound a lot like Peter, Paul and Mary minus Mary. Over half the songs on the album were traditional folk tunes or written by other artists, such as "You Can Tell the World", "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream", "Peggy-O", "Go Tell It on the Mountain", and "The Times They Are a-Changin'".
  • Their previous incarnation, Tom & Jerry, fits this trope to a T, with their The Everly Brothers-esqe bubblegum tunes.
• Frank Sinatra: On his earliest recordings, his singing voice sounded drastically different from the voice that most associate him with.
• Six Feet Under's first two albums bare an uncanny resemblance to Obituary, largely due to Allen West's presence on guitar. It wasn't until Maximum Violence when their signature sound set in.
• Skillet's music used to sound very explicitly religious, like a lot of Christian rock groups; Ardent Worship and Hey You I Love Your Soul being the most obvious albums. "Collide" is when they started changing, and their songs began to sound more like mainstream Alternative Rock with various Alternative Character Interpretations. A lot of people don't even notice they're a Christian Rock group nowadays.
• Progression Towards Evil, the debut album of Brutal Death Metal band Skinless, was almost entirely focused on Toilet Humor and Gorn. Their sophomore album, Foreshadowing Our Demise, still contained a few songs of this nature, but by and large shifted to the Humans Are Bastards and politically-oriented themes that took up the entirety of their subsequent albums.
• Slayer:
  • Slayer's first album, Show No Mercy, is very different from their later albums. It is (very slightly) slower and much more melodic (as opposed to out-right E-string shredding a la Reign in Blood — it is fast in its own right) and aside from being American and much heavier, is almost downright NWOBHM (in the words of Kerry King, there is some "Iron Maiden [influence] here and there") - to the extent that it's pretty much a Venom tribute album.
  • Their second album, Hell Awaits, features darker, longer songs than the band had performed before or since with some Progressive Metal leanings. Both it and Show No Mercy feature more outright Satanic, mystical lyrical content than the rest of their discography. It wasn't until Reign in Blood that Slayer adopted their current punk-influenced sound and lyrics mainly based on real life horrors like serial killers and war.
• Slipknot's Mate. Feed. Kill. Repeat. is considerably less cohesive than their current works. It gets weirder. The original vocalist, Anders Colsefini, had an entirely different style than Corey Taylor that was more akin to the late Peter Steele of Type O Negative, meets Kirk Windstein of Crowbar, with a dash of James Hetfield. The album also contains more than a few references to The World of Darkness series; the eponymous ''Slipknot'' (an early version of ''(sic)'') being the most glaring example. And finally, to say it bordered on Genre Mashup, is a gross understatement as the album had jarring elements of glam, funk, jazz, and lounge. Yes, lounge.
• The Smashing Pumpkins: This performance filmed in 1988 shows the band playing The Cure-esque post-punk/goth-rock, a far cry from their Genre Mashup blend of grunge, shoegaze, dream pop and metal in their heyday.
• Smog's early albums were full of noise experiments and song fragments that sound nothing like the folk and rock Bill Callahan is best known for. If you listen to any of his first three albums and then any of his recent albums, he's unrecognisable as the same vocalist, as his voice got a lot deeper over time. Wild Love (1995) is a transition between the two eras, and in terms of Callahan's voice, you can hear the early and later Callahan in his mid 90s output in general.
• Spinto Band had a lot of self-released albums full of Ween-inspired GenreMashups; by the time they got signed they whittled down their influences to something more coherent. From their 2006 album Nice And Nicely Done and on, their style can basically be summed up as a mix of indie rock, New Wave Music, and Power Pop. Earlier albums like Digital Summer (New Wave Techno Pop) jump from trippy instrumentals to ska to novelty rap.
• Most of John Philip Sousa's early marches (from 1873 to 1885) lack the break or "dogfight" strain.
• Split Enz: The majority of their earlier songs could best be described as strange, ethereal ballads, often over six minutes in length. As of their third album they shifted to a much more poppy and mainstream music style (though still fairly quirky).
• Rick Springfield had a couple of them way back in 1973, long before he was a chart-smashing phenom who also starred on General Hospital. Not only do these songs not fit under the "Power Pop" category that most people associate with Springfield's music, they also feature very different vocal stylings from Rick that sound nothing like the crooning he became known for in later songs such as "Jessie's Girl".
• Status Quo: The long-lasting British band started out in the late 1960s as a psychedelic/prog rock band (during this time, they had their one American hit, "Pictures of Matchstick Men"), before switching in the early 1970s to the guitar boogie style they've maintained ever since. This is parodied by the very un-metal early songs of Spinal Tap in This is Spın̈al Tap.
• Cat Stevens started off performing Baroque Pop, as opposed to the Folk music he is much more well known for.
• Stone Temple Pilots were one of the biggest alternative acts of the 1990s, but their debut album Core has a Heavy Metal sound and marketed as such^note all of their albums sound different from the last, but this one is the most out-of-place in the discography. Released in 1992, Core was initially lambasted by critics for being derivative of bands like Alice in Chains from the then-huge grunge metal scene. Fans of 1996's "Lady Picture Show" may be surprised to hear "Sex Type Thing", the band's debut single, for the first time. Also, it was in the 1996 album Tiny Music where Scott Weiland arguably found his own voice as a singer, almost completely eschewing the yarling grunge baritone going forward.
  • It gets weirder; the band started out in the late 80s as a Funk band called Mighty Joe Young, and then Shirley Temple's Pussy until the name was censored to their current name.
• The Stooges: "We Will Fall" from their first, self-titled album, is a ten minute psychedelic drone that didn't inform anything they wrote afterwards.
• Stratovarius was an incredibly different band than what it is today. Consider this [1], versus this [2]; it's important to understand that the band does not feature any of their original members anymore. The first three albums featured Timo Tolkki on vocals — Timo Kotipelto didn't take over until the fourth album, Fourth Dimension, and the band wouldn't start using their signature "symphonic power metal" style until the next album, Episode, which was the first album to use the "classic" Stratovarius lineup (Timo Kotipelto on vocals, Timo Tolkki on lead guitar, Jari Kainulainen on bass guitar, Jens Johansson on keyboards and Jörg Michael on drums).
• Stuck Mojo (a rap metal band from Atlanta GA) achieved most of what infamy they had based on being unapologetically pro-American, starting with their third album Rising (which was promoted by Turner Broadcasting and featured the WCW United States Championship Belt on the cover). They'd later get mainstream attention for their fourth album Southern Born Killers, which featured the pro-American "I'm American" and the pro-war anti-Islamic-millitant "Open Season". So it might surprise fans of their later work to see a song like "Uncle Sam Scam" and other leftist politically charged songs on their first two albums.
• Sugarland's first album Twice the Speed of Life had slicker production (from Garth Fundis instead of their usual producer Byron Gallimore) and much less of a Genre Roulette feel. It was also the only album to feature guitarist/songwriter Kristen Hall. After she left the group, the other two members (lead singer Jennifer Nettles and guitarist/mandolinist Kristian Bush) decided to pursue a more dynamic, acoustic pop-influenced sound, often with lighter lyrics than Hall contributed. The vocal arrangements are different, with nearly all songs featuring both Kristian and Kristen singing a low harmony; the albums recorded as a duo have more varied vocal arrangements, with some Step Up to the Microphone moments for Kristian, instances of Jennifer singing over herself, backing vocals from bassist Annie Clements, and even a few songs where Kristian doesn't sing at all (most notably "Stay", where he at least contributes on guitar).
• Sugar Ray are primarily known for breezy pop-rock, but spent their first two albums as an Alternative Metal band. The turning point was "Fly", a massive hit from Floored that was more than a bit softer than the surrounding material. Instead of letting "Fly" become a Black Sheep Hit, they opted to just roll with it and go in a Lighter and Softer direction. They did some humorous Lampshade Hanging on this: their third album 14:59 opened with a short lyrically dissonant mock-Death Metal song called "New Direction", immediately followed by much calmer material.
• Swans: The 1982 self-titled debut EP is vaguely creepy, saxophone-laced Post-Punk with a pronounced No Wave influence. Their first LP, 1983's Filth, is far harsher, not unlike some sort of primitive hybrid of Industrial and Hardcore Punk. It is also far more unsettling. And then there's their second LP, 1984's Cop. "Brutal" does not begin to describe it.
• The Sweet first emerged as a bubblegum pop band with early hits such as "Funny Funny" and "Co-Co". Even at this phase, they would hint at their future direction by including harder-hitting B-sides. Eventually, this would translate to much more enduring A-side hits such as "Block Buster!", "Ballroom Blitz" and "Fox on the Run".
• Taylor Swift's first album was by far her most country-sounding, with a lot more fiddle and banjo, and a twangier vocal style. Each subsequent album moved her further and further away from country, culminating in her abandoning the genre entirely with 1989 in 2014. Her first three albums were produced entirely by Nathan Chapman, with Swift writing either by herself or collaborating with country songwriter Liz Rose, while from Red onward the producers have been more varied. The early albums also serve as an Early Installment Weirdness for Chapman, whose production style was noticeably more subdued than on the electric guitar and drum-machine driven style he'd use on his later work with Lady Antebellum and Keith Urban.
• Billy Talent's first album focused more on Benjamin's screaming and Ian's back-up vocals appeared much more often. The lyrics were also much more nonsensical, so a few of their songs back then (especially "Cut The Curtains" and "Voices of Violence") were impossible to figure out, which is a welcome change since it made their music less sloppy. They also had less themes of anger as the years went by.
• Tears for Fears: Compared to the increasingly organic and more emotionally variable progressive pop of the band's later work, their debut The Hurting is a relatively straightforward Synth-Pop album, with its angsty tone putting it within the realm of Goth Rock and Dark Wave. A few prog touches are here and there in the form of a unifying central concept and occasional use of Fading into the Next Song, but it's not as prominent as on succeeding records.
• Ted Leo & The Pharmacists: Their first album was a lo-fi, dub-inspired 19-song album released in 1999 titled tej leo (?), rx/pharmacists on Gern Blandsten Records. It isn't fully considered a TL/Rx project since it was mainly just Ted Leo and a friend, Jodi Buonanno. Several of the songs were built off samples, something the band in the future wouldn't revisit as a whole. The lengthy tracklist is partly due to short interludes like "Version: (To Decline to Take a Shower)", which is a snippet of Ted singing acapella inside a shower, taking up the bulk of the songs. Fans have tended to not like this album very much in contrast to the band's future work and for the longest time even Ted himself was overlooking it, but in recent times he's become more willing to play some of those songs live.
• Sister Rosetta Tharpe's second and third albums, recorded after a ten year hiatus, are much more subdued and indebted to traditional gospel than her debut. She didn't abandon the gospel influence, but her subsequent recordings are more upbeat and demonstrative of her skill as a guitarist.
• Randy Travis's early recordings in the late 70s were under his real name of Randy Traywick. The material is a lot more generic, with his voice sounding more swaggering, somewhat like a mix of Waylon Jennings and Conway Twitty. It's a considerable distance from his trademark reedy bass-baritone and neotraditionalist ballads that drove him to stardom in The '80s and the first half of The '90s.
• Trout Fishing in America's first few albums were more straightforward folk-rock, with their more remembered novelty and children's tunes not coming into force until Big Trouble (although later albums would go back and forth, the children's material would remain more popular in the long run).
• Shania Twain's first album was very subdued and mainstream early-90s country. Her second album, The Woman in Me, paired her up with the aforementioned Robert John "Mutt" Lange (who later became her husband until 2010), and she developed (for better or worse) the slick crossover pop-rock country sound she's forever known for.
• Conway Twitty was a rock/pop singer in his early days. It wasn't until the mid-1960s that he switched to country and became known for his sultry, romantic ballads.
• Type O Negative were always Doom Metal, but their first album Slow Deep And Hard contained more Thrash Metal influence than their more well known Gothic Metal sound (largely thanks to the lingering influence Peter Steele's earlier work in thrash metal with Carnivore). Their lyrics focus more on Peter's hatred for certain people than they do on sex, although there are a couple of songs about the latter. Justified in that the songs on the album were written for Peter Steele's previous band Carnivore, who were a thrash band. This is also why the sound of the album is so raw. Type O Negative would become known for their clean sound quality (rare in metal) later on.

U-Z

• Ume: It wasn't until Sunshowers or Phantoms that Ume gained some attention, so it would understandingly be jarring for newer fans to go back into 2005's Urgent Sea. The production is more raw with their Hard Rock influences more upfront than their usual Shoegazing, and contrasting with Lauren's later dreamier style, she had a heavier edge (you could even tell she's from Texas in this one). And oh yeah, there's also screaming involved.
• Underworld started out as a new wave/alternative pop band and released two albums (Underneath the Radar and Change the Weather) in this style, which also fetched them a minor American hit in the single "Stand Up". After a nearly five year recording hiatus following their second album, they emerged as an electronica/house group, which they have remained ever since.
• Keith Urban's first American albums are rife with this. His first American release was as one-third of the band The Ranch in 1997, which found him performing soft, mainstream-sounding country with relatively few guitar solos. Two years later, his 1999 Self-Titled Album (his first solo release in the States) continued largely in the same vein: greater emphasis on fiddle and steel and an overall more muted sound, thanks mainly to session pianist Matt Rollings producing instead of longtime producer Dann Huff. There was considerably less emphasis on Urban's guitar playing, and he had yet to discover the "ganjo" (a six-string banjo tuned like a guitar) which quickly became a trademark of his sound. Also on the 1999 album, his hair was shorter and he spelled his name in all lowercase letters.
• Vandal Moon, prior to establishing their Signature Style of Gothic Synthwave, explored Neoclassical Dark Wave, Minimal Wave, and Post-Industrial sounds on their first two albums.
• Vangelis: When you think of Vangelis, you usually think of synth soundscapes like the ones in the soundtracks to Chariots of Fire or Blade Runner. When he started out with Aphrodite's Child (see above), however, he was forced into early Bee Gees styled pop. The closest that group came to sounding like the Vangelis we know was with their third and final album, 666, composed entirely by him.
• The Velvet Underground: People familiar with the seminal Proto Punk group’s much more abrasive first two albums may be surprised to find out that their 1965 demo recordings consist entirely of acoustic Folk Music. This does, however, anticipate the direction they would take on their Lighter and Softer third album, which is not entirely acoustic but certainly qualifies as Folk Rock.
• Victoria Celestine's 2012 debut From The Outside was mainly Neo Soul with a touch of Folk Music/Country Music, and did not feature any synthesizers, unlike her signature indie-Synth-Pop style from "Wasted Tears" onwards.
• White Zombie are primarily known for mixing Industrial Metal and Groove Metal in the 90's, but started out as a chaotic, lo-fi Noise Rock band in the late 80's: They cited bands like The Birthday Party, Butthole Surfers, and Black Flag as influencing this phase. Rob Zombie's voice was also only sometimes recognizable at this point— instead of the near raspy vocal style he'd use in White Zombie's nineties albums (and throughout his solo career), he sang in more of a nasal, punk-ish sneer. The main thread running through both stages of their career are Word Salad Lyrics that sometimes double as Shout Outs to grind-house and horror movies, and frequent use of Spoken Word in Music. Interestingly, Kurt Cobain was a fan of their early work, as was Iggy Pop.
• Keith Whitley was also rather mainstream country-pop until 1988's Don't Close Your Eyes and 1989's I Wonder Do You Think of Me, which pushed him to a hardcore honky-tonk sound. Unfortunately, he died just before the latter album was released.
• Wild Beasts: Some listeners who got into the band through either Two Dancers and Smother may find the madcap cabaret numbers featured on their debut Limbo, Panto bewildering.
• Hank Williams Jr.: Early on, was a teenager covering his daddy's songs, starting with "Long Gone Lonesome Blues" in 1964. For the next several years, he followed the "countrypolitan" sound of the day, singing lushly produced country-pop ballads in a markedly different voice. After a break enforced by his fall off a mountain (which damaged his face and required a great deal of surgery, in addition to requiring that he re-learn how to sing), he finally forged his edgier, Southern rock and outlaw country influenced sound with Family Tradition at the end of the 70s, although the album Hank Williams, Jr. and Friends from 1975 was the first album with the music in this style and features collaborations from many southern rock artists. Even though his Early-Installment Weirdness era produced two #1 hits in "Eleven Roses" and "All for the Love of Sunshine", those songs are at total odds with his most famous style, and all but forgotten today.
• Amy Winehouse began as solely a Jazz singer on her debut album Frank, but by the time of Back to Black she had abandoned Jazz completely for Soul. Her look also changed in accordance with her shift in genres. By the time of Back to Black, she started wearing her trademark beehive haircut and thick black eyeliner which reflected the fact that she was drawing on Soul, girl groups from the 1960s such as The Ronettes for inspiration as opposed to Jazz singers such as Frank Sinatra whom her first album was even named after.
• Darryl Worley's first two albums did not have any political or soldier-related songs, and were largely composed of ballads. He only started doing political songs after the runaway success of "Have You Forgotten?" in 2003.
• Dave Wyndorf: Well before becoming a stoner rock icon with Monster Magnet, Dave Wyndorf fronted a pop-punk band called Shrapnel, which also had future The Ramones producer Daniel Rey on guitar. Here's the future Space Lord in all his short-haired, clean-shaven glory, cheesing it up with a song called "Combat Love."
• XTC's first CD issues had bonus tracks, typically B-sides of singles that didn't appear on the album release. These tracks were inserted into the running orders of the albums, but later reissues appended these tracks to the end, as was typical with expanded albums later on.
• "Weird Al" Yankovic's output can basically be divided into two eras: his self-titled debut album, and literally everything else. Said album's parodies feature only vague approximations of the original arrangements at best, prominently featuring Al on the accordion. There's no polka medley, roughly half the songs feature armpit farts, every single one has the accordion as its lead instrument (due to Al's longtime guitarist Jim West not being at the sessions; the few guitar parts present are instead played by producer Rick Derringer or session musician Richard Bennett^note brother of Al's drummer Jon "Bermuda" Schwartz), and only one of the original songs ("Happy Birthday") is done In the Style of some other artist. Coincidentally, it's also his only studio album to date with a featured vocalist. His appearance is also a case of Early Instalment weirdness: in the 80s and 90s he wore thick-framed glasses, a Funny Afro, and a mustache, only adopting his current style of appearance (long flowing curly black hair, no glasses, clean-shaven) in 1999.
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs Fever To Tell is a lot more punk-sounding than Show Your Bones and It's Blitz!.
• Yes: The first two albums count. Along with the unique playing styles of founding guitarist Peter Banks and founding keyboardist Tony Kaye, Yes specialized in re-arranged covers of Byrds, Beatles and Buffalo Springfield songs, while their originals showed more '60's pop influences. The band's second album, Time and a Word also incorporates orchestral accompaniment, which Yes would rarely use to such an extent until 2000's Magnification. Also, their breakthrough third release, The Yes Album, was Yes' first attempt at using synthesizers, and were used in a relatively subtle way; Kaye was reluctant to use them and otherwise preferred Hammond organ. Their multi-keyboard sound would not develop until the followup, Fragile, by which time Rick Wakeman would replace Kaye in the lineup.
• Chris Young's first three albums had a more neotraditional country sound with plenty of fiddle and steel guitar. A.M. saw him pivot to a more pop-influenced sound that he has continued with since.
• Zac Brown Band's major-label debut The Foundation is rife with this. Most of the songs are rerecordings of either material from their 2005 independent album or concert favorites from the same era, so (especially on "Chicken Fried", the debut single) the lyrics and sound are more formulaic. Overall, the band sounds more like a mix of Jimmy Buffett and Dave Matthews Band than the Genre Roulette present on their subsequent albums. The Foundation is also the only major-label album to feature little-known members Marcus Petruska and Joel Williams, who were respectively replaced by Chris Fryar and Coy Bowles by the time "Chicken Fried" was actually released. Since the album also predates the addition of Clay Cook, this also means that the vocal harmonies are only three-part instead of four-part, and the keyboard parts are played by session musicians. Finally, the track "It's Not OK" stands out as being their only song to date sung by someone other than Brown (it was instead sung by John Driskell Hopkins).
• Zoviet France: The first three albums by the industrial group were made up of the most aggressive and nauseating sounds recorded to tape. From animal growls and tortured screams to out of tune violins and pianos that sounded like they were played by mad men. They're now known for using homemade tape effects to create murky ambient/drone pieces, but they occasionally delve into their old style of Musique concrète.

Others

Formats

• Compact Cassettes went through a good deal of evolution on their way to late 20th century ubiquity.
  • The format was originally for dictation and amateur home recordings instead of music. Early recorders were mono and had no noise reduction, with the latter being invented in the late 1960s and introduced in high-end stereo decks around the start of the 1970s along with improved tape formulations, leading to cassettes emerging as an alternative to vinyl records for home listening by the late '70s.
  • The packaging of music cassettes also went through several iterations. Early cases were paperboard or plastic sleeves, sometimes with a snap case (paperboard sleeves would be retained for cassette singles). The liner notes were also limited to the front cover and tracklist on the assumption that, like 8-tracks, they would be used mainly with portable and car units. This only started to change around the turn of the decade when record companies noticed that cassettes were rivaling vinyl records for home listening, with plastic flip-top cases and foldout J-cards including full liner notes and interior artwork emerging. These became mostly standard for cassette releases after the early 1980s, when cassette sales overtook vinyl.
  • Another carryover from 8-tracks was the idea of an endless loop of music, albeit with the same sequence on the LP, which on cassette was achieved simply by recording the entire album on both sides and playing it in an auto-reversing deck or just flipping the tape in a deck that didn't auto-reverse. Some early U2 cassette releases used this method, including War (U2 Album).
• Like cassettes, the Compact Disc format was a much different beast in its early phases, stretching back to before it even made its official debut.
  • Prototype CDs took more after the vinyl records that they were made to supplant, featuring small, standardized labels in the hub area and LP-style pressboard sleeves; the official launch of the format would switch over to the more ubiquitous jewel cases, designed after the ones used for cassettes (though "mini LP" packaging would later catch on as a novel alternative).
  • From the format's launch up until the turn of the '90s, it was most common for CDs to still use standardized labels (occupying the whole of the disc face this time) thanks to silkscreen technology at the time only being able to accommodate one to three colors. Custom labels would be experimented with as soon as 1984, but it would take until the early 90's for most labels to phase out the standardized ones entirely (outside of re-pressings, CD singles, and promotional releases).
  • Early CDs also tended to have mirror bands, thin blank areas at or near the rim of a disc that provided a pure mirror effect; mostly this just served to give an extra aesthetic touch during the era of generic label designs. Since this took up usable space, CDs that clocked in at an hour or more would downsize or omit them. The mirror band was mostly phased out by 1993 thanks to a mix of custom labels becoming dominant, albums growing long enough to use most of the space on a disc, and it simply being easier to manufacture discs without the mirror bands.
  • CD packaging was also different early on too. Early jewel cases had smooth lid edges instead of ridged ones, and more significantly the cases had an extra layer of packaging in the form of 12"-tall "longboxes" intended for vinyl-oriented record store racks and out of an attempt to make them difficult to shoplift as well as attract buyers with large designs similar to LPs. These were eventually phased out in 1993 thanks to a mix of environmentalist pressure (since most people threw out the boxes after purchase), the boxes making shoplifting easier instead of deterring it (since shoplifters could stealthily remove the CDs and leave the boxes in place), jewel case-sized store racks becoming more common, label and retailer fears about consumers rejecting smaller jewel case sizes turning out to be unfounded, and newer, more effective forms of anti-shoplifting technology emerging.
  • Early double-CD sets used to come in either two individual cases stacked in a single longbox or a single fatbox. The former was phased out with the longbox, while the latter was supplanted by the advent of standard-sized cases with hinged trays (though fatboxes remain in place for releases of 3 or more CDs, assuming a digipak, digisleeve, or Boxed Set isn't used instead). Some releases both then and now feature individual cases in a single horizontal slipcase or just shrink-wrapped together, but these are comparatively rare.
  • Double-LP albums that exceeded a CD's original 74-minute runtime — or in more severe cases, PolyGram's 65-minute limit (as the 74-minute size was a last-minute expansion by Sony) — used to either edit down or remove tracks. Warner Music Group and Virgin Records, both frequent clients of PolyGram during the first half of the '80s, were serial offenders, where most other labels simply issued double-CD sets of double albums that didn't fit on one CD. This practice mostly died out after 80-minute CDs became widely available in the late '80s, though albums that still surpass that might rarely see edits. By that time, the commercial viablility of the CD format was more than proven, meaning that multi-disc sets weren't seen as much of a commercial risk as they were when the CD first launched.
  • CDs were originally designed with the ability to subdivide tracks into segments via an index-marking feature, mainly to distinguish movements in Classical Music releases. A few early releases on the format included this feature, both classical and non-classical (e.g. the first CD release of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here as part of the format's launch lineup in 1982, where each side of the LP was one twentysomething-minute track subdivided into the individual songs via index markers), but compatibility was quickly dropped from CD players afterward thanks to it being much simpler to just sequence tracks as Siamese Twin Songs.
  • From the format's launch through the early '90s, the back covers of CD releases carried three-letter SPARS (Society of Professional Audio Recording Services) codes indicating whether an album was recorded, mixed, or mastered on analog ("A") or digital ("D") equipment.^note Since CDs are digital, they are all "digitally mastered." Certain cassette and LP releases featured "AAA" SPARS codes, but these are scarce compared to the ones that lacked codes altogether. This practice was also abandoned in the mid-90s outside of an increasingly small handful of labels; by then, digital recording became more widespread, SPARS themselves realized that the codes oversimplified the production process, and record companies realized that no one really cared except for audiophiles.
• Even vinyl records went through this:
  • The earliest vinyl records were actually 78 rpm ones, replacing prior shellac discs due to the latter material becoming scarce during World War II. Most of these were for V-Discs issued to the Armed Forces, though they later lingered around during and after the rise of their 12" and 7" successors, first for people who couldn't afford to upgrade their sets and then as novelty releases. Before the war, vinyl had also been the standard for radio transcription discs.
  • The earliest pop music LP records were 10" discs, matching the size of their 78 rpm counterparts, and featured much greater gaps between tracks, while 12" discs were marketed to classical listeners. The assumption was that popular music listeners would prefer shorter albums, but they increasingly demanded more music on LPs like classical listeners had. In order to maximize the amount of music that could be included, the 10" discs were phased out in favor of 12" discs, and between-track gaps became far smaller.
  • RCA Records introduced the 7", 45 rpm record as a competitor to Columbia Records' LP (incidentally a successor to RCA's failed experiments with long-playing discs) in 1949; an album comprised several discs similarly to the 78 rpm albums that already existed. RCA relegated the 7" format to singles after it became clear that record buyers overwhelmingly preferred LP albums because they only needed one disc.

Genres

• Black Metal as a genre also went through this trope. The early first-wave black metal (called "extreme metal") was basically a very raw Thrash Metal with shades of Death Metal, Speed Metal, Doom Metal, Sludge Metal, Hardcore Punk, Punk Rock, Post-Punk and proto-Grunge, and the Satanic themes were written for the purpose of shock value instead of actually depicting the band's beliefs.
• Death Metal: the earliest examples of the genre could more accurately be described as very heavy Thrash Metal. The music isn't quite as aggressive and technically demanding, and the vocals are raspy shouts and snarls instead of the "cookie monster" growls normally associated with the genre. Death's 'Scream Bloody Gore'' is frequently pointed to as the point where death metal began to separate from thrash and become its own genre, and Morbid Angel and Deicide further refined the style.
• Heavy Metal as a whole can be considered to have this, at least for the mainstream. One of the most well known traits of heavy metal music is that of blistering speed and a sense of power & guitar virtuosity, and it's something that metal artists since the late 1970s were championing as one of the best aspects of the genre. Yet the band considered to have kickstarted metal music, Black Sabbath, is near universally known for how slow and gloomy their music was (a trait which made them extraordinarily popular in the Punk Rock and 80s alternative underground). These elements in their music, along with their downer and much more personal lyrical themes (at least compared to what was standard for heavy metal in the '80s), helped give rise to Doom Metal and even Grunge to an extent, but until these came about, "slow-tempo heavy metal" would've been seen as an oxymoron save for Glam Metal power ballads or deliberately "Sabbath-esque" songs from non-doom metal bands— and because Doom Metal has never had a large mainstream presence, a very sizable number of mainstream rock & metal fans still perceive Sabbath's sound (as well as the style of their proto-metal contemporaries such as Blue Cheer, Deep Purple, and Led Zeppelin) as Early-Installment Weirdness.
• Eurobeat wasn't always the high-speed, "drive fast and drift through mountain passes" music that it's known as today. The early generations of Eurobeat from the 1980s and early 1990s are characterized more by slower tempos (around 120-135 BPM) and a feel closer to contemporary pop music, owing to its Italo Disco roots.

Labels

• Dualtone Records was originally a country music label, having released albums by David Ball, McBride & the Ride, Radney Foster, and Chely Wright among others; their first chart hit was Ball's late-2001 single "Riding with Private Malone". Over time, the country artists were replaced by more folk artists such as Shovels & Rope and The Lumineers.

Series

• Give 'Em The Boot, a series of Punk Rock, Hardcore Punk, and Ska Punk compilations put out by Hellcat Records, had an Idiosyncratic Cover Art theme that only started with Give 'Em The Boot II: Every album after the first looks identical except for color schemes and a roman numeral under the title. Give 'Em The Boot II itself is the only volume to have an Album Intro Track, namely a stock sound effect of a yowling cat to go with the name of the record label.
• Super Eurobeat: The Eurobeat compilation series was, for its first ten installments, actually a compilation of Italo-disco, a predecessor genre to Eurobeat that is much slower and more serious.

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