New Sound Album

From straightforward Rock & Roll to eclectically whimsical Psychedelic Rock; makes it hard to tell that it's the same band.

"This album shocked fans by not sounding exactly like our previous album ... Which in turn didn't sound like the previous album, which also didn't sound like the album before that... etc..."

— Tub Ring

So, there's Band X. Band X has become popular and generally well-received by critics quite a while ago and are known for a certain style.

However, Band X decide to do something completely different for their next album, for whatever reason. Maybe they're tired and believe they've taken their style to the limit. Maybe they're afraid of being one-trick ponies. Maybe it's Executive Meddling. Regardless, the result will be a change of style. This can be either a total Genre Shift, general simplification for bands with highly complex styles (thrash metal, prog rock, etc.), more prog tendencies for simple pop-rock bands, or sometimes even becoming purely pop bands, whatever. The point is that they will continue with this style for a period, to either continued success or diminishing returns.

Cue shock and They Changed It, Now It Sucks! from parts of the fanbase, along with a whole spectrum of opinions from others.

The New Sound Album represents an album where a band generally known for a certain style backs away from its roots and makes a radical change, if not a total Genre Shift. Reactions to this tend to vary. There's always a segment of the fanbase that says They Changed It, Now It Sucks! and labels them as sellouts, even ignoring that sometimes the band honestly admits to wanting a change. In other parts there's a whole range of reactions, from mixed to positive. In the worst case the album will divide a fanbase into Old Guard Versus New Blood, and in the best case a majority of fans will enjoy both periods of the band's career. When this happens, fans will usually cite the album as a case of Growing the Beard. Often times, the New Sound Album serves as a springboard into a new phase (genre-wise) of the band's career, when looked at in retrospect.

Contrast Formula-Breaking Episode, where the change is usually temporary, and the artist goes back to their old sound with the next album. Also see Creator's Oddball.

---

Examples

Bands and Artists 0-G

• You may remember the group 4hero for the breakbeat techno song "Mr Kirk's Nightmare" back in the early 90's. Well, in 2007, following a six-year hiatus, they made a complete Genre Shift to downtempo and nu-jazz with the appropriately named Play with the Changes.
• "A" went for a similar trend-chasing shift from unique melodic punkiness to full on The Offspring/Green Day style pop-punk... and subverted it by actually being quite good, recognisably the same The Beach Boys -inspired band that made How Ace Are Buildings and A Vs Monkey Kong, and scoring some commercial success. Then subverting it even harder by sticking with a slight refinement of the same theme for Teen Dance Ordinance, somehow getting nowhere with anyone, and splitting out of frustration.
• Aerosmith's Permanent Vacation saw the band employing outside songwriters for the first time and switching to the slicker, poppier, MTV-ready sound that would distinguish their later-period work, all while keeping their blues-based Hard Rock roots intact.
  • Indeed, for about 25 years, they just kept exploring the same hard rock/blues rock material they started with, refining and adding elements of pop rock, funk, hip hop, whatever they could, with varying degrees of success. That was all progression. Just Push Play on the other hand definitely seems to count.
• aespa's third mini-album My World moved away from the hard-edged sounds of their previous work. This was inevitable without Yoo Young-Jin, the songwriter and producer who helmed their previous work, as he had left SM Entertainment prior to the album's completion.
• AFI started off as a derivative hardcore punk band (a la Black Flag) but switched to a hugely innovative blend of post-hardcore, Emo, hardcore punk and alternative rock (exemplified with 1999's 'Black Sails In The Sunset'), they then perfected that new sound with 'Sing The Sorrow' (one of the key albums of early 2000's post-hardcore) and 'Decemberunderground' and have now gone to straightforward New Wave Music/Punk with 'Crash Love' and then to The Sisters of Mercy-style operatic rock with 'Burials'.
• A Flock of Seagulls switched from New Wave rock to late 1980s dance pop with Dream Come True in 1986.
• The All-American Rejects started as a pop-punk band similar to blink-182. Move Along saw them move to a heavier area of pop-punk, while When the World Comes Down emphasized more simple pop melodies and Kids in the Street had an emphasis on 80's-throwback power pop.
• Alter Bridge: Started out with what sounded like Classic Hard Rock, then gradually moved towards a darker, heavier sound on every subsequent album- hitting its current (as of 2024) peak with Fortress, backing off a bit for The Last Hero and Walk the Sky... only to come smashing back to that same peak, this time with even more prog flavor in Pawns & Kings.
• Daniel Amos started off in 1975 with a self-titled country album. They considered themselves a rock band, with the country just being a temporary phase, so their followup Shotgun Angel mixed it with an ambitious rock opera. It was their third album, Horrendous Disc, that signaled their complete abandonment of country, and let fans know to expect more surprises in the future. Then they switched to New Wave with ¡Alarma!, then to 90s alt-rock on Kalhöun, with a brief diversion into psychedelic rock on Motorcycle.
• Tori Amos - Her three albums The Beekeeper, American Doll Posse, and Abnormally Attracted to Sin depart from her signature piano-based sound. The Beekeeper is a mixture of baroque pop and blue-eyed soul, American Doll Posse is alternative rock, and Abnormally Attracted to Sin is a mixture of electronica, baroque pop, and alternative rock. May fans dislike those albums (especially The Beekeeper). Also, her last three albums from the '90s count too. Boys for Pele is very minimalistic; the majority of songs on the album lack a bassline and a drum beat. from the choirgirl hotel is a mixture of electronica and alternative rock. To Venus and Back is even more electronic. These albums however, are way more popular with fans.
• Infamous grindcore band Anal Cunt, who made it their mission to offend everyone with over-the-top aggressive lyrics condoning racism, homophobia, sexism, violence, etc., put out Picnic of Love, the most deliberately inoffensive album ever. In place of songs like "Women: Nature's Punching Bag," we're treated to songs such as "I Respect Your Feelings as a Woman and a Human." Aside from the lyrics, the music, itself, is also considerably Lighter and Softer, featuring acoustic guitars and Seth Putnam's signature squealing and screaming is replaced with an almost Elmo-esque falsetto.
  • Meanwhile, Fuckin' A was meant to be their take on "cock rock" — the songs were longer than usual, and were in the style of retro Hard Rock rather than grindcore (fittingly, the cover art is a parody of Mötley Crüe's Too Fast For Love). Seth Putnam's usual vocal style and shock value lyrics remained, albeit with more emphasis on typical hard rock subject matter like sex, drugs / alcohol, and rock and roll - song titles included "Whiskey, Coke and Sluts" and "Crankin' My Band's Demo on a Box On The Beach".
• Every single album Animal Collective ever released did that.
• The Answer changed direction after five albums of bluesy hard rock with their sixth, "Solas", introducing a more traditionally Irish-influenced sound incorporating mandolins and bouzouki (although the guitars were still present, just not as prominent as on earlier work). While many of their fans praised the new direction, others who preferred their harder edge have derided this record, showing signs of a broken base.
• Apoptygma Berzerk were originally straight-up Industrial EBM, but went into the Lighter and Softer Futurepop subgenre starting with Welcome to Earth, and with You and Me Against the World (2005) and Rocket Science (2009), they completely jumped ship to indie-style synth rock. 2016's Exit Popularity Contest, however, shifted back towards their electronic industrial roots.
• Aqua's third album, Megalomania, was a major shift from their usual light-hearted Eurodance into a more "grown-up" electropop sound. It was not well-received: as a critic put it, "they now sound like every other generic dance-pop outfit out there", and some old fans mockingly call the band "Black Eyed Peas 2.0".
• The Aquabats!, on their 1999 album The Aquabats vs. the Floating Eye of Death, radically changed direction from the ska style of their first two albums (released in 1996 and 1997), featuring no ska and a reduced use of brass instruments in favor of guitar and keyboard-driven New Wave-influenced rock and punk. The band continues to maintain this style, and in 2005, they released Charge!!, the first album which not only introduced a smaller five-member line-up but didn't feature any of the horns they once used in the '90s.
• Arctic Monkeys' Humbug, a Pink Floyd -influenced psychedelic album, quite different from the frantic garage-rock of their previous material.
  • Their 2011 album Suck It And See is also much softer change from their earlier sound.
  • Their 2013 album AM is sort of a cross between Humbug and Suck It and See, with some R&B influences.
  • And then in 2018 came Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, a Sophistipop Concept Album with a science fiction bent.
• Death Metal band Autopsy did this constantly. The debut Severed Survival was fast and thrashy, while Mental Funeral was much more slow and doomy. Third album Acts of the Unspeakable moved more in the direction of Grindcore and Shitfun was basically Hardcore Punk.
• Avenged Sevenfold started as pure Metalcore on "Sounding the Seventh Trumpet" before adding cleaner vocals on their sophomore album "Waking the Fallen". But their biggest change came on "City of Evil", which contained clear vocals and musically mixed old-school Thrash Metal with the melodic ferocity, breakdowns, and Pop Punk/Post-Hardcore elements of modern-day Metalcore. Their self titled album continued in this direction, although it was more polished. This rankled some fans, as well as having many examples of an Out-of-Genre Experience such as the Danny Elfman style "A Little Piece of Heaven"^note which even had horn arrangements by Oingo Boingo guitarist/co-arranger Steve Bartek and the country ballad "Dear God". "Nightmare" was released after the death of drummer "The Rev" and was more reflective, as well as featuring a piano ballad called "Fiction" and the pure Metalcore (screamed lyrics and all) of "God Hates Us". Then there was "Hail to the King" — which has been described by lead singer M Shadows as "more Blues Rock-influenced and more like classic rock and classic metal in the vein of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin". Their seventh album The Stage switched their style again, this time to Progressive Metal, complete with Epic Rocking, and included elements of Thrash Metal as well as their old Metalcore sound.
• Backseat Goodbye and The Good Years. It diverges from his previous sound of pop-folk to a more solid folk-country (with pop elements). Some people thought it sucked, some were like "cool, whatever."
• Bad Religion did this in Into The Unknown, then went back again to their old style, progressing into a new sound in a more subtle way. They made another big change in The New America, and their fanbase still argues if it's a great record or if it's a case of They Changed It, Now It Sucks!.
  • Into the Unknown has since become the band's Old Shame, to the point that it is the only one of their early albums not to be re-issued on CD.
• Basshunter's fourth album, Calling Time, was criticized for leaning more towards commercial EDM, athough it still includes a few tunes in his classic hard Eurotrance style.
• The Beach Boys evolved away from surf-rock by 1964, but fully went baroque pop with what's considered their masterpiece, Pet Sounds. They went back to simplicity later due to intra-band conflict and drug abuse.
  • Though Carl and the Passions – "So Tough" and Holland would fit this trope. It's justified though, as Bruce Johnston left as they started making the former album, and Blondie Chaplin and Ricky Fataar joined the band.
• Beastie Boys have done this a few times. First with Paul's Boutique they moved away from their more rap rock-oriented sound into eclectic genre hopping. Check Your Head and Ill Communication saw the band return to their roots as a late '70s hardcore punk band and integrating live instruments, resulting in a more alternative rock sound. Hello Nasty returned the band to rap, but added influences of electronica and club dance music. To the 5 Boroughs featured a return to a more alternative rap sound. Their final album, Hot Sauce Committee Part 2, continued with a more stripped down version of what they were doing on To the 5 Boroughs.
• The Beatles did it all the time. They may even have been the Trope Namer and Trope Codifier for rock 'n' roll. It first happened with Rubber Soul, which took on a folkier sound than the band's previous outings. Then it became most notable from Revolver on, where more psychedelic sounds started to come in. The song "Eleanor Rigby" has classical strings instead of rock arrangements. Their next album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was a total change in image. They appeared as a Fake Band, made a Concept Album and used a lot of sound effects and tape loops. Magical Mystery Tour continued the psychedelica. It was followed by The White Album which showed a more intimate, acoustic side at times, with songs in about every possible genre and mood. With Abbey Road they combined a more baroque sound with a Medley on side B. Let It Be was straightforward rock and had some live tracks.
• Beck, on every single album.
  • Banjo Story (his first full-length album) - Banjo-based lo-fi Freak Folk (interestingly enough, the album released in 1988, almost a decade before it became a named subgenre!)
  • The oft-forgotten Fuck Iowa - A collection of Punk Rock and Heavy Metal, with the occasional step into Spoken Word.
  • Golden Feelings - A bizzaro hodgepodge of straightforward Folk, Noise Rock , Heavy Metal, Punk Rock and Freak Folk, all joined together by production that sounds like early Ween if all the amps had been slashed and thrown down the stairs before recording and the tapes were then played backwards and corrupted. This was his Signature Style for a good few demo tapes before the album's release, and crossed over into it's direct successor Stereopathic Soulmanure.
  • One Foot in the Grave - Lo-Fi Folk/Folk-Rock.
  • Mellow Gold acts as a culmination of sorts to everything he did between 1988 to 1994, containing everything from Hip-Hop to Folk, to Freak Folk, to Rock 'n' Roll, to Drum 'n' Bass to psychedelia to Heavy Metal to... whatever the hell Sweet Sunshine is, all wrapped up in slightly more conventional production.
  • Odelay - Beck combining hip-hop-esque production from The Dust Brothers, sampling everything from Bob Dylan to obscure Sex Education films from the 60's, mixed with pretty much every other genre known to man, creating the Genre Mashup classic we know and love.
  • Mutations - A more conventional mixture of Folk Rock, Blues Rock and Psychedelic Folk.
  • Midnite Vultures - To put it simply, the Hotter and Sexier version of Odelay: to expand, a mixtape of that album's Genre Mashup sensibilities, this time with Funk, R&B, Hip-Hop, with a little bit of Jazz thrown in there for good measure.
  • Sea Change - A nonstop Tearjerker of a Folk Rock album, inspired by the likes of Nick Cave , Elliott Smith and Bob Dylan's Seminal album. It's widely considered his masterpiece and is one of the most popular 'breakup albums' ever produced.
  • From Guero onward, he's no longer been radically changing his sound on each release: but maybe it only seems that way, because (by now) he's already explored every possible genre, and even then most albums since then have innovated his sound in some way.
  • The Information - Whilst partly just Beck doing his thing, the album boasts heavy Psychedelic Hip-Hop elements.
  • Modern Guilt - Alternative Rock with some elements of Prog, with a heavy emphasis on apocalyptic lyrics.
  • Morning Phase - Standard Folk Rock.
  • Colors - Radio-friendly Dance-Pop, creating a sizable Broken Base in the process.
  • 'Hyperspace'' - Minimalist Psyche-synth-pop, notable for being almost completely unrecognizable from anything Beck's done before, showing that, even 31 years into his career, he still refuses to settle down!
• The Bee Gees started out as very skiffle/folk-influenced on their earliest recordings, moved to a Beatlesque sound for their 1967 international debut album, Bee Gees 1st, explored Progressive Rock on 1969's Odessa, adopted a more singer-songwriter-like sound for 2 Years On in 1972, then explored a Philadelphia Soul sound for 1974's Mr. Natural. Its followup, 1975's Main Course established their well-known mix of soulful ballads and Disco. 1987's E.S.P. saw them move to a more dance-pop sound. Their last few albums, Still Waters and This Is Where I Came In straddled more to all of these sounds.
• Behemoth started incorporating Death Metal into their mostly up to that point Black Metal sound in the album Satanica, and have continued this movement on each subsequent album.
• Dierks Bentley recorded a bluegrass album, Up on the Ridge, in 2010. It was a radical departure from his mainstream country music sound. Although the album netted him the most critical acclaim of his career, its singles completely failed to take off at radio. The album is also notable for being his first with Jon Randall as producer instead of Brett Beavers; Randall also produced the next album, Home, which is more in line with Dierks' usual style. It happened again in 2014 with Riser, which has a more rock-influenced production from Ross Copperman.
• Beyoncé did this with 4, moving away (not entirely, but largely) from hip-hop and dance music, going more towards old-style R'n'B and orchestral music. Then there was her self-titled album, which saw her shift to the newly-created and rapidly rising PBR&B genre, heavily influenced by Hip-Hop and Electronic Music. Then Lemonade came out flirting with many genres from Garage Rock, Soul Music, Trap Rap, and even Country music. Her seventh studio album, Renaissance (2022), put her back into the pop sphere but with more of a dance influence than her previous pop music.
• At the suggestion of their manager, The B-52s debuted a new, more electronic-based sound with the EP Mesopotamia and subsequent album Whammy! The departure from the low-fi punk/garage sound of their first two albums led to somewhat of a Broken Base. Cosmic Thing went for a more pop rock-esque sound with forays into Jangle Pop.
• Justin Bieber's Purpose sheds the bubblegum pop genre he was previously known for in favor of a more mature and edgy sound.
• Björk often changes her sound with every album, Medúlla being a very audacious experiment: an album with mostly A Cappella singing. Her recent releases, Volta, Biophilia, and Vulnicura may have used similar timbres, but with wide-ranging investigations of beat and environmental sound sources included.
• When Black Flag started they were a regular 2-minute Hardcore Punk band (all of their early singles/extended plays and the Damaged album); when they broke up they had 10 minute free style jazz jams (The Process of Weeding Out instrumental EP) and a more heavy metal/hard rock sound (the Loose Nut and In My Head albums in particular).
  • The bands second LP, My War, released a little more than two years after Damaged, featured three 6 minute songs on the B-side that later influenced the sludge metal genre.
• Black Rebel Motorcycle Club started out with a loud, aggressive "rock revival" sound with noise rock and psychedelic influences. With Howl, they suddenly shifted to an acoustic-based Americana folk-rock sound influenced by blues, country and gospel. Baby 81 returned to the rock sound, and after the ambient instrumental album The Effects of 333, Beat the Devil's Tattoo was a sort of middle ground between the two sounds.
• Black Sabbath's first six albums were based on huge heavy riffs with bits of sophistication sprinkled on top. Their sixth album Sabotage features the heaviest Black Sabbath song, "Symptom of the Universe", which is often considered to be the first thrash song. Their seventh album, Technical Ecstasy? A great deal of the heaviness was gone, as well as the general apocolyptica that was dominent in Sabbath's earlier work and set them apart.
  • Heaven and Hell, their first album with Ronnie James Dio, certainly counts. It returned to the heavy metal sound from before Ecstasy but largely downplayed the psychedelic and Doom Metal influences from the Ozzy years in favor of more traditional metal, Power Metal and even Speed Metal influences (doomy songs were however still written, just a lot less).
• Black Veil Brides switched from Metalcore to modern day Hair Metal on their second album, and have stuck with this ever since.
• Mary J. Blige had a pretty consistent sound in all of her albums for over twenty years, being R&B with hip-hop influences. Then 2014's The London Sessions, recorded in London with prominent UK producers such as Disclosure and Naughty Boy, changed to a very British-influenced sound, with UK garage, deep house, and grime in the place of her normal style. This quite possibly makes her the first American artist to preform this style of music.
• blink-182 did this with their 2003 self-titled album. The band wanted to make a "serious" album after years of pop-punk and lighthearted lyrics about proms and humping dogs. The result of this was an emo/post hardcore-influenced sound.
  • Also, when frontman Tom Delonge went on to form Angels & Airwaves, which was radically different in nature from Blink.
• Bloc Party's debut album Silent Alarm was well received and known for its heavy use of guitars and was generally considered an example of a good indie album. As the band's career progressed they released A Weekend in the City and Intimacy, two albums with increasingly dancier music and less emphasis on guitars and other standard indie fare.
• Bloodrock started out as a hard rock band, albeit one that frequently employed Progressive Rock-esque organ playing and Epic Rocking. Passage saw them adopting a full-on prog rock sound without much use of distorted guitar, partially due to vocalist Jim Rutledge and lead guitarist Lee Pickens leaving the group and vocalist/flute player Warren Ham joining. The new sound stuck until their breakup one album later, and the newer lineup of the band had Creator Backlash towards much of their earlier material, especially morbid Signature Song "D.O.A.".
• Blur started as a roughly Madchester-style band with Leisure, before transitioning to Britpop with Modern Life Is Rubbish. Their later career basically consisted of four of these: Blur took inspiration from American indie rock and lo-fi bands such as Pavement, 13 continued into more experimental territory, and Think Tank was kind of like 13, but with more electronic influences. Their comeback album The Magic Whip had lots of experimentation as well, taking cues from Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon's solo work, their Britpop career, and even David Bowie's Berlin trilogy. Their 2023 album The Ballad of Darren meanwhile takes inspiration from lounge, chamber music, and baroque pop.
• Boards of Canada's first two main releases, Music Has the Right to Children and Geogaddi, which were laden with warm synthesizer sounds, were both greatly adored and critically acclaimed albums. Their third release, The Campfire Headphase which utilized guitar and a more pastoral sound, was released to a mixed reception. However, their fourth album, Tomorrow's Harvest, went back to their original sound.
• Bon Jovi had two, maybe justified as the lineup underwent a slight change and lead singer/writer Jon aged and mellowed a little — and they went after the changing tastes of ladies more their own age (Hair Metal always being, in the end, all about the ladies)... but, the stylistic shift experienced between the classic but ironically titled Keep The Faith, and newer, poppier, mushier Crush (with "These Days" as a confused, halfway turning point, and "Crossroads" being a sort of "this is the Best Of the OLD Bon Jovi, now watch as we change it all") is still a heck of a jolt for male fans who enjoyed the heavier, more traditional rock flavour of their first 15 or so years. Those two start the Broken Base, with women (stereotypically) liking the new phase and rockers (of both genders) the old one.
  • There is also Lost Highway, the band's attempt at a country album, though most people don't hold it in high regard.
• Bone Thugs-n-Harmony (just about every new release?)
• The Boo Radleys did this a lot. Their studio albums went approximately, Shoegazing -> Dub-and-psychedelia-inflected Genre-Busting -> melodic pop -> rock -> melodic pop again, but with a bit of big beat thrown in.
• Japanese stoner metal band Boris seem to shift their style quite frequently. The first album was the hour long drone and noise albums Absolutego and Amplifier Worship then followed with a more post-rock sounding drone album Flood. The following albums Akuma No Uta and Heavy Rocks seem to follow a more stoner metal approach which has become part of their staple sound. They have also released more noise based albums with Merzbow, a J-pop/J-rock album New Album and have experimented with other styles throughout their extensive discography.
  • Taken further with the release of their album Vein which was released in two identical versions that are nearly impossible to tell the difference of. One version of the album is a noise album, and the other version is hardcore punk.
• David Bowie many times, to the point where it became his biggest hallmark as a musician. In order of significant ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, his first self-titled album was 1960s British pop with touches of music hall fare, and then he moved on to...
  • Psychedelic Folk Rock (Space Oddity)
  • Heavy Metal (The Man Who Sold the World)
  • Art Rock (Hunky Dory)
  • GlamRock (The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars)
  • Blue-eyed Soul (Young Americans)
  • Disco-rock (Station to Station)
  • Electronic proto-Post-Punk Krautrock (Low)
  • Goth Rock-influenced New Wave (Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps))
  • Pop rock (Let's Dance)
  • Hard Rock/Grunge (The two albums he recorded with Tin Machine)
  • Electronica-influenced art rock (Black Tie White Noise)
  • Industrial rock/electronica (1. Outside)
  • Drum and bass (Earthling)
  • Neoclasical art rock ('hours...')
  • Mainstream Alternative Rock (Reality)
  • Jazz fusion and modern electronic music (★)
• The band Brand New changes their entire style each album. "Your Favorite Weapon" was pure pop punk and emo with quick witted lyrics and power chords. Their follow up "Deja Entendu" was much closer to post-hardcore emo, and featured literary lyrics, more mature song writting and a much darker sound. They than increased the darkness ten fold on "The Devil and God are Raging inside me" which featured an abrasive mix of emo, post-hardcore, screamo, indie folk, and art rock. "Daisy" continued with this sound with more emphasis on the screamo and art rock aspects. Finally ending with "Science Fiction" making major influence from slower art rock
• Few bands have been as successful with continually updating their sound as Bring Me the Horizon has. Starting out as a rather generic and derivative Deathcore band on Count Your Blessings; they had all the typical trappings of the genre such as breakdowns, pig squealed and high pitched screams. They than made a huge leap forward with Suicide Season: switching towards straight Metalcore with much improved and more emotional screaming, better use of breakdowns and occasional use of ambient music. They got much more ambitious on their next album There is a Hell..., which featured more elements of Post-Rock, Baroque Pop style orchestras, glitched out vocals, and electronic beats. Finally they surprised everyone with the now critically acclaimed Sempiternal which fully integrates their metalcore and electronic sides with more mature song writing to create a unique sound. Then they pulled a complete one-eighty with That's the Spirit, which saw them ditching metalcore entirely in favor of lighter, poppier, electronic-tinged Nu Metal. They may be closer to rock than metal now, but it's given them their biggest success.
• BT has changed sounds several times. His first album Ima was deep/progressive house, then he changed to drum&bass/trance/ambient/trip-hop for ESCM and Movement in Still Life, then Emotional Technology was pop-trance, electro, and rock ballads. This Binary Universe was a complete Genre Shift to experimental ambient and new age material (influenced by Creator Breakdown due to his equipment being stolen and his daughter's kidnapping), then These Hopeful Machines ventured back down the Emotional Technology route, as well as incorporating elements of IDM and glitch-hop. If the Stars Are Eternal So are You and I and Morceau Subrosa are ambient follow-ups to TBU, while A Song Across Wires is straight-up contemporary EDM.
• In a case of New Sound Career, after the squeaky-clean British boy band Busted split, member Charlie Simpson formed the critically acclaimed post-hardcore band Fightstar. And then in 2011, while on hiatus from Fightstar, he released his first solo album...a collection of acoustic folk songs.
• Butthole Surfers were initially known for psychedelic noise rock, but slowly started sliding towards more conventional alternative rock as time went on. The real big change in sound came with Lost Episode album After The Astronaut (and The Weird Revolution, which had revamped versions of many of the same songs) - their sound became much more electronic and danceable, although Word Salad Lyrics and some sophomoric humor remained. The change wasn't entirely out of the blue though - their contribution to the Spawn soundtrack had them working with Moby, while "Whatever (I Had A Dream)" from William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet had a heavy trip-hop influence. Their Black Sheep Hit "Pepper", often compared (or just plain misattributed) to Beck, could be considered a precursor too. And finally, much earlier than any of this, there was The Jackofficers, an obscure and short-lived experimental electronic side project of members Gibby Haynes and Jeff Pinkus, who put out one album in 1990.
• The Byrds started out as a folk-rock group, but once it neared being a Dead Horse Genre they moved to psychedelic pop-rock with Fifth Dimension. They later shifted to traditionalist country rock with Sweetheart of the Rodeo.
• John Cale reinvented himself several times, perhaps the first noticeable break with tradition being 1979's Sabotage/Live, his response to punk and foreign policy. Then he released an awful 80's pop album, Caribbean Sunset. He then released an album of classical interpretations of his previous catalogue, Fragments of a Rainy Season. More recently he's into hard rock (Circus Live).
• Captain Beefheart: His early albums, Safe as Milk and Strictly Personal already sounded different compared to other blues rock albums of the time, with surreal lyrics and psychedelic sounds as the prime reasons. However, this was nothing compared to Trout Mask Replica, where Beefheart virtually re-invented music by creating surreal poetry with dissonant musical arrangements that was way ahead of its time. Unconditionally Guaranteed and Bluejeans & Moonbeams, on the other hand, were Beefheart at his most mainstream friendly with a total lack of all his Avant-Garde Music trademarks.
• Caravan Palace is known primarily as an Electro Swing group, but they've managed to get a lot of diverse sonic mileage out of it with each of their albums.
  • Their debut Self-Titled Album remains in probably having the purest depiction of swing, emphasizing live acoustic jazz and Big Band instrumentals alongside the French House and techno elements that would define them.
  • Panic has a much Lighter and Softer bend, still featuring plenty of pop and jazz elements, but with a production style that skewed from the danceable, rustic grit of its predecessor to something focusing more on subtle, laid-back grooves, featuring some of their most gentle and serene songs to date.
  • <|°_°|> (also known as Robot Face) featured a much darker dive into more cinematic genres, experimenting more with moodier melodies, soundscapes, and with twinges inspired by House Music, Drum and Bass, and even Hip-Hop.
  • Chronologic marks the band's closest it's gotten to traditional pop, featuring more emphasis on vocal features and songwriting akin to mainstream Electronic Dance Music, but still informed by their mix of vintage Big Band sounds with modern electronic production.
• The Cardigans went considerably Darker and Edgier for their fourth album Gran Turismo, which had more of a focus on electronics. Then their next album Long Gone Before Daylight switched again, to a style influenced by alt-country.
• Mariah Carey is easily this. Her debut album, Mariah Carey incorporated 80s synths with slight R&B dance vibes. It switched to a 50s/60s/70s Disco/Soul vibe in Emotions, which then suddenly changed into Adult Contemporary mellow-sounding ballads for Music Box. Daydream started to lean more towards modern, underground music and incorporated, and fused, pop, R&B, hip-hop and AC. Butterfly later dropped the noticeable Adult Contemporary aspects and went for a heavy R&B/hip-hop sound with slight pop/AC leanings (like 75% R&B/hip-hop, 25% pop). This eventually turned into full R&B/Hip-hop with a bit of pop (90% r&b/hip-hop, 10% pop) during Rainbow, where there was some pop but only because she was really popular at the time. It dropped the AC leanings completely. Then came the infamous Glitter which utilized a myriad of rappers and incorporated a bunch of 80s pop samples creating some weird 80s influence r&b/hip-hop with modern day rap. Then, during Charmbracelet she had slight r&b/hip-hop leanings and returned back to her old AC style only for her to return back to full R&B/Hip-Hop for The Emancipation of Mimi. Then, for E=MC2, she adopted... whatever was popular in 2008 and used some reggae/dance hall music and returned to a more familiar pop/r&b/hip-hop/dance sound. Finally, for Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel she utilized an R&B style with heavily, electronic instrumentation which had some 80s influences. So, in short, we have:
  • 80s pop with R&B/Dance vibes (Mariah Carey)
  • 50s/60s/70s Soul/Disco/Pop (Emotions)
  • Adult Contemporary (Music Box)
  • AC/Pop with some mixture of R&B/Hip-Hop (Daydream)
  • Mostly R&B/Hip-Hop with some pop leanings (Butterfly)
  • Heavily R&B/Hip-Hop with little pop leanings (''Rainbow')
  • 80s R&B/Hip-Hop/Dance Pop with modern day rappers/rap styles (Glitter)
  • AC with some R&B/Hip-Hop leanings (Charmbracelet)
  • Full R&B/Hip-Hop (The Emancipation of Mimi)
  • Current trends in Pop/R&B/Hip-Hop/Dance (E=MC2)
  • R&B/Hip-Hop with 80s Electronic Keyboards/Synths (Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel)
• Wendy Carlos: Switched-On Bach was considered to be a controversial and unprecedented album for it played Classical Music, namely Johann Sebastian Bach, on a Moog synthesizer. Despite all criticism from purists it still managed to become a bestseller with many sequels.
• Vanessa Carlton, otherwise known as "that girl who sang A Thousand Miles" to most people, moved away from her pop roots to an indie label for Rabbits on the Run. Only the initial track, Carousel, is reminiscent of the past, and even it hints at the more atmospheric sound that would define the rest of the album. The woman who once sang about chasing after boys now sings about not wanting to be a bride and the distinction between love and marriage.
• Cave In started out primarily as a metalcore band. With the Creative Eclipses EP and followup album Jupiter, they started embracing more of a Space Rock sound, and lead vocalist Stephen Brodsky started eschewing Harsh Vocals entirely due to fear of damaging his voice. Then Antenna, their only major label album, was another shift towards Alternative Metal, albeit with some hints of space rock remaining. After being dropped from RCA, they started combining elements of all three of the above styles, with bassist Caleb Scofield taking the lead whenever a song requires Harsh Vocals: Antenna's followup, Perfect Pitch Black, could be described as shoegazing alternative metalcore space rock.
• Celtic Frost started out as a straight-up heavy metal band of the black/death style, with a Venom look. Then they incorporated electronica into their sound, a heresy at the time. Then they came out of nowhere with 'Cold Lake', which had them looking like a hair metal band and with a glam rock sound. Then they came out again with a new school black metal sound, their current incarnation, with a different band member singing and a more Rob Zombie-esque visual look.
• Ray Charles: Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music broke new ground by incorporating country music in Charles' regular R&B sound. He made a crossover to both audiences as a result.
• Chicago is well known for their transition from being an experimental "rock band with horns" in the '70s to a ballad-heavy and synth-heavy band in the '80s, with the transition point being Chicago X, with Throw It In! ballad "If You Leave Me Now" becoming their first number 1 hit.
• Childish Gambino had already been shifting away from the over-the-top lyrics he was known for by 2013, culminating in because the internet having a decidedly alternative feel to it. He made an even bigger shift when he didn't rap at all on "Awaken, My Love!" which was funk and R&B rather than hip-hop.
• Chiodos has done this multiple times. Their first few EPs were emo-tinged pop rock with some post-hardcore influences, with the first full length album All's Well That Ends Well going straight into post-hardcore territory. The second full length Bone Palace Ballet had more influences from classical music (with some gothic tinges in certain songs). 2010's Illuminaudio is alternative rock with electronic influences.
• The soundtrack to Cirque du Soleil's Amaluna is very different from that of their previous shows, featuring many heavy metal/hard rock tunes, with touches of electronica/techno elements and their traditional contemporary classical sounds.
• Clan of Xymox began as Dark Wave, then after their first couple albums renamed themselves Xymox and switched to a Lighter and Softer Alternative Dance type sound. Upon reforming as Clan of Xymox in 1997, they changed style again to straight Goth Rock with minimal synthesizers. In Love We Trust and Darkest Hour had a grittier, FuturePop-influenced sound. Finally, Matters of Mind, Body, and Soul and Days of Black returned to classic darkwave.
• The Clash changed their sound with London Calling, moving from outright punk to a heavily reggae and blues influenced sound. The seeds of this were seen on the previous album, Give 'Em Enough Rope, most notably on Julie's Been Working From The Drug Squad that displayed heavy New Orleans Jazz influences. At the time it was derided for betraying "punk" but has since gone on to be considered one of the best albums of all time. Later albums also experimented with style, but to a lesser degree of success, although there are fans of Sandinista! and Combat Rock. Most fans consider Cut the Crap (the band's final album) to be, well, crap.
• Cloud Nothings' first two albums were Power Pop-style indie rock recorded solely by Dylan Baldi. By the time Attack on Memory came out, he recorded with his touring band and crossing with Darker and Edgier, switched his sound to a heavier 90's Emo-influenced sound that carried over into the next album Here and Nowhere Else. And it wasn't a Creator Breakdown that influenced the darker direction, Baldi simply got bored with Power Pop.
• Cobra Starship pulled this a few times. Their first album was mostly just Pop Punk with synths. Their second album moved them into the mix of dance-pop, pop punk and synthpop and sarcasm that they became famous for. Their third continued with this, leading to their breakthrough song "Good Girls Go Bad". Their fourth album Night Shades has lead to many outcries of They Changed It, Now It Sucks! due to them embracing a streamlined dance-pop club sound without an inch of irony.
• Coldplay started as a soft, early-Radiohead-esque band with 2000's Parachutes, then switched to a harder, more U2-like sound on A Rush of Blood to the Head in 2002. 2005's X&Y averted this trope (which many didn't like), but in 2008 Viva la Vida introduced a radically different art-rock/baroque pop/world beat sound reminiscent of Arcade Fire. And then they changed again, with 2011 seeing the heavily electro-rock/R&B-influenced Mylo Xyloto (with guest vocals from, of all people, Rihanna.) Ghost Stories wound up more like the U2-esque sound due to a Creator Breakdown, but all albums ever since remained on the sonic landscapes of Viva La Vida and Mylo Xyloto.
• Leonard Cohen added a few synth-pop elements to his normal folk-rock with the release of I'm Your Man in 1988.
• Chris Cornell's Scream, combining his rock crooning with producer Timbaland's trademark R&B and pop. It tanked miserably, being described as "an exercise in misguided ambition that makes no sense outside of pure theory".
• Elvis Costello did this throughout his career, beginning with his second album This Year's Model, which had a harder, louder and more new-wave edge than his first album, My Aim Is True. Since then he has explored country, chamber pop, torch songs, shiny contemporary pop, even opera. He is known to release albums of wildly differing styles back to back and even in the same year.
• Cathal Coughlan. To begin with, his duo Microdisney played post punk that consisted of him yelling political rants over an uneasy backing track (evidenced by the compilation only track 'National Anthem'). By the time they had released their first record, they had acquired a minimilalist indie sound, with melodic synths, jangly guitars and drum machines, the vocals despairing and cynical. Come their second album, they had acquired a proper backing band including a drummer and bassist. He also changed his vocal style so that it was louder and more positive sounding. The resulting album almost sounds like adult orientated pop music, but there are still traces of the old sound in there. The next album was an even greater change, the band adding violins and female backing singers. The following album, their last, was far more lyrically biting, and with less of a chart orientated sound. The music was still fairly upbeat though. When Microdisney broke up Cathal went on to form The Fatima Mansions, who played a combination of American influenced noise rock, grunge and electronica with a mostly completely different vocal style, many songs shouting instead of singing. After that band broke up, he recorded some somber solo albums. His latest album however is far more reminiscent of the music he used to make in the mid 80s, suggesting that some things come full circle. As he is somebody who has never been after a hit, the return to form seems all the more remarkable.
• Cocteau Twins: Their first few albums reflect their Post-Punk origins, with a sort of Goth edginess that earned them fans from that genre (although it was always pushing the envelope to call them that). Treasure, in 1984, shed that, embracing some jazzier and Eastern influences and generally giving their sound its distinctive airy Dream Pop quality. A couple of albums later, the band is starting to get more popular in the U.S. and making 4AD some serious money, so the label starts to invest more in the recording process, resulting in the fuller, more polished sound of Blue Bell Knoll and Heaven or Las Vegas. They then moved to a major label, Fontana, and recorded "Four Calendar Café", often considered one of their most radical new sound albums as although it was musically similar to Heaven or Las Vegas, Elizabeth Fraser's vocal style changed from (mostly) Singing Simlish to being (mostly) intelligible.
• Crash Test Dummies - Give Yourself A Hand, which is a radical departure from their earlier folk rock. The album mixes Funk Rock, R&B, Chillout, Trip Hop, Drum & Bass and even includes a string ballad. Brad Roberts tries new vocal styles - in addition to his original baritone, he pulls off an impressive falsetto and even unleashes his inner Mike Patton/Anthony Kiedis on some of the funkier tracks, which have very raunchy lyrics. Ellen Reid, previously the backing singer, has lead vocals on a few songs. It is hard to believe this is the same band who did "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" a few years before.
• Creedence Clearwater Revival started out on their debut album with a few blues-rock and psychedelic rock songs from when they were the Golliwogs. Bayou Country, in contrast, is straight-out country-based rock, a format the band would follow until they broke up.
• Crowded House play with this on Together Alone. While the album incorporates many new styles into the music, the sound remains recognizable as Crowded House's sound.
• The Cruxshadows were standard darkwave up until Wishfire, whence they changed to a blend of Futurepop and Gothic Alternative Dance.
• The Crystal Method's Divided By Night consists mainly of chilled midtempo/downtempo pieces, as opposed to their usual upbeat breaks, although it has a few of those too.
• The Crystalline Effect's sound is generally electronic/trip-hop, and doesn't tend to have very heavy beats. Their latest EP, Industrial Re-Evolution, sounds very much like industrial and does.
• When The Cult started out, they were playing trippy psychedelic post-punk. With their third album, Electric, they suddenly started playing AC/DC-esque hard rock.
• The Cure started off as a pop-punk group and completely changed their sound with the melancholic tones of Seventeen Seconds and Faith, which got them lumped with the gothic rock scene, culminating in their dark tower of angst, Pornography. After Pornography, the band balanced melancholic and upbeat on their next few albums, until their masterpiece Disintegration which was a tad darker than the previous couple albums before it. After Disintegration, they increased the pop quotient with Wish, and since then their style is pretty much a mix between bleak goth and upbeat pop, with varying degrees of happiness.
  • The Top was a MAJOR turn away from their previous effort, Pornography.
• Billy Currington usually recorded laid-back, twangy neo-traditionalist Country Music. But starting with We Are Tonight in 2013 and continuing through Summer Forever two years later, he has opted for a more upbeat, electric-guitar driven production style. Songs like "Hey Girl", "We Are Tonight", and "Don't It" in particular are more polished and punchy.
• Miley Cyrus' first non-Hannah Montana solo album, Meet Miley Cyrus, was more traditionally Teen Pop influenced, while Breakout showed more rock influences. Her EP, The Time Of Our Lives brought a harder sound on some tracks, with hip-hop influences and power ballads. Can't Be Tamed is more electro-pop.
  • And then Bangerz came along.
  • Miley Cyrus And Her Dead Petz, largely a collaboration with Flaming Lips, drops much of the hip-hop flavor of Bangerz for a Psychedelic Rock influenced sound for most of the tracks.
  • Then she completely moved from the Bangerz sound with the country pop of Younger Now.
  • Her most recent album, Plastic Hearts, is heavily influenced by the popular music of the 1980s, featuring collaborations with Billy Idol, Joan Jett, and Stevie Nicks.
• Da Yoopers had this happen with We're Still Rockin' in 1995. It was the first album on which Jim Bellmore took over as lead guitarist, songwriter, and producer. The resulting album was an experience in Genre Roulette, keeping the band's often novelty-tinged lyrics about life in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan while trading out the more folk-influenced sound in favor of a more rock edge. Subsequent albums found a balance between the older and newer styles.
• Daft Punk never released an album that wasn't in some way a massive shift in concept, aesthetic, and technical execution from a previous one. Their debut Homework was a genre codifier for House Music, mixing lo-fi, but delicately-arranged drum machines and synthesizers with light Funk influences for pure dance music. Discovery went into a cleaner, yet more cinematic pop-based direction influenced by Synth-Pop, R&B, and Disco with a larger emphasis on sampling. Human After All went into a far darker, colder Industrial tone with greater attention to electric guitars and minimalist, repetitive, yet intense instrumentals. Their final album, Random Access Memories, is a full Genre Throwback to the duo's funk, soul, and disco roots, featuring a grand amount of live instrumentation and guest collaborators (many of whom were their personal heroes).
• Miles Davis did this many times. His early work in Cool Jazz was collected into the album Birth of The Cool, before he later switched to Hard Bop with Walkin'. Milestones marked his switch from hard bop to Modality, a switch he would complete fully on his next album Kind of Blue. His later album Miles In The Sky marked his foray away from conventional jazz into Jazz-Fusion. He would flirt with the sound a bit through his next two albums, Filles De Kilimanjaro and In A Silent Way, and he would go all in on the new sound with Bitches Brew.
• The Decemberists - The Hazards of Love: Kept the folk influences, but replaced the baroque pop influences with prog.
  • Followed up with The King Is Dead in a way that proves that labels can be deceptive. Both their previous work and this album could be described as indie folk, but before this the "folk" element was Old World folk songs, particularly English and Irish ones. The folk in The King Is Dead is pure Americana, and a fair assessment of it would be "The Boss gone Country".
• Decoded Feedback's Shockwave was more minimalistic than their prior albums. They returned to Aggrotech EBM for Combustion, then the following albums moved in a Lighter and Softer direction towards Futurepop.
• Jenny Dee & The Deelinquents' first album, Keeping Time, was a retraux homage to Motown and 60's Girl Groups. The second album, Electric Candyland, added elements of Glam Rock and early New Wave Music, sounding more like a product of the mid-70's than the early 60's - one of the biggest changes is that there's distorted guitar all over Electric Candyland, whereas for the first album, guitarist Eric Salt stuck entirely to clean tones, evoking a time when intentional distortion still wasn't often heard in mainstream rock music. A bit of the girl-group flavor was preserved because of the frequent use of three-part harmony though, and "That Moon Was Low" could have fit in on their first album, especially because it uses the Doo-Wop Progression.
• Deep Purple's sound changed with every new line-up, starting off as hard-edged psychedelic rock and moving to progressive rock by their third album, at which point they changed line-ups and shifted to straight hard rock/heavy metal until they changed line-ups again, playing more blues-rock and funk-flavored hard rock. Their sound has stabilized nowadays to a classic-flavored hard rock, however. Their live album Concerto for Group and Orchestra (1969) is perhaps the most unique example. It was a live performance accompanied by the London Symphonic Orchestra.
• Def Leppard went with a more organic sound with darker lyrical content in 1996 with the Slang album. Their rationale at the time was that, with Hair Metal being out of fashion, they may as well make the most "Un-Def Leppard" album they could (though one member said that, in hindsight, they probably included some of those ideas a little too eagerly, without doing proper quality control beforehand), because they were going to get slammed no matter what they did. Reaction was mixed, the album wasn't very successful in the USA, and the band returned to their trademark sound with 1999's Euphoria.
• Deftones have had something of a shift in sound with every album. Adrenaline was pretty much straight-out Nu Metal, while Around the Fur had a similar direction, but included electronics and an overall slightly more experimental sound. White Pony was the biggest shift, switching the band from nu-metal to experimental rock with heavy use of samples. Their self-titled album had Frank Delgado using keyboards instead of turntables, and had a very eclectic sound (but overall heavier than White Pony). Saturday Night Wrist and Diamond Eyes are the second big shift, being a lot more melodic and positive than their previous work.
• Depeche Mode, at least seven times. When original main songwriter Vince Clarke left after the first album (Speak & Spell) and Martin Gore (who had contributed a few songs) took over, the second album (A Broken Frame) was much more 'moody' sounding than Clarke's work while they were oddly marketed as a 'boy band'. For the next album (Construction Time Again), the classically-trained Alan Wilder, Clarke's replacement at live shows as a keyboard player, became an official member while Gareth Jones engineered and later produced — and they helped shape what we know now as the band's sound as they started using samplers and the songs took a more dark and industrial turn, epitomized in Black Celebration. After 3 albums together, DM and Jones had an amicable split and the next album, Music for the Masses had a similar sound but was largely self-produced with Dave Bascombe engineering. The biggest change may have been when Flood (who made a great team with Wilder) came in to produce Violator, which introduced guitars as a staple and gave the world "Personal Jesus" and "Enjoy the Silence". With grunge becoming huge and drug-addled lead singer Dave Gahan immersing himself in the local music scene after moving to LA, Songs of Faith and Devotion, the second album with Flood, was full-on rock, while still recognizably Depeche Mode with the familiar songwriting themes and layered arrangements. Wilder left, and while Ultra was billed as a return to the Violator-era sound, it unusually played with trip-hop influences in places. Exciter was essentially "the soft and sensual side of Depeche Mode". Playing the Angel went back to the more Violator-style sound, and then in 2009 they released Sounds of the Universe, which was yet again completely different from all of their other albums as they used old analogue synthesizers that Gore bought on eBay in new and bizarre ways. Delta Machine returned to a more muted and stripped-down style with a slight blues influence, similar to A Broken Frame, but with more modern production elements. 2017's Spirit got a new producer in Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford, and with his involvement came an aggressive sound that is basically Songs of Faith and Devotion with more synthesizers and angry, openly political lyrics. Then in 2023 they released Memento Mori, a softer, more reflective sounding album than recent works, largely informed by Andy Fletcher's untimely passing in 2022.
• Jason Derulo started out primarily with electro-R&B/dance pop with his debut Self-Titled Album and his follow-up Future History. Then for his third album Tattoos (and its reissue Talk Dirty), he abandoned the electronic elements for a sound closer to Contemporary R&B with a more 'urban' Hip-Hop feel, complete with many instances of A Wild Rapper Appears! (also the first album to contain guest vocals). His fourth album Everything Is 4 was more-or-less a return to his electro-R&B/dance-pop style. While there are guest vocals, none of them are rappers.
• When their original vocalist was swapped out for one with a much softer voice, Destroy the Runner went from hard-hitting Christian metalcore on their debut album Saints, to melodic ambiguously-spiritual metal on their second album, I, Lucifer. Many fans were not pleased.
• Devo slowly started moving towards synthpop with Freedom of Choice, and then suddenly changed to industrial dance on Total Devo and Smooth Noodle Maps.
• Dexys Midnight Runners started off with a heavy brass section on Searching for the Lost Soul Rebels. They later swapped it for blue-eyed soul on their second album, Too-Rye-Aye.
• Dir en grey started with experimental alternative rock, sometimes with a more poppy sound, and with a Visual Kei look. This was largely dropped on MACABRE, in favour of a simpler look and a more progressive feel. The six Ugly EP was where they began to focus more on the metal elements of their sound, moving towards more elements of nu-metal and metalcore on Withering to death. and THE MARROW OF A BONE. With the release of UROBOROS, they began gravitating back to a progressive metal style, but in a distinctly different way than on MACABRE and Kisō.
• Disclosure's first album Settle put heavy emphasis on instrumentation over vocals. Their second album Caracal is much more vocal-oriented, with a poppier sound fit for mainstream radio, while still maintaining their original UK garage style.
• Starting with Massive Killing Capacity, Dismember makes the full transition to Melodic Death Metal they've been known for influencing.
• The Doobie Brothers — During the Tom Johnston era, the band was known for hard-rocking and bluesy songs. After Michael McDonald became lead singer, the band became much more concentrated on falsetto and harmony-heavy pop songs. By Minute by Minute, they were completely rid of their old sound. They got their old sound back, however, when the band reunited with Johnston on lead vocals.
• The Doors. The first two albums contained the brand of organ based psychedelic rock that they're known for. Waiting For The Sun was more eclectic based, having pop tunes, ballads and other oddities. The Soft Parade has a more big band sound, Morrison Hotel goes over the styles of the previous albums and L.A. Woman showcased the band during barroom blues.
• The albums "All Around the World", "Let it Be Me", and "Sign of Your Love" from Jason Donovan all have a sound that's far different than the sounds of his first three albums.
• Mike Doughty has done this a few times in his post Soul Coughing career. His first solo album Skittish was produced by minimalist producer Mark Kramer and is mostly Doughty and acoustic guitar, with occasional strings added by Kramer. The EP Rockity Roll was produced by Pat Dillett and is full of acoustic electropop songs. 2005's Haughty Melodic was Doughty's first solo album with an electric full band sound (though performed by session musicians). It contained aspects of his previous work but was mostly a straightforward "medium rock" (as dubbed by Doughty himself) album. Next came Golden Delicious, which continued the direction of Haughty Melodic but was recorded completely with a live band. Then came Sad Man Happy Man, which saw Doughty going back to his acoustic routes, but incorporating cello performed by his longtime live band member Andrew "Scrap" Livingston, as well as self-programmed drum machines. Yes and Also Yes had elements of the previous album but also contained actual drums on a few songs (Doughty had wanted to do a full album with songs in the latter category but ended up backtracking in the end). The Flip Is Another Honey is mostly a cover album (with a new original song built over a repeating John Denver sample). Then he did an album of Soul Coughing re-recordings, radically different from how they originally sounded. His most recent effort Stellar Motel is a mixture of a throwback to songs on Haughty Melodic and, for the first time, rap (with major emphasis on the rap).
• Nick Drake's first two albums featured a backing band to give his music a fuller sound. His third and final album, Pink Moon, went for a more stripped down sound with Drake being the sole performer; most tracks feature no other instruments besides guitar and vocals, with the only exception being a bit of piano overdubs in the title track.
• Dream Theater does this quite often, the most notable one being when Executive Meddling forced Falling Into Infinity to take on a more mainstream rock sound than the Progressive Metal of their earlier and later albums.
  • Train Of Thought was this, as it introduced a much heavier and more modern Dream Theater.
• Bob Dylan many times, including:
  • Electric folk rock with Bringing It All Back Home
  • Country (Nashville Skyline)
  • Gospel rock (Slow Train Coming and Saved)
  • Synth-pop (several tracks on Empire Burlesque)
  • Return to traditional acoustic folk (Good as I Been to You, World Gone Wrong)
  • Blues rock (Time Out of Mind)
  • A Christmas themed Cover Album (Christmas in the Heart)
• Eighteen Visions Initially started out as a hardcore/metal band with a lot of screaming lyrics. In their final, self-titled album, they mostly dropped the screaming and worked a lot more 80s rock influences into their songs, creating an album that turned off a lot of long-time fans, but appealed to a new set of fans. Unfortunately, the band broke up shortly after the release of that album.
• The overall musical output of Einstürzende Neubauten explores a diverse selection of textures and styles. Zeichnungen des Patienten O. T. introduced a wider range of moods, melodies, and sounds than the generally intense abrasiveness of Kollaps, a direction taken further into detail on Halber Mensch, which was succeeded by the dark ambient of Fünf Auf der Nach Oben Offenen Richterskala. Haus der Lüge includes elements of electronic and rock music but is less diverse than Tabula Rasa, that in turn is louder and more unconventional than Ende Neu. Silence is Sexy disposes most of the noise aspects found in previous albums in favor of restraint, resulting in softer songs. Perpetuum Mobile continues the relaxed and mature nature of Silence is Sexy while bringing back some of the Sensory Abuse heard in the band's 1980s works. Alles Weider Offen remained smooth despite being a slightly bleaker album. The World War I-centered concept album Lament is based off archived recordings and writings and accompanied by a string quartet.
• Electric Light Orchestra's Discovery, when compared to their previous work, it's, well, very disco. They followed this with the poppy soundtrack to Xanadu, then moved to synth-pop with Time.
• Emilie Autumn went from jazz pop with Rnb influences to electronic industrial power rock/metal in her second album, influenced by her Creator Breakdown.
• Eminem:
  • In the mid-90s Eminem released a poorly-received debut album, Infinite, which is full of positive, funk-sample-driven raps about how excited he is about his happy marriage and a child on the way. The negative reception the album got (it was considered derivative), combined with the deterioration of Eminem's personal life and a few suicide attempts, led to him totally throwing out his old sound and subject matter in favour of a Horrorcore sound featuring an alter ego character called Slim Shady, a highly aggressive, murderous and Laughably Evil Shadow Archetype who could say things too horrible for him to say as 'himself'. This is how on Infinite we get lyrics like "One day I plan to be a family man, happily married" and on The Slim Shady EP we get lyrics like "I was put on this earth to make your baby mama cum".
  • The Eminem Show has Eminem gaining more control over the production, with an attendant change of sound to a cinematic feel with elements of 70s rock.
  • Recovery showed Eminem ditching Dr. Dre as his primary producer, instead working with multiple different beatmakers and a adopting a chart-friendly Pop Rap sound.
  • The Marshall Mathers LP 2 retains the Pop Rap feel of Recovery, but also incorporates retro elements inspired by the Rap Rock of the late 80s and early 90s, courtesy of Rick Rubin.
  • Kamikaze showed Eminem abandoning the pop style he'd adopted for most of the 2010s in favour of a minimalist, modern hip-hop sound.
• English Dogs began as a hardcore punk band. Over time, they began to incorporate increasing amounts of speed metal influence, moving towards crossover thrash, before morphing into a Power Metal band with the final album of their original period, Where Legend Began. They reformed in the 90's, returning to their crossover roots, and eventually, the lineup was retooled into an experimental punk band called Janus Stark, which continued for several years before splitting up. Original vocalist Pete Wakefield reformed the band in 2007, and moved their sound towards straightforward street punk. Just to make things more confusing, a completely different second lineup is also using the name English Dogs, playing what is essentially a fusion of Power Metal and crossover.
• Brian Eno effectively introduced Ambient with the album Ambient 1: Music for Airports.
• Enter Shikari's first album, 2007's Take To The Skies, was more or less Metalcore with some synthesizers. Their second full-length, 2009's Common Dreads, aimed for a less heavy but more experimental sound and also made the lyrical change from singing about more or less anything to highly political, anti-capitalist lyrics. 2010's one-off single Destabilise went even heavier on the synths and also added some hip hop elements. According to the band, the forthcoming album is going to include influences by both Sigur Rós and Rammstein.
• Erasure's 2000 album Loveboat. It can best be described as "Erasure goes indie", with a lo-fi, "basement-y" feel, heavier bass, and much greater use of acoustic instruments. in stark contrast to their typical campy, danceable synthpop. Fans hated it because the style was so different. A sizable majority of the fanbase consider it Fanon Discontinuity and the end of classic Erasure. It sold terribly in both the UK and the US and it didn't get released in the US until 2003 because Maverick Records dropped them like a hot potato when they refused to remix a good portion of the tracks. Even lead singer Andy Bell panned it years later. The worst part? Critics tended to like it, and it's a well-written album with a subdued, personal sound to it.
• One of the most radical shifts in style would be Everything but the Girl, the jazzy adult pop duo. When their song “Missing” became a massive hit after being subjected to a dance-oriented remix, they reinvented them as a synth-based techno-styled act. The result was another major case of Broken Base.
• Faith No More's Angel Dust mostly abandoned the funk-metal sound of the band's previous albums. It was the second album to feature Mike Patton, but the first in which he was involved from start to finish. Consequently, the album benefits from his ideas and the fact that he no longer had to sing in an unnatural style to accommodate the band. It's a much heavier album than their first three, while also drawing on an eclectic variety of influences and an equally varied collection of samples ("Midlife Crisis" samples both Simon & Garfunkel and Beastie Boys).
• Fall Out Boy started out with a mix of fast paced Pop Punk and dark Emo introspection (including occasional background screams from Pete) on their first album. Their follow up (and breakthrough) album ''From Under the Cork Tree" continued this sound with a much more anthemic vibe. "Infinity on high" added elements of Soul, RAndB, and Baroque Pop. Their last album before the hiatus was "Folie A Deux" which featured a schizophrenic blend of emo, blue eyed soul, Beatles-esque psychedelia, arena rock riffs, and new wave.
  • Save Rock & Roll; their comeback album, despite the title, veered much closer to pure pop, combining elements of a lot of modern trends.
  • PAX AM Days is a total reverse of that direction since it's throwback 80's Hardcore Punk.
  • American Beauty/American Psycho goes further into the pure pop direction, involving heavy sampling as well as electronic effects layered over the instrumentation, with only a few songs hearkening back to their old style.
  • The remix album Make America Psycho Again had a featured rapper on each song and a more hip-hop oriented production to match.
• Falling in Reverse started as a Metalcore band mixed with Pop Punk and Hair Metal elements. It was decently received and was a large seller. For the next album they decided to make their sound more distinctive, resulting in the absolute genre mess that is "Fashionably Late", a bizarre mish mash of Metalcore, Trap Music, Dubstep, and Electropop. It would border on Crunkcore if that hadn't died out with Myspace. It was universally panned by everyone including former fans.
• Every one of Falling Up's five records sounded generally different from the rest, as they moved more and more in the direction of experimental rock. They took it to a new level with Fangs! though, which saw a complete restructuring of their sound and how the band performed and recorded. Unfortunately it was also their last album.
• Fates Warning's 1989 album Perfect Symmetry saw them beginning to move away from the thrash-tinged power metal of their previous albums in favor of the more melodic progressive metal with introspective and philosophical lyrics they're known for these days. They'd already started making a name for themselves by that point, but for some fans it marked the beginning of their beard growth.
• Fear Factory started off with a death metal sound on Soul of a New Machine. It wasn't until Demanufacture when they found their signature sound.
• Feeder seem to have a habit of changing every two albums. Swim and Polythene are pretty heavy grungey style stuff, Yesterday Went Too Soon and Echo Park are more straightforward rock albums, with a bit of punk influence, Comfort In Sound and Pushing The Senses are much softer (but still with some straight up rock songs, like "Godzilla" and "Helium"). Silent Cry and Renegades seem to be if you shoved all their previous albums into a blender, with the softer stuff on Silent Cry and the heavier stuff on Renegades.
• Finch's Say Hello to Sunshine, which was a huge departure from their poppier 2000s emo sound that they helped to helm on their first album, and their foray into heavier, more experimental territory.
  • They did this again with their 2012 album Back to Oblivion, which was preceded by several years of turbulence, false-starts to their third album, and a breakup which lasted all of two years. Back to Oblivion introduced a more alternative rock approach to the band's sound, such that it was set apart from anything they had done before.
• Samantha Fish's Chills & Fever added horns, and shifted direction from pure blues to a mix of blues, garage rock, and R&B. It put more emphasis on the vocals, and not as much on Fish's flashy guitar work, and generally had a more sexy feel than her earlier, in-your-face work. Critics loved it, but the fan reaction was more mixed.
• The Flaming Lips kind of had a series of these after 1995, probably owed to lead guitarist Ronald Jones departing: the last time they had a guitarist leave (Jonathan Donahue, also of Mercury Rev) they replaced him with another one, but this time they expanded drummer Steven Drozd's role to include guitar and synthesizers. Thus, Zaireeka and especially The Soft Bulletin had him using synthesized strings for an orchestral effect, while Yoshimi Vs. The Pink Robots added drum machines and more of an electronic influence. Guitars were more prominent on At War With The Mystics and Embryonic, but even those weren't quite the same: AWWTM felt a little like Yoshimi mixed with their earlier material, but Embryonic was actually Darker and Edgier than usual, with lots of ominous bass and more of a Krautrock influence.
• Fleetwood Mac started as a moderately successful blues-rock band led by guitarist Peter Green known for hard-rockin' songs with heavy riffs such as "Oh Well" and "The Green Manalishi (with the Two Pronged Crown)". One long complicated history later, including Green and the other guitarist quitting due to mental illness and joining a cult and other replacements that didn't go much anywhere, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined the band, now relocated to California. With Fleetwood Mac they changed to a pop/rock style inspired mostly by the Beatles, Beach Boys and the mellow Californian soft rock scene. They refined the formula and obtained massive success with Rumours and Tusk, and never looked back.
  • Between all of the Peter Green era guitarists leaving and Buckingham/Nicks joining, the band was led by singers/songwriters Bob Welch and Christine McVie, sounding closer to the Rumours lineup but with a slight psychedelic vibe.
  • There were still a few New Sound Albums even in their pop era. Tusk, the followup to Rumours, is experimental, with new wave and punk rock influences (but still with enough radio-friendly pop to ensure it a hit), and Tango in the Night is chock full of synthesizers.
• Hardcore Punk band Flux of Pink Indians changed their sound with every album they made. Their first album, Strive to Survive Causing Least Suffering Possible, was fairly standard hardcore, apart from the fact that most of the songs were continuous. Their second album, The Fucking Cunts Treat Us Like Pricks, was in part a reaction to a sexual assault a band member had suffered and incorporated quite a bit of Harsh Noise influence (as well as some influence from Avant-Garde Music). For the third album they changed their name to Flux, stripped back the hardcore influence almost entirely, and based the album's sound around tribal drumming, with elements of jazz music, Progressive Rock, dub, New Wave Music, and other influences filtered in. EPs the band released tended to reflect the sound of the nearest album. The main constants throughout the band's existence were their commitment to anarchism and the tendency of their songs to lead into each other.
• The Foo Fighters, after their Post-Grunge-heavy first two albums (Their self-titled album and The Colour and the Shape), have decided to explore different styles - including an all-acoustic disc for their Distinct Double Album In Your Honour, as well as disco on one side of Hail Satin.^note The last album was released under the name "Dee Gees"; the disco side was covers of songs by the Bee Gees and their brother Andy Gibb.
  • The Colour And The Shape is also their only album with a notable Emo influence, which was caused by the band's bassist and then drummer (who had both been in the genre's Trope Codifier Sunny Day Real Estate) contributing to the songwriting process. "My Hero" is the primary example of this, though so are the verses of "Hey Johnny Park". Awkwardly, it remains the band's most popular album despite the fact they rock much harder these days.
• 60s pop vocal group the Four Seasons went psychedelic with their album Genuine Imitation Life Gazette.
• Franz Ferdinand executed one of these with Tonight: Franz Ferdinand, breaking with the fairly typical (if well-executed) guitar-driven post-punk revival sound of their first two albums for a synthesizer-driven, dance-y sound. It works well, and they remain recognizably them.
• Freaky Chakra shifted from the trancy acid techno of Lowdown Motivator to Darker and Edgier cyberpunk-esque techno breaks with Blacklight Fantasy, then to Lighter and Softer electro/tech house with Moonroof Operator.
• Front Line Assembly started out as an Industrial band and weren't averse to occasional use of guitars. Then they decided to Follow the Leader and make an entirely Industrial Metal album called Millenium. They went back to Industrial for their next album (although they used quite a bit of guitar on it), and for the album after that (FLAvour Of The Weak) they made a complete Genre Shift to IDM and Drum 'n' Bass. They began to get back to Industrial over time, although they retained elements from IDM and Drum 'n' Bass in their sound. Improvised Electronic Device returned to the Industrial Metal elements of Millenium, and their latest two albums venture into dubstep territory.
• FT Island started off with rock ballads with some upbeat songs on the side. The third album "Cross and Change" promoted a much less melancholy song and is mostly upbeat songs with some rock ballads on the side. Though they still write and perform rock ballads, nowadays they focus much more on rockier and upbeat songs compared to their first few years.
• The Fugs: Their fifth album, It Crawled Into My Hand, Honest had much higher production quality and showed the band trying out many different musical genres, including Country Music, Gospel Music, Gregorian chant, Broadway musicals,...
• fun.'s Some Nights: Their debut, Aim and Ignite, was Baroque Pop-leaning indie, not that dissimilar from Nate Ruess's previous band The Format. Some Nights still had the Baroque Pop elements, but had a much more electronic sound, with heavy use of drum machines, synthesizers, and even some vocoder. The change was reportedly due to the band starting to listen to newer hip hop, with Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy being noted as a particular influence.
• Better known for funky house, Funkstar De Luxe had a total Out-of-Genre Experience with No Man's Planet, which consisted of techno-industrial/EBM and dark ambient. He appears to have switched back to more familiar sounds as of late.
• Futurecop!'s Hopes, Dreams, and Alienation had a more commercial EDM-influenced sound, which displeased many fans. Fairy Tales, however, shifted back towards traditional synthwave.
• Genesis, which began as a vaguely psychedelic pop band with From Genesis to Revelation in 1969, changed to Progressive Rock a year later with Trespass. They stayed this way even after Peter Gabriel's departure (and replacement by drummer Phil Collins) in 1975. After the departure of longtime guitarist Steve Hackett and their reduction to a trio in 1978, they gradually began including shorter and more commercial-sounding songs (starting with "Follow You, Follow Me") into their repertoire by the late 1970's. The Abacab album of 1981 found the group almost entirely abandoning their prog roots for a more streamlined, high-tech prog-pop sound, winning success on MTV and the Top 40. Though they gained a new audience, much of the older fanbase was alienated from the new style.
• Gentle Giant has seen this happen twice: a mild case occurred when Phil Shulman (who played saxophones, trumpets, and occasional other winds) left the band, and their next album, In A Glass House, had a harder edge and none of the literary allusions that Phil had put in their earlier albums. This shift was nothing compared to their later album The Missing Piece, released around the time that Progressive Rock was falling out of favor, and attempting to appeal to a pop audience with shorter, simpler songs. It didn't work.
• While he's always been a techno musician at heart, Gesaffelstein drastically changed his style between his two albums. Aleph, his debut album, is a harsh, aggressive album with a really strong Industrial undercurrent; Hyperion, his second album, is decidedly Lighter and Softer as it gets completely rid of any industrial influences in favor of a sound that is much closer to R&B. Comparing songs like "Hate or Glory" to "Lost in the Fire" is almost like comparing Throbbing Gristle to Frank Ocean.
• Life In The So-Called Space Age by God Lives Underwater. Their earlier releases were a mix of Industrial Metal and Alternative Metal, but this one had them shift towards a much more electronic, Synth-Pop-influenced sound. Fittingly, the album title was a Depeche Mode Shout-Out - the phrase "Life In The So-Called Space Age" appeared on the back cover to their album Black Celebration. The long-delayed followup Up Off The Floor largely went back to their earlier sound.
• Godspeed You! Black Emperor's last album, Yanqui U.X.O.. In terms of composition, it's not a huge Genre Shift, but there is more of an emphasis on notes and less on drones, guitar washes, and noise. More noticeably, the album is missing 2 things the band was well-known for: cryptic, spoken-word field recordings and individually named movements that made up larger tracks. Also, thanks to engineer Steve Albini, the album's sound was more raw and direct than the others. The reception of the album has been fairly divided among both critics and fans.
• Believe it or not, The Goo Goo Dolls started as a punk rock band. After 2 punk albums, with 1990's Hold Me Up they gradually began to change over to the lighter pop-rock they became known for in The '90s. Their 1987 debut album isn't even in print today.
• Nina Gordon, one of the two singer/songwriters for 90's alt-rockers Veruca Salt went adult contemporary pop for her debut solo album Tonight and the Rest of My Life.
• Gorillaz is known for never sticking to a singular sound for very long, with each album possessing a signature identity previous from the last.
  • Demon Days built off of the Hip-Hop and Alternative Rock aspects of their self-titled debut, as well as introducing more guest features and Pop elements, at least compositionally. The actual tone of the album, became significantly darker and more cinematic than the "assorted mixtape" vibe of their debut, with much more directly political lyrics commenting on the state of the world and celebrity culture.
  • Plastic Beach went into an even more eclectic direction, featuring more elements of psychedelic electronica and live orchestra, as well as an even wider array of featured artists, firmly cementing collaboration as part of the band's DNA. It's also the band's most conceptual album to date, stringing together a narrative surrounding the titular trash island and themes of environmental degradation.
  • The Fall was made as a Breather Episode album, constructed almost entirely by creator Damon Albarn on his iPad during the Plastic Beach tour. Gorillaz' quietest release yet, it has a very stripped-down aesthetic inspired by ambient, blues, and chillwave, with 2D as the sole vocalist for majority of the project.
  • Humanz was a bit of both this and Revisiting the Roots, returning to the "loosely-assorted mixtape" vibe of their debut, but jam-packing the collaborative crossovers, with sleeker, modernized production with emphasis on electronic and R&B elements. Thematically, it's not as overtly political as Demon Days, but it was rather "an emotional response to politics" of the world of 2016-17.
  • The Now Now was another tour-inspired Breather Episode Album made in large part in response towards criticism that Humanz had too many features, once again largely centered around 2D as the sole performer. This time, it went in a more acoustic, retro-inspired direction with roots in soul, Synth-Pop, and New Wave.
  • Gorillaz' following project Song Machine is a bit of an odd case influenced by its format, designed to be an episodic series of singles rather than a thematically cohesive album (though due to outside circumstances, it was compiled as such). Nevertheless, it continues on the collaboration-heavy base of Humanz, but featuring more relaxing, upbeat, if still eclectic tracks mixing pop, hip-hop, and electronica where 2D remains a focus.
  • Cracker Island returned to the focused Synth-Pop stylings and more limited collaborator list of The Now Now, but also adopted a more electric approach to the sound, taking cues from Funk and psychedelia, with a few experiments in Latin pop as well (held over from the album's beginnings as a second season of Song Machine).
• Ellie Goulding, her debut album Lights was synthpop and electronica with folk mixed in. Her sophomore album Halcyon ditches the folk and brings Dream Pop, Alternative Dance, and dubstep with an overall darker, more somber tone. Justified in that her boyfriend (at the time) was Skrillex.
• Grand Funk Railroad had this with their 1972 album Phoenix. It was still hard rock regardless, but it had no involvement of producer/manager Terry Knight, brought in newly-added keyboardist Craig Frost and marked the beginning of more involvement in singing and songwriting by drummer Don Brewer.
• Amy Grant started out being strictly inspirational contemporary Christian music - then, by Unguarded, she's taken on a more mainstream pop style. Then, by Heart In Motion, she started performing songs that weren't explicitly Christian - and started getting airplay on mainstream pop stations.
• Every Green Carnation album has been one of these:
  • Their demo material was pure Death Metal.
  • Journey to the End of the Night was folk-influenced Doom Metal.
  • Light of Day, Day of Darkness was pure Progressive Metal, featuring one single sixty-minute song.
  • A Blessing in Disguise contained shorter and more melodic songs, some gothic tinges, and was more hard rock oriented.
  • The Quiet Offspring had a more traditional hard rock sound, leaving behind the atmospheric and progressive stylings of their previous two albums.
  • The Acoustic Verses is a completely acoustic album.
• Green Day in The '90s used to be a pop-punk band who wrote catchy songs about being lazy, being insane, masturbating, being bored, the works. Cue American Idiot and their shift to a more complex style inspired by Rock Opera and The Who.
• Guns N' Roses did this for every album. From the sleazy L.A. club rock of Appetite for Destruction to mellow acoustic tracks on G N'R Lies to a double album full of epics and ballads with plenty of synth and pianos. Then Chinese Democracy came out with an entirely new band and featured hip hop drum samples, copious amounts of synth and strings, trip hop beats, industrial songs, elephant noises, alt rock, choirs, walls of Axl, some songs featuring upwards of FIVE guitar players. Sometimes all in one song.
  • Not surprising, Chinese Democracy is so far from the original GNR-sound that most fans don't even count it as a GNR-album.
  • The new sound on Chinese is justified in that every guitar player has their own unique style, and Slash, whom fans consider the real lead guitarist in GNR, had no involvement in making the album (since he left the band before Axl started making the album). One that stands out is Robin Finck, best known for his involvement with Nine Inch Nails, who is featured in all tracks and co-wrote half of those, showing that Axl Rose wanted the industrial sound to be the one that stood out.

Bands and Artists H-O

• Herbie Hancock moved into electro-funk with his 35th album, Future Shock, but that wasn't the first time he did it. Speak Like a Child was an early jazz fusion record, and Head Hunters saw him becoming a keyboard jazz-funk pioneer to the best sales of his career. It's hard to find a genre that he hasn't done.
• Calvin Harris had a pretty consistent sound for most of his music, being poppy upbeat electronic dance music. However, for his fourth album Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1, he decided to change things up to a more rhythmic sound with a funkier beat and more 'urban' guest artists, consisting mostly of rappers and R&B singers. It's more in line with the likes of DJ Khaled than his previous work.
  • And then his recent EPs and songs under the alias Love Regenerator took a sharp turn into the other direction: mostly instrumental techno with strong breakbeat, acid house, and rave influences, akin to early '90s dance music.
• Heart changed styles several times. Their debut album Dreamboat Annie is trippy psych-folk. The following album Little Queen abandoned the psychedelia of the debut in favor of straightfoward hard rock. In The '80s, they signed a record deal requiring them to adopt a pop sound and image and use outside professional songwriters. The first result of this was the 1985 self-titled album Heart. This was followed by the very synth-heavy Bad Animals album, then Brigade, which was a return to guitars, but was still very polished pop. With Desire Walks On, the band regained creative control and began moving back to their traditional sound.
• Hedley once began as a relatively unremarkable pop-punk band, but not before The Show Must Go saw them moving towards a mainstream pop rock style. On Wild Life, they incorporate elements of disco, dance-pop and funk.
• Faith Hill was already making inroads to country-pop since "This Kiss" in 1998, and especially after "Breathe" was the biggest pop hit of 2000, but 2002' s Cry completed the transition of her to a pop artist. The production was a lot more lush and bombastic, and reliant on belting. The album's singles all bombed horribly at country, but fared well enough on pop and AC. Most country fans derided her as a sellout. She was able to Win Back the Crowd with the more country-sounding Fireflies in 2005, but her fortunes soon faded again.
• HIM's Screamworks diverges from their long-standing sound of dark goth with...something more pop and upbeat. The lyrics are still quite dark, although they too have taken quite a change. Venus Doom, their previous album began off as incredibly metal, so it too was a bit of a new sound album—the transition can be...difficult.
  • Basically, going from the incredibly messed up song "Gone With the Sin" (Razorblade Romance) from all the way back in 1999 to "Scared to Death" (Screamworks: Love in Theory and Practice) may leave people wondering just who the hell they're listening to.
• The Hollies started out as another pop-rock Beatles ripoff, then they made two albums of psychedelic rock. They didn't call the first of them Evolution for nothing.
• The Horrors switched from the gothy garage-punk of their first album Strange House to Shoegazing on their second album, Primary Colours. They've kept this style for their third album Skying, while Luminous added dance and electronic influences to it. V would embrace a mashup of synth-pop/psychedelia/industrial in their sound and their Lout and Against the Blade EP's they'd go full on industrial metal.
• A rather different example: Houkago Tea Time's songs are quite different in types of rock genres: "Fuwa Fuwa Time" is alternative rock (with some rapping at one point, even), "Don't Say Lazy" has some sort of melodic, but also a bit of post-hardcore rock feel into it. "Happy? Sorry!" is Synthpop, "Sweet Bitter Beauty Song" kinda sounds Grunge-esque due to the guitar shredding. "Shrew Way To Go" is mathrock due to the different time sculptures, and "Hello Little Girl" being no doubt their softest song. These are just the first season songs.
  • Examples for the second season songs include both "Go! Go! Maniac!" and "Utauyo! Miracle", which sound eerily mathcore-esque, but is still mathrock since they don't even scream. "Girls In Wonderland" has trumpets used, "Listen" sounds quite jazzy thanks to the keyboards, "Early Summer Rain (20 Love)" sounds quite much like a radio-friendly modern rock song.
  • For a slightly-straight example, the "Second" album feels like listening through a children's album. Yui's vocals sound baby-ish for most of it. Note that songs done by Mio always seem to be the more heavier songs.
• Originally, Hunters & Collectors were a Krautrock-influenced new wave/art rock band, featuring experimental percussion, a heavily bass-driven sound and production by Conny Plank (famous for being Neu! and Kraftwerk's producer). With The Jaws of Life, they stripped back their style while retaining their prominent basslines and distinctive horn section, embracing the pub rock sound that would bring them major success.
• The Idle Race released two albums of psychedelic rock while Jeff Lynne was in the band, The Birthday Party and their Self-Titled Album. After Lynne left and joined the Move, they switched to folk-rock on their third (and last) album, Time Is.
• At the dawn of The '90s, Billy Idol decided it was time for a change, and based his next record, Cyberpunk, off that particular genre of literature he was into at the time. He had a lot of time to read into it, too, since he was recovering from a leg injury he got from a motorcycle accident - in fact, with all the screws and metal put in his leg, he wryly noted that he technically is a "cyber punk." To underscore his new direction, he composed the whole thing on a Macintosh computer, resulting in way more electronic influence than he's ever had, and added some social commentary to his lyrics, which was very new for Billy (lead single, "Shock To The System," was based around the Los Angeles riots of 1992). The resulting fusion of Electronic Music, Punk Rock and Glam Rock limped its way to #48 in America and #20 in the UK, and critics and longtime fans were largely put off by the album. Billy never got experimental on his records again.
• ill niño has done this with every album. They are a Latin-infused metal band, but they have a different sound with time. Their debut was straightforward nu-metal with an aggressive sound and simple song structures. Confession is pretty much a heavier version of pre-Minutes to Midnight Linkin Park. One Nation Underground is a metal Genre Roulette, going from a Groove Metal-esque anthem to a Metalcore song to a mainstream hard rock song in the album's first few minutes. Enigma took the Latin influences to another level, and erasing the band's Nu Metal influence in place of a Progressive Metal sound. Dead New World left behind much of the Latin, and switched to a much more aggressive sound similar to Thrash Metal/Groove Metal, but with a much more modern feel than the former. Epidemia is heavily influenced by Deathcore, with one song even featuring Frankie Palmeri of Emmure as a guest singer.
• After helping define Melodic Death Metal in Sweden, In Flames began changing their style with Colony and to a greater extent with Clayman. Then they released Reroute to Remain which is now considered by fans where "Old" In Flames ends and "New" In Flames begins. Each album after that has had its own distinct sound. This has lead to one hell of a Broken Base. Just check the comments on any of their music videos.
• Incubus have done this roughly twice. A Crow Left of the Murder... had a much less polished sound (and a new bass player), with the trend continuing on Light Grenades, though heavy songs were still present. If Not Now, When? was a significant departure, with slower, simpler songs and an intentional absence of aggressive guitars.
• Inna's self-titled fourth album is softer and more downtempo than her first three.
• Metalcore band In This Moment went for a less heavy sound in their second album The Dream, diitching most of the growling vocals and Metal Screams after vocalist Maria Brink expressed a desire to challenge herself with more clean-vocals songs. Blood saw yet another major shift to an industrial rock/nu metal hybrid, which is the sound that they've seemingly opted to keep.
• Carnival of Carnage sounds very little like later Insane Clown Posse albums; it makes little reference to circus tropes and is much more a "Fuck the rich" album. Ringmaster introduced the Dark Carnival, but the group's sound didn't codify until Riddlebox.
• Iron Maiden incorporated guitar synths on Somewhere In Time, and full-fledged synthesizers on the Concept Album Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. Though the biggest change was when Blaze Bayley joined the band, showing a darker and more Progressive Rock-influenced sound which attracted many detractors.
• iVardensphere's Ragemaker focuses mainly on the tribal and neoclassical aspects of their style, while minimizing the techno and industrial elements, leading to it sounding more like a heavier Dead Can Dance album.
• Alan Jackson had his 2006 album Like Red on a Rose, which instead of his neo-traditionalist country sound, was a smooth AC-styled album full of soulful, passionate ballads. It was produced by Alison Krauss, making it his only album to date without his usual producer Keith Stegall. Unlike most of his other albums, where he wrote at least half of the songs, he only wrote one — the second single "A Woman's Love", which was a remake of a song from his 1998 album High Mileage. The album was met with mixed reception, and only two singles were released, so he went back to the basics on his subsequent projects.
• Michael Jackson had a few. Off the Wall was a much more mature effort after his four previous teen-pop Motown albums (MJ was not allowed any creative control during his Motown tenure). It was also far more funky. Thriller was also considered different than his previous albums. It sounded more like pop music, "Beat It" even had a hard rock guitar solo and the lyrics became more Properly Paranoid. Bad was totally pop, no R&B influences anymore and Dangerous incorporated hip hop elements for the first time. His final album Invincible has a sound that can best be described as remiscent of the late 90s-early 00s teen-pop wave.
• James started with a more folky sounds with songs like "Hymn From A Village" and "What For". They then progressed to a bigger sound on Gold Mother and Seven with the addition of a trumpet player. With Laid they lost the trumpets and returned to a more stripped down sound. Whiplash contained a few straight up pop rock songs like "She's a Star", "Tomorrow", "Homeboy" and "Lost a Friend" while also containing what can only be described as "experimental" tracks such as "Greenpeace" and "Go To The Bank".
• Most of Jean-Michel Jarre's albums were New Sound Albums. Oxygène made him famous. Equinoxe sounded almost the same. Then came six albums (not counting Music For Supermarkets and live albums), none of which sounded like any of their respective predecessors, especially not like Oxygène and Equinoxe, because both Jarre's style and electronic instrument technology evolved. Oxygène 7-13 from 1997 was a partial return to Jarre's old sound, but all releases from then to the re-recording of Oxygène from 2007 were individual New Sound Albums again.
• Jars of Clay does one of these every second album or so.
• Jethro Tull began as a Cream-like blues-rock band tinged with bluesy/jazzy flute playing with This Was, then added more folk and pop influences with Stand Up. Benefit introduced a harder rock sound. Aqualung brought the group into a more progressive/conceptual style, which they followed up with two Epic Rocking album-length concept albums. War Child, Minstrel In The Gallery, and Too Old to Rock and Roll, Too Young to Die!, introduced an Elizabethan folk/hard rock/prog/classic rock style with shorter songs. Songs from the Wood, Heavy Horses and Stormwatch rounded off the decade with progressive folk-rock and more of the acoustic side. The '80s saw Tull dabble in synthesizeritis and modern production techniques, with more emphasis on electric guitar by the late eighties (1987's comeback album Crest of a Knave would even beat Metallica for Best Hard Rock/Heavy Metal album at the Grammy's). They would gradually return to more folk influences (and some world music flavors) by The '90s. Tull's last album is a very acoustic-based Christmas album reminiscent of their folk-rock Seventies style.
• Jewel was always evolving her music, but the most striking example is 0304, the synthesizer heavy dance pop album she put out after primarily being known for acoustic adult alternative. Strangely averted with her country album Perfectly Clear, which differed only in that John Rich wrote some of the songs and others had hints of steel guitar.
• After establishing his style in the 1970s, Billy Joel began jumping all over the place in The '80s. Glass Houses in 1980 was mostly guitar rock (for a piano player), followed by The Nylon Curtain, a Beatles-esque album with a lot of synth in 1982, and only one year later came An Innocent Man, which was a retro doo-wop album. His next release, 1986's The Bridge, was pretty standard mid-80s radio rock.
• Elton John, a prolific and eclectic singer-songwriter, had several New Sound Albums. Tumbleweed Connection was a country-rock album inspired by the Old West. Honky Chateau featured the classic Elton John Band in full for the first time, abandoning the use of heavy and dramatic orchestration for a more group-based rock sound and more use of the guitar. Rock Of The Westies saw a new group lineup and a harder blues-rock sound in places. Victim Of Love, released in 1979, was Elton's attempt at disco. Too Low For Zero, his comeback album, combined the classic Elton sound with heavier use of modern synthesizers, sequencers and drum machines and a modern production, and saw the return of his classic backing band. Ice On Fire saw a new backing band and a more modern MOR/synth-pop sound, which continued until the more organic Songs From The West Coast in 2001.
• Judas Priest. They simplified their sound (but still sticking to metal) with Killing Machine and British Steel, and continued to get more commercial throughout the decade, culminating in the synthesizer-laden pop-metal of Turbo. They returned to speed metal again with Painkiller, and during the Tim "Ripper" Owens era they took on a bit more of a late-80's thrash influence. With Angel of Retribution and their reunion with Rob Halford, they basically went back to their pre-Killing Machine sound.
• Julien-K started off as Industrial Metal with electronic and dance elements. For their sophomore album they moved to a much more poppy, dancey, 80s-influenced sound. Bassist Brandon Belsky wasn't thrilled with the direction they were taking, and left the band.
• Juno Reactor started out as goa/psy trance (aside from the dark Ambient album Luciana), but gradually evolved into a ethnic/neoclassical EBM-type sound. Gods and Monsters took an even more radical shift, dabbling in jazz, trip-hop, and dubstep. The Golden Sun of the Great East revisits their trance heritage, while retaining elements of their contemporary style.
• Kamelot started as a standard power metal band with a god-awful Geoff Tate wanna be of a vocalist, but upon said vocalist quitting and the subsequent addition of Norwegian opera-style vocalist Roy Khan, plus the switch to a more progressive metal influenced style has made their album The Fourth Legacy both a New Sound Album as well as the start of their beard growth.
• Vinyl Confessions by Kansas represented a major lyrical shift towards Christian themes with replacement of Steve Walsh (who quit over philosophical differences with guitarist Kerry Livgren, who was mostly responsible for their new, Christian influences) with John Elefante.
• With Discouraged Ones, Katatonia shifted from death/doom into alternative metal, using exclusively clean vocals. Viva Emptiness was another one, Returning to it's heavier roots towards a Gothic/Doom sound with the progressive ambient guitar work of the early career making a return.
• Keane's first 2 albums were straight piano pop-rock. Their 3rd album onward were an 80s synthpop revival, full of synths, amplified basslines, and electronic drums.
• KEN mode got famous with a difficult-to-classify yet very accessible sound that mixed elements of metalcore, sludge metal, math rock, post-hardcore, post-rock, and classic emo into a cohesive and very unique final product. For Success, they wound up working with Steve Albini, and while it's likely that they probably planned on trying something new to begin with, his influence was still clearly felt in the music, which was straight late 1980s noise rock/post-hardcore with some grunge thrown in for good measure.
• Swedish band Kent is usually known for alternative/pop rock, but changed their style to electro rock for Tillbaka till samtiden and Röd. After that they went back to their original style.
• Kerli's second album, which includes the electropop singles "Army of Love" and "Zero Gravity", is very different in style from her first album, which was alternative/indie rock. She describes the album's style as "bubblegum goth".
• Kero Kero Bonito is very broadly an Indie Pop band that plays around with lofi, chiptune and MIDI-esque electronica, but each project they've released has sounded vastly different than the last.
  • Bonito Generation greatly built off the video game and J-pop sounds of their debut mixtape Intro Bonito, featuring more elaborate, cleaner production and more developed singing than the simple rapping. Tonally, Intro Bonito often rallied back and forth between its anxious cynicism and upbeat idealism, but Bonito Generation fully commits to the side of playful positivity.
  • Their TOTEP EP and Time 'n' Place album phase out almost all of their J-pop elements (including Sarah Bonito's bilingual lyrics) and shifts to a grittier Garage Rock and Noise Pop sound inspired by their London roots, with greater focus on live instruments and softer, wistful singing. The tone is also much more melancholy, exploring more existential themes about the darkness of growing up.
  • Civilisation I and II phase back out the rock elements and hearkened back to their MIDI sound, but entered in a vastly more sophisticated compositional direction, resembling art pop and house music. Thematically, these EPs center around the uncertain path of human history and feature much more prosaic, wistful lyrics about the past, present, and future of life on Earth.
• Kevorkian Death Cycle's comeback album, God Am I, was predominantly Industrial Metal, as opposed to their previous EBM and dark electro. The follow-up, I Am God, saw a return to form.
• King Crimson change their sound every other album.
  • In the Court of the Crimson King and In the Wake of Poseidon are doomy progressive rock with lots of mellotrons and a good bit of jazz thrown in.
  • Lizard is more jazzy and poppy. Islands is a good deal less poppy, but more jazzy still, although one track is just chamber music.
  • They largely ditched their wind instruments and went increasingy metal on Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Starless and Bible Black and Red.
  • Seven years later they were suddenly making new-wave-esque prog with world music influences, in Discipline and Beat. Three of a Perfect Pair went in two different directions simultaneously, with half the tracks being fairly conventional pop songs and the other half being improvised frightening abstract soundscapes.
  • THRAK was kind of a combination of the metal and new-wave incarnations.
  • The ConstruKction of Light has electronic percuussion and was produced much more cleanly than THRAK.
  • The Power To Believe refined the style explored on THRAK and The Constru Kction of Light, but also included some influence from ambient music in the various parts of the title track.
• King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard take this trope to new heights, as each of their albums sound different than their predecessors all while still maintaining their psychedelic roots. Listing every album would be exhausting considering their rapid-fire release schedule, but they dabbled with garage rock, psychedelic pop, Indian folk music, folk rock, progressive rock/metal, boogie rock, and even thrash metal. You'd be forgiven if you initially thought you were listening to different bands.
• The Kinks have a few of these.
  • Face to Face was their first album to really embrace the baroque styles of the sixties, albeit in their own way.
  • Muswell Hillbillies had a heavy Country Music influence, and could also be seen as an early pub rock album.
• KISS's Music from "The Elder" was hated by fans, and later, the band themselves, and Revenge was met with lukewarm responses, both changing from the classic KISS style. Both were followed by returns to classic KISS (Creatures of the Night for the former, the reunion album Psycho Circus for the latter). A lesser case is second album Hotter Than Hell, which is much heavier than their usual output, to the point only the title track, which is one of the few exceptions, remains well-known.
• Korn has had a few of these, generally followed by a return to form on their next album. As the band seeks to either improve itself artistically or Win Back the Crowd, its sound has become more complex, less complex, and even dipped into other genres. The most noticeable of these changes was The Path of Totality, an album that took a break from metal for Dubstep.
• Kraftwerk: Autobahn was their fourth album and was noticeable for having a more electronic robotic sound. The three previous albums are considered Early-Installment Weirdness by the fans and Canon Discontinuity by the band.
• Ingo Kunzi, for his second Ayla album, Unreleased Secrets, after a nearly 8 year hiatus, shifted more to a mid/downtempo chillout style, with "Tribal Symphony" being the only standard trance tune on the album.
• Lady Antebellum said that they tried to make their 2014 album 747 sound different by making it more upbeat and energetic, in addition to replacing their longtime producer Paul Worley with Nathan Chapman. This was likely due to their three previous albums getting criticized for their sleepy-sounding, string drenched ballads.
• Laserdance, from Hypermagic to The Guardian of Forever, shifted to a faster Hi-NRG-esque sound, and TGOF had a Halfway Genre Switch to techno-trance. Their sound changed again with their swan song album, Strikes Back, due to being co-produced by Julius Wijnmalen, although rekindling the spirit of their original style.
• Led Zeppelin, with their third album. The first two are mostly heavy blues-rock material; the third features only one blues song and an entire side of acoustic folk songs. Later albums would continue to explore different styles, but with hard rock being dominant.
  • In Through The Out Door features an uncharacteristic amount of synthesizer on a number of tracks, courtesy of John Paul Jones' then-cutting edge Yamaha GX-1.
• Lampshaded by Lemon Jelly, who wrote on their album '64 to '95: "This is our new album. It's not like our old albums."
• John Lennon's first three solo albums, recorded with Yoko Ono were all experimental recordings that were way more far out than any other Psychedelic Rock artist at the time. Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins (1968) is basically John and Yoko experimenting with noise and feedback while Yoko wails. Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with the Lions (1969) has more of the same, though luckily only one LP side worth of that. The second side is Yoko and John singing newspaper articles, a recording of the heartbeat monitor of their unborn baby (who died in miscarriage), two minutes of pure silence and Yoko playing around with a radio. Wedding Album (1969) has John and Yoko saying their names for one entire LP side, while side 2 is a couple of songs, press interviews and background noise in their hotel room during their Bed-In peace project. Needless to say, it's not difficult to see why these albums are not often mentioned when people discuss Lennon's genius as a songwriter! His subsequent albums took on a much more accessible sound, and are much more well-regarded as a result.
• Lights' second album, Siberia, is more experimental and dubstep-influenced.
• Rap superstar Lil Wayne decided to follow in the footsteps of his friend Kid Rock and record a Rap Rock album entitled Rebirth.
• Lil Yachty made a name for himself as a cloudy trap rapper with his Lil Boat series, dabbling sporadically with occasional Pop Rap or aggressive Michigan trap sounds here and there. Then he released Let's Start Here in 2023, which took a huge detour by being a full-on Psychedelic Rock album, featuring a few thumbprints like his auto-tuned voice, but otherwise completely eschewing the hip-hop elements.
• Linkin Park:
  • After their Nu Metal influenced Hybrid Theory and Meteora, they switched to a U2-esque Arena Rock sound with Minutes to Midnight. Critical reviews are mostly positive, and the album's good commercial performance helped the band to remain relevant for the latter half of the 2000s; fan reception, however, is very divisive. The general consensus was that they gave up everything that made them unique in order to be as generic as possible, and it's generally considered to be one of their weakest albums.
  • A Thousand Suns saw the integration of industrial, experimental, and electronic sounds. Depending on who you ask, it's either the point where they grew the beard or where they jumped the shark; however, as time goes on it becomes Vindicated by History.
  • Living Things has been described as combining elements of their four previous albums to make a unique sound. It basically sounds like indietronica meets Rap Metal. Fan reception is mostly positive, but as time passed, the album loses popularity as A Thousand Suns gains more traction.
  • The Hunting Party finally saw Linkin Park return to nu metal, but also integrated elements of '90s Thrash Metal and Punk Rock, with a sound that's easily their least commercial friendly of their entire library, to a mixed-to-positive reception.
  • One More Light, ironically, shifts to a pop style to create their most commercial friendly record. This massive change was near-universally hated, and most considers the album the weakest Linkin Park has ever made, but after the death of Chester Bennington two months later, the album gains a slightly better retrospective reception, in most part due to the very personal lyrics.
• Liz Phair has had two of these so far out of her six-album discography: Liz Phair, an Executive Meddling-heavy pop effort in 2003 that was poorly received after her three previous confessional and sexually-explicit indie-pop albums (but ultimately Vindicated by History), and Funstyle, which was half straightforward songs resembling her usual output, half jarringly silly songs mocking her experiences in the music industry, which in the album's press release Phair stated to have resulted in her being let go by her label and dropped by her agent (and interviews show that Phair didn't do it as self-sabotaging Writer Revolt, with the album closer even being a Take That! against the executives who were appalled by lead single "Bollywood" when she actually expected them to like this wacky approach).
• Little Boots' debut album, Hands was 80's-style electro/synthpop, now she has genre shifted to a retraux house-type sound in her latest few singles.
• Demi Lovato started exploring a grittier, more hip-hop/R&B-influenced style on her third album, Unbroken, than her earlier pop-rock sound.
• Low did this with Double Negative. adding Noise Rock and Glitch to their previous Slowcore sound
• Lupe Fiasco with his third album Lasers, due to heavy Executive Meddling. Atlantic Records saw the success the single 'Superstar' had made upon his previous album The Cool, and thus wanted him to continue going down that path. It must also be noted at the time, Lasers was heavily anticipated, due to the solid approbation of his first two albums and especially with back-and-forth rumors of Lupe going into early retirement. After molding the album accordingly, Lasers finally got a release date. While the lyricism was still mostly genuine, it featured a heavy pop-oriented slightly electro sound that a good portion of the fanbase didn't sit well with.
• Machine Gun Kelly's Tickets to My Downfall: his previous album, Hotel Diablo added some Rap Rock elements to his usual Hip-Hop style, but Tickets to My Downfall took it a step further, with Kelly largely singing instead of rapping. Critics have referred to it as a throwback to the early 2000s Pop Punk scene.
• Machine Head started off as straightforward Groove Metal for their first two albums. Their next two albums brought in Nu Metal, but for some reason, they switched back to Groove Metal for Through the Ashes of Empires. Four years later, they made the ultimate change; switching to Thrash Metal with The Blackening, even adding several long songs, a then-first for the band. Unto the Locust continued this, and whatever they do next...well, we'll have to wait and see.
• Madonna - Bedtime Stories was R&B, which lead to Ray of Light and Music, which were electronic albums. Hard Candy sounds most like her '80s albums with urban and electronic influences.
• Stephen Malkmus is best known for his work with Pavement, and whether credited to Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks or to Malkmus alone, his subsequent solo albums could still be broadly described as guitar-based indie rock... Until Groove Denied, where Malkmus himself played all the instruments and experimented heavily with drum machines and synthesizers. Certain songs still sound like Pavement or his other solo work, but others sound more like early Post-Punk - first promotional single "Viktor Borgia" is basically a Synth-Pop song.
• In 1966 Manfred Mann changed singers (from Paul Jones to Mike d'Abo) and labels (from HMV to Fontana). They also changed styles, albeit very slightly as they retained the R&B roots they had, with As Is, where they shifted from beat music to psychedelic pop-rock.
• Marilyn Manson has done this with almost every album. His first album was pretty much straight Industrial Metal, with Antichrist Superstar following the same lines with more elements of traditional Industrial. Mechanical Animals was a much Lighter and Softer mix of his old sound with Glam Rock. Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death) combined the accesibility of Mechanical Animals with the darkness of his first two resulting in a perfect combination of his two styles, and the completion of his concept trilogy.
  • Golden Age of the Grotesque was the first where Twiggy Ramirez was not co-writing (or a part of the band) was more Industrial Metal.
  • Eat Me, Drink Me was one of his biggest shifts, completely abandoning Industrial for a sound influenced by 80's Goth Rock, New Wave, and 2000's post-hardcore style Emo, and less of a focus on shocking and more of a focus on his recent heartbreaks.
  • After Twiggy returned, having founded Goon Moon, and played for both A Perfect Circle and Nine Inch Nails, the next album, The High End of Low, had a much different sound, incorporating some Industrial Metal elements, folk ("Four Rusted Horses" is actually an unreleased Goon Moon song, with a new set of lyrics, the original Twiggy version is on Youtube), more Glam Rock, metal and pretty much just a hopping into every genre that they had ever touched (which, as a result, makes it just as eclectic as what Twiggy was doing with Goon Moon, in its own way). Their latest album, Born Villain, is more of a metal sound.
  • The latest album, The Pale Emperor, was made by Manson and soundtrack musician Tyler Bates. The genre, according to Manson's Facebook page, is "Suicide Rock". It's a metal/blues infusion with a very cinematic feel, and has been pretty much universally praised by fans and reviewers alike, a distinction that hasn't existed since 2000's Holy Wood. While Manson described Born Villain as the comeback album, this album will be remembered as the true one, even bringing a career revitalization, a tour with The Smashing Pumpkins, an expansion of Manson's already praised television and film career, and the most praised live shows since the Golden Age of Grotesque era, with Manson on top of his game once more, singing better than ever, and in shape. According to interviews, the last one was motivated by his role on Sons of Anarchy, which apparently spawned a fear that, if he ever did time, due to his physique and reputation at the time, he'd be a prison bitch, so he started working out. Seriously. He's even done some images shirtless, something he hadn't done in over a decade due to his weight.
• Kathy Mattea was best known for her country, bluegrass, and folk influences. 1994's Walking Away a Winner was considerably more pop and rock influenced, leading to favorable comparisons to Bonnie Raitt.
• Midnight Resistance was electronic-based Dark Wave with a touch of Future Pop on his first album, Remote, then changed to a guitar-based Alternative Rock sound for his second, The Mirror Cage.
• Mike Mareen's 1988 sophomore album, Let's Start Now, started to shift from his Italo-Disco/Hi-NRG roots to more contemporary dance/synthpop, as well as being somewhat Darker and Edgier.
• Marina Diamandis started off with indie pop with Retraux influences, but starting with Electra Heart she switched to an electropop sound. Apparently, the critics were the only ones saying "She Changed Her Music, Now She Sucks", as it was acclaimed by her fans.
• Bob Marley: Fans were surprised by Kaya, which was a Lighter and Softer album than Marley's previous output, with no protest songs and mostly laidback songs about love and relaxing in the sun. This was followed up with Survival, an album with nothing but protest songs.
• Imelda May had always showed other influences, but her first few albums established her as something of a rockabilly revivalist, complete with a very distinctive visual style. Life Love Flesh Blood (2017) showcases a wider range of styles; it's a relatively subtle shift by the standards of the trope, but the accompanying change in her look, from skunk stripe to Little Black Dress, made the point clear. As she said, she wanted to stop dressing up as "Imelda May".
• McFly, a band commonly known for their chirpy Pop-Rock music. In 2010, they released Above The Noise, an album filled with mostly electro-pop music, with heavy involvement from Taio Cruz. Fans weren't impressed.
• mewithoutYou- It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All A Dream! It's Alright! contained more acoustic than electric, a highly folky campire sound, and actual SINGING by Aaron Weiss.
  • The album contains the most specific Christian ("A Stick, a Carrot, and a String") and at the same time Sufi and Buddhist ("Allah! Allah! Allah!" and "Cattail Down") influences so far, confusing some Christian fans unaware of Weiss's Religious history.
• Men Without Hats were a Synth-Pop/New Wave band throughout the eighties. The 1991 album Sideways was a surprising shift towards Alternative Rock, based around distorted electric guitar instead of the synthesizer. The band changed styles because they felt guitar-based music was going to make a comeback, and they were arguably ahead of the curve in this attitude -Nevermind came out later the same year and helped break Alternative Rock into the mainstream, not that it helped sales of Sideways any. They broke up for about a decade due to the album's lack of commercial success, and went back to synth pop after reforming again.
• Metallica and Megadeth simplified their style almost simultaneously, with Metallica (The Black Album) for the former and Countdown to Extinction for the latter. While initially successful, both bands continued with the simplification for the rest of The '90s, to predictably diminishing returns.
  • The low points for each band were St. Anger (Metallica, in 2003) and Risk (Megadeth, in 1999). The former stripped down for a rough, unpolished sound while the other tried to be more commercial after the success of the previous album's efforts. Their later efforts were mostly a U-turn: Metallica's Death Magnetic kept the longer songs of St. Anger with a turn back to their late-80s sound, and the three Megadeth albums after the band's reformation (The System Has Failed, United Abominations, and Endgame) steadily shifted more towards the seminal Rust In Peace. Incidentally, the Megadeth albums tend to be overall better received than Death Magnetic is (blame the Metallica fans), though the latter's still pretty good.
  • Then Metallica collaborated with Lou Reed in Lulu, a weird Concept Album based on an opera which was panned by almost everyone who heard it. At the same time, Megadeth released Th1rt3en. An album that, while well received overall, was criticized by some for having a decidedly lighter and more stripped down style of metal than their previous three albums. Less than two years later, they released Super Collider. An album that was almost as badly received as Risk.
  • Both bands would then in 2016 make heavier releases that are nearly Old Sound Albums, Metallica's Hardwired... to Self-Destruct (which compared to the late-80s throwback of Death Magnetic, sounds instead like their 1983 debut Kill 'Em All) and Megadeth's Dystopia, which would be much better received.
• MGMT
  • Their sophomore album Congratulations dropped the electropop from their first album in favor of 60's and 70's-influenced Psychedelia.
  • Their third, self-titled album MGMT, beyond the first two singles, "Alien Days" and "Your Life is a Lie", is more electronic, darker and droning.
• While Midnight Oil kept on improving their sound, the one that fits a style change the most is 1998's Redneck Wonderland, which features a more electronic-leaning sound. Two of its songs were included in the Greatest Hits Album released the year before as a preview, and the contrast is downright jarring.
• Robert Miles changed sounds for each of his albums, from his signature dream trance on Dreamland, to ambient breaks on 23 AM, to ethno-trip hop on Organik.
• mind.in.a.box is mainly darkwave/futurepop, but R.E.T.R.O took an unexpected detour to chiptunes and Commodore 64 remixes. It also deviates from their signature cohesive narrative of Sequel Songs, possessing minimal lyrics and no plotline.
• Few bands have pulled off a radical Genre Shift more successfully than Ministry. Their first two albums were ordinary, if slightly pessimistic, New Wave '80s pop (one reviewer dubbed them "The Human League's surly little brother"). On their third album, The Land of Rape and Honey they revamped their lineup and completely changed their sound, abandoning pop for a brand new musical style that would become known as Industrial Metal and catapulting themselves to stardom in the process.
• Kylie Minogue basically does this with every album:
  • Her first four albums were produced with Stock Aitken Waterman. Of those, the first two, Kylie and Enjoy Yourself, fit squarely into the production trio’s bubblegum pop mold, with a fusion of Hi-NRG beats and Motown-esque songwriting. Her third album Rhythm Of Love was the first to break from this with a more dance-oriented sound, influenced by Madonna. She gained even more creative control on her fourth album ‘’Let’s Get To It,'' adding new jack swing, house, and hip-hop to the mix.
  • After parting ways with the production team that brought her to fame, she signed to the dance music label Deconstruction, and experimented with trip-hop, house, and R&B on her second self-titled LP.
  • Her second (and last) album for Deconstruction, Impossible Princess, was highly polarizing on release because it was not afraid to experiment - it went from drum and bass to Celtic pop to Britpop to progressive pop rock, and that’s just the first four tracks.
  • With another label change to Parlophone, she went back to her pop roots with Light Years, which was so successful that she would stay with the label for over a decade. She reinvented herself again and again, though, delving into disco-pop (Fever, her best-selling album to date), 1980s-oriented synthpop (Body Language), glam rock and euro disco (X), polished dance pop (Aphrodite), pure pop again (Kiss Me Once), Christmas music (Kylie Christmas), and another brief return to her disco days (the Kylie + Garibay EP).
  • After switching labels again to BMG, she experimented with country music on Golden. Finally, she returned to disco again with the aptly named Disco, which became her best selling album since Fever.
• Joni Mitchell began injecting jazzy sounds into her folk-rock as early as 1972’s For the Roses, but that still didn’t prepare listeners for the almost abstract, full-tilt jazz-rock of 1975’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns and ensuing albums.
• Moby is primarily known as a major figure in Electronic Music, who started with 90s rave music and proved himself to be more diverse than previously thought when he added elements of new age, rock, ambient and hip-hop. So far, so good, but when he took the plunge and did a full-length Alternative Rock album with 1996's Animal Rights, it sank like a rock and made him a laughingstock (though its first single, a Cover Version of Mission of Burma's "That's When I Reach For My Revolver", was a minor hit). Luckily, four years later, another New Sound Album, Play (most famous for its downtempo sound and liberal use of blues and gospel samples) not only revitalized his career, but was the highest selling album ever in electronic music, selling 12,000,000 copies.
• Modest Mouse changes their sound on each of their albums, starting with the pixies-esque "This Is A Long Drive...", followed up with the more western sounding "Lonesome Crowded West", and the spacey "Moon & Antarctica." "Good News For People Who Love Bad News" was more straightforward rock with a few soft ballads, and We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank has a more produced feel.
• The Monkees began incorporating psychedelic pop-rock with bubblegum pop on their fourth album, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones Ltd. They also pretty much experimented here and there on their other albums.
• Mono Puff was a project led by They Might Be Giants' John Flansburgh, and their first album, Unsupervised, largely sounded like TMBG but with more Genre Roulette. Their second album, It's Fun to Steal, was still fairly eclectic, but put a major emphasis on funk and disco influences.
• The Moody Blues started off as an R&B group on their first album, The Magnificent Moodies. After a few personnel changes, they released Days of Future Passed and became the symphonic rock group we know today.
• Prior to breaking internationally, Alanis Morissette had recorded two teen pop albums. Then, for Jagged Little Pill (her first album to reach international success), she decided to go with a harder rocking decidedly Post-Grunge style.
• Mötley Crüe was a great hard rock/hair metal band in the '80s. In 1992, lead singer Vince Neil left the band; he was then replaced by John Corabi. At this point, Hair Metal/Hard Rock was dead, and Grunge/Alt Rock became mainstream. Corabi morphed the sound of Mötley Crüe into a grunge band. It did not fit well with their fans, they stopped touring in arena, went to theaters, then eventually canceled the tour. This went on for a decade, with Neil and Tommy Lee leaving and returning again from time to time.
  • The eventual followup in 1997, Generation Swine, brought Vince Neil back but it was another attempt to keep up with contemporary trends, adding elements of Alternative Metal and Industrial Metal to their sound and making use of drum machines and synthesizers. They'd finally return to straightforward glam metal with New Tattoo in 2000, and subsequent albums tended not to stray so far from their usual style.
• The Move's first album, along with the handful of singles that accompanied it like "Night of Fear" and "I Can Hear The Grass Grow," were light pop tunes typical of the late 1960s. The release of their second album, Shazam, showcased the band embracing hard rock which would become the band's forte throughout the rest of their existence.
• Muse's The Resistance has raised cries of They Changed It, Now It Sucks!. Really, every single Muse album makes changes to their sound. Compare Showbiz to Origin of Symmetry, Origin Of Symmetry to Absolution and so on. Frankly, it wasn't that radical departure from Black Holes and Revelations, other than the "Undisclosed Desires" which uses a keytar instead of a guitar or piano, which was a first. But still Muse. They have, in fact, made each album deliberately different from the previous one.
• Mumford and Sons' first two albums, Sigh No More and Babel, were folk-rock through and through, with plenty of banjos, melodic harmonies and passionate, epic songwriting. For their third album Wilder Mind, however, the band ditched the banjos for a more electric alt-rock and stadium rock sound, influenced by producer James Ford (who has also worked with bands such as Arctic Monkeys, Florence + The Machine and Klaxons). Cue numerous cries of They Changed It, Now It Sucks!.
• Kacey Musgraves's 2018 album "Golden Hour" is much more 70s pop/soft rock a la Fleetwood Mac or The Bee Gees than her other two albums which are more or less straight country. Her next album, 2021's star-crossed, pushed her further into pop territory.
• My Chemical Romance pulls this with pretty much every album. I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love was straight ahead Post-Hardcore/Classic Emo with a lot of screamed lyrics, distorted guitars, and even a few straight ahead Hardcore Punk songs. Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge largely continued with this sound but added Post-Punk, Goth Rock and Pop Punk, decreased the amount of screamed lyrics and focused more on Gerard Way's emotional vocals. This coupled with better songwriting and the big hits "Helena" and "I'm Not Okay (I Promise)" made it a hit. Around this time, they embraced their neo-goth meets horror punk image. The Black Parade was a major shift; it was a full on Concept Album influenced by '70s rock styles such as Progressive Rock and the artier side of Glam Rock, while still staying true to their Emo roots. Danger Days was the biggest change; it had a very modern indie pop influenced sound, incorporating elements of Synth-Pop, garage rock, and Pop Punk. It also had a much more vibrant feel, which contrasted with their original sound and image, creating a Broken Base.
• Napalm Death: Harmony Corruption onwards, when they started to take on death metal influences.
• Kate Nash had two albums of straight piano-focused indie pop. Her third release, Girl Talk, flipped her previous sound on its head, as she instead opted for a guitar-lead garage rock sound. Fan reaction was mixed, to say the least.
• Nero's first album Welcome Reality was heavily rooted in Dubstep and Drum and Bass, with elements of breakbeat, electro-pop, and electronic rock. Their second album Between II Worlds largely abandons those two genres, and has a more future house/big beat feel to it.
• New Found Glory's music has always been steeped in pop-punk and hardcore influences, but their album Coming Home is considered their most different as the melodies were Lighter and Softer, with more involvement with piano, acoustics, and some female backing vocals. Their next few releases after this album went back to their hardcore roots.
• Although they'd released a couple of dance floor classics already such as "Everything's Gone Green" and "Tempation", and of course "Blue Monday", New Order's album Power, Corruption & Lies was where the band fully dived into their alternative dance persona. Their previous album, Movement, sounded rather similar to Joy Division.
• After three albums of straight indie power pop, The New Pornographers started varying things up a bit:
  • Challengers was composed almost entirely of ballads, with only two songs ("All of the Things That Go to Make Heaven and Earth" and "Mutiny, I Promise You") resembling anything from, say, Mass Romantic. The album carries a downtempo air of melancholy and many of the songs on it seem to be about breakups, and even Dan Bejar's three songs are more wistful than usual.
  • Together, in addition to having plenty more ballads, features a more grandiose sound heavily featuring strings and horns, as well as established guest musicians such as St. Vincent and Zach Condon from Beirut.
  • Brill Bruisers has a much more noticeable reliance on synthesizers and a denser sound in general. This is even more pronounced on the group's latest, Whiteout Conditions.
• These New Puritans' first album, Beat Pyramid, had a fairly normal post-punk revival sound. Their follow-up, Hidden, was a dark and bizarre album based mostly on electronic beats, orchestral and choir arrangements and odd samples.
  • And now their new album, Field of Reeds, seems to be going in a more Post-Rock direction.
• Nilsson Schmilsson saw Harry Nilsson switch from Tin Pan Alley-styled pop (with a heavy Beatles influence) to more straight-ahead (though eclectic) rock.
  • And A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night consisted of nothing but traditional pop standards.
• Nirvana: They did it with every single album of theirs. Bleach was a mix of sludgy hard rock/metal based off bands like Green River along with some more pop rock and punk fare. Nevermind was polished, glossy produced (for them, commercial) hard rock much more similar to The Pixies and Mudhoney along with the acoustic song "Polly". The compilation Incesticide was a hodge-podge mixture of Bleach-era songs, straight punk rock covers, and covers turned into pop rock such as the song "Son of a Gun". In Utero was more of a hodge-podge of heavy metal, heavily distorted hard rock like Sonic Youth, straight punk, and acoustic ballads such as the song "Dumb". Finally, MTV Unplugged in New York was acoustic rock with more of a progressive focus such as the inclusion of the cello on several songs and the addition of a second guitarist in Pat Smear. If anything, Nirvana managed to constantly revolve around certain elements within each album (metal/hard rock focused songs, an acoustic song or two, and a straight punk song or two.)
• Nits are known for doing this with almost every album, to the point where critics and fans are disappointed when they don't.
• No Doubt's second big album, Return of Saturn, was a different sound from that heard in the wildly popular Tragic Kingdom, but it was more an evolution than any sort of sudden shift. But Rock Steady was a drastic change, so drastic that (for better or worse) it barely sounded like No Doubt at all. Ska/punk had morphed into a pop/dance sound.
• American metal band Nonpoint has always been a very recognizable band, but each of their major studio albums feature a distinctly different sound. Statement, their first album, features an aggressive Nu Metal sound, with R&B-influenced vocal delivery and occasional rapped vocals. This was largely dropped on their second album Development, which went towards a much more commercial Alternative Metal direction very similar to Chevelle, which featured no trace of harsh vocals and very radio friendly melodies. Recoil was a much heavier album with very throaty vocals and crunchy distortion, even featuring some double-bass drumming moments. The album still maintained the catchy melodies from the previous album, though not as commercial. To the Pain essentially took the previous album and dialed it up, with some songs featuring extremely harsh, lightning-fast vocal delivery, chugging riffs, and a very strong Groove Metal sound. Vengeance was rawer and even more aggressive, though the vocals aren't quite as fast. Miracle is another slightly more commercial album, though nowhere near as radio friendly as Development; it features less melody and harsher singing than the latter album.
• Julia Nunes' first album, Left Right Wrong was entirely original songs performed by herself on acoustic guitar and vocals. Subsequent albums added a backing group and some clean electric guitar but were roughly in the same acoustic pop/indie pop vein. A major change came with the EP UGHWOW, which had a more beat-heavy, r and b/hip-hop inspired production style. Acoustic guitar or ukulele are audible in a few tracks, but they're more likely to be run through effects to sound more like "samples".
• While Oasis roughly kept the same "Beatlesesque songs" style their whole career, their albums from the third to fifth fall into this: Be Here Now focused on Epic Rocking, Standing on the Shoulder of Giants was psychedelic and Heathen Chemistry had a crude sound.
• The Ocean started off their first three albums with a mixture of aggressive hardcore-influenced progressive sludge metal and slow, heavy, dark atmospheric doom metal. Heliocentric and Anthropocentric changed everything with far more clean singing and melodies, and even additions of ballads.
• of Montreal's Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? represented and, to a degree, chronicled their transition from quirky twee pop to bizarre neo-glam.
  • The earlier album Satanic Panic in the Attic was also an important transition towards this new sound: It was their first album to prominently feature synthesizers and drum machines throughout.
  • This has been a common occurrence throughout the band's existence. The very second album - The Bedside Drama: A Petite Tragedy - was a shift from stand-alone, confessional compositions towards concept albums about fictional characters.
• The Offspring became popular as a punk rock band with catchy upbeat songs. Their album Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace has only two songs in their signature style with the rest being slow and more thoughtful.
  • There breakout album, 1994's Smash, is itself a New Sound Album. Their previous two albums are much rougher hardcore punk, while Smash marked the debut of better hooks and a strong metal influence.
  • To be fair, they often had slower, "more thoughtful" songs and interludes on almost all of their albums (except maybe Smash), such as the Grief Song "Gone Away".
• UK thrash metal band Onslaught's album In Search of Sanity features a more melodic and complex style of thrash than the simpler, Slayer-esque sound they had on their previous release. It also featured vocalist Steve Grimmett from Grim Reaper, whose soaring and clean vocal style was a point of contention at the time of the album's release.
  • On the topic of Onslaught, their first album was more of a thrash and hardcore punk hybrid than the full-on thrash they would play on their second album.
• The German band Oomph!, thanks to frequent experimentations and Genre Shift during their career, have several of them:
  • Sperm moved partially away from the previous EBM album Oomph!, taking the first steps into Industrial Metal with Groove Metal influences, in fact codifying the "Neue Deutsche Härte" (or NDH);
  • Plastik represented a turning point in the band's sound, which got significantly softened, featuring less aggressive instruments and vocals and more prominent synthesizer riffs;
  • Wahrheit oder Pflich introduced substantial Gothic Metal elements;
  • Des Wahnnsinns fette Beute abandoned the previous gothic influences but also distanced itself from the more traditional NDH, experimenting a lot by blending together different and contrasting genres and sounds, sometimes within the same song.
• Opeth, originally a progressive death metal band, did this twice.
  • Damnation is an album consisting of, essentially, nothing but the quiet bits that had usually been sandwiched inside death metal songs before. This was followed by two more albums of their regular progressive death metal mix.
  • Heritage features a new sound entirely, abandoning the death metal influences for heavy progressive rock. This change has stuck, with their albums since refining the same style.
• Orbital's In Sides and The Altogether.
• Cyrus' ex-co-star, Emily Osment, used an adult alternative sound on her debut EP, All The Right Wrongs, while Fight Or Flight is more techno/dubstep/dance-oriented.
• Owl City began as a indie-electropop project, but delved into more of a mainstream dance-pop sound post-Shooting Star, which did not go well with plenty of fans. The 2014 EP Ultraviolet saw Adam Young returning to a less mainstream sound, which seems to have won back former fans.

Bands and Artists P-Z

• Progressive Metal band Pain of Salvation did this with every album, too. Entropia had a very eclectic prog-metal sound with a funk influence in some tracks. One Hour by the Concrete Lake was much more streamlined and had a slight industrial influence. The Perfect Element - Part 1 was a softer, darker, and more complex effort. Remedy Lane was the same, but slightly heavier. BE was very experimental, featuring tracks in other genres away from metal or progressive rock. Scarsick was more commercial, even adding a bit of Nu Metal in the sound. Both Road Salt albums are heavily influenced by 1970s prog-rock and hard rock, and are their softest work to date.
• Panic! at the Disco may stand as the only band to have changed their sound halfway through an album, since their first album transitioned from emo influenced dance-punk, to vaudeville and musical theater inflected emo influenced by Danny Elfman. They then completely changed their sound again on Pretty. Odd. which switched to a '60s inspired psychedelic and folk pop sound with the modern production and lyrics of emo. This triggered a Broken Base who still rage to this day. After the band split up, the remaining members came back with Vices and Virtues, which bizarrely enough returned them to the dark, synthesizer based, dance rock of their debut; and then Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die switched to a sound influenced by '80s Synthpop and New Wave Music as well as modern day R&B and electro-rock. Death of a Bachelor had a much less consistent sound - a few tracks were straightforward Pop Rock, but Jazz and Hip-Hop had a clear influence throughout the album.
• Papa Roach's first three albums were heavily influenced by Nu Metal and Rap Metal. Their fourth 2004 album Getting Away with Murder abandoned nu metal completely for Alternative Metal with Hard Rock leanings, and all rapping was completely removed. They maintained this sound all the way until 2012's The Connection, which featured the return of rapping and nu metal elements, described as a cross between old and new. 2015's Face Everything and Rise made the nu metal elements even more prominent, and while it's not a complete return to their roots, it is easily their most nu metal-sounding album since 2004.
• Pearl Jam moved from their accessible hits on Ten towards more experimental waters starting with Vitalogy or No Code, and they eventually returned to head-on grunge/hard rock with either Riot Act or Pearl Jam (depends who you ask).
• Pendulum started out as a mainly D'n'B band when their first album, Hold Your Colour, was released. The next two albums, In Silico & Immersion, branched out more into different genres and styles. Despite the albums selling like hot cakes, it still doesn't stop people from complaining.
  • Their next album is reportedly going to be more punk rock influenced. Time will tell how that ends up going.
• After little success cranking out generic J-pop, Perfume brought on producer Yasutaka Nakata for their album "Game" as a last ditch attempt at popularity. The switch to a techno sound quickly turned them into one of the most successful groups in Japan's history.
• Pet Shop Boys albums are pretty consistent—almost entirely electronic and typically dance-pop or house-influenced beatfests with the occasional political snark, historical reference, or cultural observation. Then, out of left field, 2002's Release: a guitar-based album full of sixties-ish pop (with Johnny Marr playing the guitar parts, no less), the occasional use of Autotune (mostly to simulate a phone line, but fans still cried "they ruined Neil's voice!"), and slow, sincere ballads, with only two dance-oriented tracks. Critics tended to like it, but many fans hated it for being "too acoustic".
• Petra, the original Christian Rock band, did this nearly every album, essentially following the current trends in rock music (or trying to, at least) from start to finish. The standouts, however, are the various times they tried to tone down the "rock" part in order to get airplay on Christian radio. Only to snap right back by the next album. Usually.
• P!nk has done this with pretty much every album.
  • Mostly due to heavy Executive Meddling in her first albums. The ones with her pink hair. Her first album was R&B/Hip-Hop, due to Executive Meddling (P!nk was supposed to have fronted an R&B girl-group, but was then offered a solo deal). She fought for more creative control with her second album, deciding to sing music in her preferred style. Each album reflects the people she worked with closely during the writing process (Linda Perry on "Missundaztood", Tim Armstrong of Rancid on "Try This", Max Martin for much of "I'm Not Dead"). The albums are also pretty good reflections of different periods in her life ("Missundaztood" dealt with much of her childhood, "Funhouse" was written during the time she had separated from husband Carey Hart).
• Pink Floyd. Listening to The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, then The Dark Side of the Moon, then The Wall, then The Final Cut, it's like four different bands (Justified for Piper, as Syd Barrett had a breakdown and had to leave the band shortly after it was finished.)
  • More like five if you take into account their experimental albums like Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother.
  • However the transitions are so gradual that in many cases it's difficult to pinpoint exactly which one is the New Sound Album. The Dark Side of the Moon is not so different from Obscured By Clouds, which is not so different from Meddle, which is not so different from Atom Heart Mother... yet Atom Heart Mother and The Dark Side Of The Moon are worlds apart.
  • Where it is evident is usually when a major change occurs in the band. Animals sounds different from Wish You Were Here (1975) because Roger Waters took control of the band at that point, and A Momentary Lapse of Reason sounds different from The Final Cut because Roger Waters left the band and David Gilmour took charge.
• The Police's first two albums, including Outlandos d'Amour, were inspired by reggae and punk music (what they termed "Reggatta de Blanc" and indeed named their second album that) and involved a lot of Sting screaming over sped-up reggae riffs. Their third album, Zenyatta Mondatta slowed things down and largely abandoned the reggae elements, before the complete Genre Shift took hold with Ghost in the Machine (apart from the hits, it was mostly funk-inspired) and Synchronicity (straight New Wave album).
• Poppy has (somewhat ironically) steadily become less Pop-influenced the longer she's went on. Her earliest work, including her debut Bubblebath EP and Poppy.Computer albums were mostly straightforward, bubblegum Synth-Pop, but Am I A Girl? took a darker and more theatrical sound based in electropop and — most surprisingly — Heavy Metal and Nu Metal, done to deliberately jarring effect. Her following project, I Disagree, is overtly a metal album with only a few smidgens of her previous bubblegum sound.
• Porcupine Tree definitely deserve this. The first album, On The Sunday Of Life, was the musical equivalent of an acid-trip. The second album, Up the Downstair, was more dance and trance-based whilst still retaining elements of being on drugs. The third album, The Sky Moves Sideways, was a homage to Pink Floyd, whilst the fourth album, Signify, was a more rock-oriented and faster-paced album than any of its previous friends, and introduced a very jazzy feeling, and Stupid Dream, the fifth album, has been described as a pop album, as it's one of the most accessible albums by PT. Lightbulb Sun is the Tree's take on emo, being the break-up album, so filled with lots of sad lyrics, and the seventh album, In Absentia, decides to further mess with your head by going progressive metal a lot of the time, whilst still retaining acoustic elements found in Lightbulb Sun and Stupid Dream. Prog metal gave way to ambience for the next album, Deadwing, which did keep some of the heavier moments from In Absentia. Fear of a Blank Planet has been the heaviest album overall, following on from Deadwing, and includes a 17 minute long epic rocking moment, which is also one of the heaviest pieces they've done, featuring some death-metal-esque drumming at points. The Incident blends together metal with ambience and acoustic guitars, as well as hints of industrial at times. It's fair to say, the only genre they've not attempted yet has been soul, but there's still time yet.
• Porter Robinson’s music can be very distinctly split between his work before the release of his debut record Worlds and after. The sound that made him famous was Electro House (with his particular style being responsible for the creation of complextro as a subgenre within the scene), with his debut Spitfire EP being an early glimmer of success for him. Worlds moved toward a more indietronica-inspired sound palette, and tunes like the ambient-inspired “Sea of Voices” and Vocaloid pop track “Sad Machine” alienated someone fans while drawing in others. Porter would go on to rather infamously disowned most of his music from his early career, save for some of the songs that foreshadowed his genre change like “Language,” the more artful tracks on Worlds and "Shelter", a collaboration with his good friend Madeon. His work since Worlds has largely stayed true to the sound established on that record, with the primary exception being his work on the speedcore project Virtual Self.
• Power Glove's EP II has a noticeably Darker and Edgier, somewhat industrial sound, compared to EP I and the Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon OST .
• Florida band Presence was a pretty standard Nu Metal/Rap Metal outfit. Their last album was a straightforward Post-Grunge album with nary a rap on it. Out of nowhere.
• From Elvis in Memphis was a new sound album for Elvis Presley as it showed him perform musical genres from his native city Memphis, Tennessee, like country and soul. At the time it was his first non-soundtrack album in nearly a decade and he actually choose music he wanted to do, rather than have his manager make this decision for him. Another unique album in Elvis' career is Having Fun with Elvis on Stage, an atrocious piece of garbage where his manager just edited several bits of stage conversations together, devoid of any context or music, and released it as an album. When Elvis heard about this he personally made sure this record was withdrawn from the stores.
• Primal Scream shifted their sound repeatedly throughout the 1990s, first moving from the indie jangle sound of their '80s albums to house rock with Screamadelica. After a brief dip into a more traditional sound with the bluesy Give Out, But Don't Give Up, the band closed out the decade with the dark, claustrophobic Vanishing Point and the angrily-political XTRMNTR.
• After two albums of generic R&B, Prince finally took the gloves off for Dirty Mind, the album which codified his now-famous style of New Wave-funk-pop-rock with highly sexual lyrics. He has had several others over his career:
  • Purple Rain emphasised the rock and pop parts of the equation with a slight influence from psychedelic rock and represented the debut of The Revolution.
  • Around the World in a Day dialed up the psychedelia.
  • Sign o' the Times was made after The Revolution disbanded and emphasised stripped-down arrangements.
  • The Black Album was pure funk but got cancelled - its replacement Lovesexy was more poppy.
  • With Graffiti Bridge, Prince bought new drum machines and sequencers but otherwise continued with Lovesexy-style pop-funk-rock.
  • Diamonds and Pearls saw him ditch the New Wave elements, reduce the pop/rock and switch more towards an urban/R&B-oriented style and heavily featured Tony M's clumsy rapping in an attempt to appeal to his supposedly dwindling black audience.
  • After changing his name to the unpronounceable symbol, The Gold Experience dialled down the clumsy rapping and continued otherwise with the funk/R&B with some extra bits of pop and rock, a style he's pretty much stayed in ever since.
• Procol Harum started out as the psychedelic band we all knew in the 60's thanks to "A Whiter Shade of Pale." Once the genre neared its end of popularity they made a shift to progressive rock with A Salty Dog and to blues rock with Home.
• The Prodigy underwent a lot of upheaval in their sound during the 90s.
  • Composer Liam Howlett started the band as a bright, peppy British rave outfit, with kiddie show samples and tons of breakbeats, as heard on their debut, Experience. Then, in response to the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (which was more or less designed to criminalize raves), Howlett significantly darkened the sound of the next album, Music for the Jilted Generation. The breakbeats were still there, but the music had a far more sinister and confrontational feel, with some rock and hip-hop influence creeping in (such as "Poison," Maxim Reality's vocal debut on record, after being their live MC since their infancy).
  • Those rock and hip-hop influences came to fruition on their third album, The Fat of the Land, which became one of the defining albums of the big-beat movement and thus felt totally different in approach to what came before. The breakbeats were deemphasized in favor of more hip-hop influence, and a Punk Rock feel to some songs, helped by dancer Keith Flint who contributed vocals for the first time. It's this record that would define the Prodigy's future records.
• Project Pitchfork appear to have jumped on the Aggrotech/Hellectro bandwagon with their more recent albums, although retaining aspects of their Darkwave past.
• While each of Pulp's albums progress from the last, His 'N' Hers shows a marked difference from their more introspective, artsy records of the 80s, and is generally considered a vast improvement. We Love Life could also be considered this to a lesser extent, as it sounds much more naturalistic and organic than the albums that preceded it.
• Queen weren't exactly prog to start with, but were known for highly overdubbed vocal harmonies and guitar work. Starting with The Game they pushed the guitar to the background and focused more on the pop side of their personality instead of rock. This development went hand in hand with synthesizeritis and reduced songwriting quality, causing them to lose their popularity in America.
• R.E.M. has a lot of these, especially the experimental New Adventures in Hi-Fi. Monster to an extent too, as it introduced a louder, more grunge-influenced sound, coming after two popular albums emphasizing orchestration and acoustic guitars. Don't forget Up, the first album after Bill Berry's departure. It introduced drum machines and synthesizers to their sound.
• Radiohead had a lot of cases of this.
  • Their first two albums were mostly straightforward rock, with a few mellow moments. And then they started to go weird with 1997's OK Computer, an album featuring spacey rock with recurring themes of globalization and alienation. The massive hype and the highly positive reception gave them much popularity and attention, but the amount of touring and inter-band strife forced the band to re-think itself.
  • ...Eventually creating Kid A. The album featured more electronic sounds than guitars (as Thom Yorke was allegedly bored of guitars by that point), distorted vocals and much more abstract lyrics and experimental instrumentation, splintering their massive fanbase (many of whom had expected a straight-up continuation of OK Computer) and becoming a highly polarizing album. 2001 saw the release of Amnesiac, which was recorded alongside Kid A and was just as confusing as its predecessor, but both albums would receive much praise.
  • After a throwback to OK Computer in 2003's Hail to the Thief, they changed again in 2007 with the Lighter and Softer In Rainbows, which was much more accessible than one could say about their previous work.
  • 2011 would bring The King of Limbs, which is way too hard to categorize as a whole.
  • ...Which was followed up with A Moon Shaped Pool in 2016, sounding very similar to How To Disappear Completely from Kid A
• Rainbow's fourth album Down to Earth represented a large shift toward a more commercial, AOR-sounding style. The Creative Differences relating to the choice led to the departure of initial vocalist Ronnie James Dio, and later star drummer Cozy Powell, the former before the album and the latter after it.
• The Ramones' pop experiment, the Phil Spector-produced End of the Century.
• The Rasmus did this with the release of Dead Letters. Possibly a case of Executive Meddling, maybe just a bad change of direction whilst trying to Break America/Rest-of-English-Speaking World, but... Energetic and thoroughly enjoyable (if not particularly special) Finnish pop-rock band tries for some strange pop-goth-electronica vibe, falls spectacularly flat, ends up generally derided by the English-Speaking-World goth rock-listening public and having one single, solitary, not very representative song played to death on commercial rock radio. Shame, a couple of the album tracks that hark slightly back to their old sound (which would likely have done well in the pop charts) are excellent, but the rest of it is a pretty forgettable dirge. - YMMV, naturally. They made 2 future albums in a similar genre.
• Red Hot Chili Peppers had Blood Sugar Sex Magik, abandoning heavy metal riffs for full-fledged funk rock. It proved to be their breakthrough album. To see how much they changed, listen to Greatest Hits and compare "Higher Ground" (the only song from before BSSM^note because EMI, their previous label, licensed it in exchange for "Under the Bridge" in their compilation What Hits?!) to the rest of the tracks. One Hot Minute (after guitarist John Frusciante departed) and Californication (when Frusciante returned) kinda count too.
• Lou Reed: Transformer was far more poppy than most of his earlier output. He followed this commercial bestseller up with increasingly more experimental albums like Berlin and the anti-commercial sonic attack Metal Machine Music.
• Relient K left their punk rock sound for more alt-rock with Mmhmm; segueing to alt-folk-ish for Five Score and Seven Years Ago. Their latest album, Forget and Not Slow Down, is a blend of all their genres.
• REO Speedwagon was a hard rock band for the entire duration of The '70s, but transformed into pop with Hi Infidelity. Although initially sucessful, this move caused the band to lose credibility and dissapeared off the radar after the 1980s.
• The Residents: Also change their sound with every album.
• Rhapsody of Fire underwent a rather drastic change between Power of the Dragonflame and Symphony of Enchanted Lands II. Whereas albums up until Power were more like music that told a story, Symphony II onward focused more and more on the story rather than the music, building up the cinematic feel almost to the point where the Dark Secret Saga feels more like a movie without the pictures as opposed to the story-telling music of the Emerald Sword Saga. Fan opinion on which style is better tends to be divided.
• After the disappointing sales of the jazzy, often times soul-influenced indietronica album Ruby Blue, Roisin Murphy decided to completely overhaul her sound and image. The result was Overpowered, a throwback to 1980s disco and synthpop that retains a few certain elements from Ruby Blue. Unlike most eamples on here, it was actually critically acclaimed, but while it was a modest success in the UK, it was never physically released in America (it did however pop up on the iTunes Store starting February 2012). After an 8-year hiatus and a pair of introspective and experimental albums, Hairless Toys and Take Her Up To Monto, she doubled down on her disco leanings in 2020, leading to her most critically acclaimed and commercially successful work yet: Roisin Machine.
• The Rolling Stones shifted from their early R&B-based British Invasion sound to a quirkier, Kinks-like pop with Between the Buttons, went to full-blown psychadelia on Their Satanic Majesties Request, then perfected their bluesy rock formula on Beggars Banquet.
  • Not to mention flirting with disco and synth-rock in the 80s. And electronica in a few tracks in the 90s. These days they are more of a heritage rock band and don't tend to experiment that much.
  • And reggae, funk and disco in the 70s. Their attitude seems to be that, if it comes from the black community it's just another form of R&B - which, of course, is the attitude the original reggae, funk and disco musicians had to begin with.
• Hard to imagine this topic without a mention of Todd Rundgren, who was notorious for changing his style on a regular basis.
• One of the most unique aspects of Rush is that they have many "eras". They start out with a new sound album, continue to perfect with the sound for about 2 to 4 albums, then they will shift to a completely new rock sound for their next album.
  • Their self-titled debut album (released prior to virtuoso drummer/lyricist Neil Peart joining the band) to Fly by Night were pretty straightfoward 70s bar-band fare ala Bad Company or Led Zeppelin. Enter Peart with Fly by Night, and suddenly the lyrics become sci-fi and the drumming much more technical, but the overall song structures still pretty straightforward hard rock.
  • Caress of Steel to Hemispheres had the band started to move into prog territory, with very long multi-part epics, including the very popular 2112.
  • Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures had the band ditching long-form numbers and Geddy Lee's highest vocal tessitura in favor of more controlled and radio-friendly songs.
  • Signals to Hold Your Fire threw the band into a New Wave influenced synthesizer-based sound and went for a more poppier approach, which lasted throughout The '80s.
  • Presto and Roll the Bones had the band throwing the synths into the background and the guitar was now back into the foreground. It still had a pop-rock sound to them and the band experiment with many genres on Roll The Bones, such as electronic, funk, and even hip-hop.
  • Counterparts had the band ditched their poppier synth-laden sound in favor of a grunge-influenced sound sound that was met with commercial and critical success at the peak of grunge's popularity. They heavier sound has been part of the band ever since, with Clockwork Angels moved the band back to a '70s sounding heavy-prog.
  • Some Rush fans have noticed that the album following an official Live Album would be a New Sound Album. They seem to have abandoned this since their 2003 return to regular recording and touring.
• Sash!, just a year after his/their retraux Eurodance comeback album Life's a Beach, released a more mainstream EDM album appropriately titled Life Changes.
• S Club 7 were known for a bubblegum pop sound on their debut album S Club. Their second album 7 was similar though introduced a few R&B tracks. Their third album Sunshine was definitely this, marking a more mature direction for the group. The album's first single "Don't Stop Moving" is widely recognised as their best song ever. Their fourth album Seeing Double was almost completely dance and R&B influenced. Although it didn't sell as well as their previous albums, it received good reviews from critics.
• Sentenced had 1996's Down, which saw the Death Metal band move to a melodic Gothic Metal sound that they would continue on for the rest of their careers. There was also a lesser earlier example in 1993's North From Here, which was way more melodic than their very brutal and raw debut Shadows from the Past.
• Asobi Seksu were criticized by some fans upon the release of their album Hush for changing their sound from shoe-gaze to a more dream-poppy sound with less guitars.
• Sepultura's album Chaos AD showed the metal band experimenting with different genres. Their album Roots had them incorporate traditional Brazilian music in their sound.
• Sevendust's first album featured rawer production, simpler writing, harsher vocals, less melody, and a more aggressive sound. Home was more melodic, leaning a little closer to the band's signature style, but still maintaining a similar sound to their debut. Animosity brought in the real change, with much stronger songwriting and a much more melodic sound. From then on, the band has made little alterations to their music.
• The Shins' Wincing The Night Away, which has a more contemporary indie-rock sound, as opposed to the faux 60's Britpop sound of their first two albums.
• With their second album, Season of Poison Shiny Toy Guns mostly abandoned their previous retro synthpop/rock style and went for a Darker and Edgier emo sound, which had many fans clamoring that it was ruined. III returned to their roots.
• Shotgun Revolution started out with a Classic Blues-Rock inspired sound. Then All This Could Be Yours came out, with a more Modern Hard-stock inspired sound. It helps that one of their guitar players left to focus on another band before they started recording All This Could Be Yours.
• About half of Shudder to Think's discography consisted of these. For their first four albums they were primarily Post-Hardcore. Their 1994 album Pony Express Record combined their original sound with elements of Math Rock and Noise Rock - interestingly, it was their major label debut but also the least commercial material they'd released up to that point.50,000 B.C. then abandoned that sound almost entirely in favor of Alternative Rock and Glam Rock... Though the album also included a re-recording of "Red House", a song from their Post-Hardcore era. Their last two albums were shifts in style in part due to being film soundtracks: First Love, Last Rites consisted of retraux pastiches of different styles popular in the sixties (which tied in with one of the main characters of the film being a collector of rare records), while High Art was a foray into trip-hop and Ambient music. First Love, Last Rites and High Art are also notable for how rarely lead vocalist Craig Wedren sings on them - the former primarily uses guest vocalists, the latter is mostly instrumental.
• A soundtrack example would be the Silent Hill series. The first game's soundtrack consisted mostly of scary mechanical and industrial noise tracks, with only a handful of tracks which are actually 'music'. Silent Hill 2 saw a much greater focus on music and acoustic tracks. The third game started the trend of tracks with vocals by Mary Elizabeth McGlynn and Joe Romersa. The series' sound stayed like this for years, but is changing again with the departure of longtime series sound developer Akira Yamaoka. His replacement for Silent Hill: Downpour is Daniel Licht, whose style is very different.
• Subversion: Chinese band Silver Ash had one single New Sound song in 2007. It was pop- a long way from their previous goth/glam rock style, and in the PV they were dressed casually- unsual, as they had up until then considered themselves China's first Visual Kei band. It seems the change was brought about, not because the band fancied a change, but because they had finally been forced to comply with the Chinese government, who had been making life very tough for them for years. However, after the release of this song, the band disappeared into the wilderness, and very little news has been heard of them since. There is a lot of speculation, but nobody really knows whether they are going to continue with their new pop sound or are planning to return to rock and VK as best they can- under the assumption that they are returning at all, of course.
• Silverchair were a Post-Grunge band for their first three albums, then Diorama had them change direction dramatically towards more of an art-rock sound with orchestral instrumentation. They had first started experimenting with string arrangements on Freak Show though, and Neon Ballroom could sort of be seen as a weird transition between their "old" and "new" sounds, as it had both softer, more contemplative songs and some of their most grunge-like material.
  • While Diorama showcased a more adult side to the onetime teen phenoms, Silverchair really went full-on art rock and completely abandoned their grunge influence in their final album, 2007's Young Modern.
• Speculative: Paul Simon, with Graceland. Wildly popular, but notable in history because of how much of a stylistic shift it was.
• Simon & Garfunkel's debut album (Wednesday Morning, 3 AM) had more of a traditional acoustic folk sound; the second album, Sounds of Silence, was where they shifted to more of a rock instrumentation and approach.
• Frank Sinatra: His album In the Wee Small Hours was noticeable for being an early Concept Album around Break Up Song topics that changed Sinatra's image from a teen idol into a more mature, introspective man.
• Sister Machine Gun is an odd case in which every album can be considered to be a New Sound Album. The only person who appears on every single release is the singer/songwriter and even during live concerts some songs are often performed differently than they were on the album they originate from.
  • In the later years the shifts happened a bit less often, for example the 5th and 6th albums had EPs come after them that were each in the same style as the album they followed (for example the album 6 was followed by the EPs '6.1' and '6.2') but then the next album release would be another New Sound Album.
• Sixx:A.M.: They originally started out playing Hard Rock/Heavy Metal. Then they released their third album, Modern Vintage, which had a more old-school feel to it. Then they released the Double Album Prayers For The Damned, Vol.1 and Prayers For The Blessed, Vol.2, which went back to the heavier sound, but still incorporates some of the more old-school elements ("Riot In My Head", for instance, has a section that sounds like it was taken straight from Queen.
• Skinny Puppy, while still mainly Industrial, have more IDM influences on their latest two albums.
• Slayer had two instances of this. First, there was 1988's South Of Heaven, which sacrificed the blisteringly fast thrash metal of Reign In Blood for a slower, more groove-oriented style of metal. Two albums and a new drummer later, there was 1998's Diabolus In Musica, which combined their signature thrash metal style with substantial Nu Metal and Industrial Metal influences. It also showed the band using mostly C# tuning rather than the Eb tuning they used on every previous album (sans their debut, which used standard tuning). Needless to say, this caused a very large fan backlash, with many accusing the band of selling out. Subsequent albums, perhaps in response to DIM's backlash, gradually toned down the "modern metal" influences, with 2009's World Painted Blood being an almost complete return to their classic style. The band has also returned to mostly Eb tuning.
• Slint started as just another Post-Hardcore band, with their debut album Tweez being no different from any other. Then came Spiderland, with such abstract composition and unique practices of dynamics that the difference between the two is simply jarring.
• Sloan's debut album Smeared had a grunge like style to it but their follow up Twice Removed saw them leaving it for a more melodic sound.
• The Smashing Pumpkins' first two albums, Gish and Siamese Dream are examples of early-90s alternative rock. Their third album, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, was a massive double album with music ranging from mellow acoustic ballads to blistering heavy metal. Their next album, Adore was mainly softer songs or electronica due to drummer Jimmy Chamberlain being fired and the band deciding to use a drum machine (Billy Corgan even said it was a Pun-Based Title, as the album was "A Door" towards a new sound). Chamberlain returned a few years later and recorded the MACHINA albums ^note MACHINA: Machines of God had a proper release while an album of outtakes, MACHINA II: Friends and Enemies of Modern Music was one of the first examples of an album being exclusively released on the Internet, which expanded the electronic experimentation of Adore and ventured into NIN-esque industrial metal. The band broke up afterward, and when Billy Corgan formed the second Smashing Pumpkins lineup, they too experimented with different genres of music.
• Michael W. Smith started out performing pop-rock, and some of his songs even crossed over into the mainstream. Then by I'll Lead You Home, he's gone to strictly pop - abandoning the "rock" aspect of his genre. Since then, his music has taken on a more inspirational type of contemporary Christian music.
• When iconic rapper Snoop Dogg changed his name to Snoop Lion and released a straightforward reggae album; if you didn't know better, you'd think they were two different people. However, it turns out that name is either just a moniker or only a one-time thing: he released a song for DreamWorks Animation's Turbo under his original name.
• Solar Fields was initially experimental ambient electronica, but shifted to trance for his Earthshine album, then returned to his former style for Movements and the Mirror's Edge soundtrack, then went back to trance on Random Friday.
• Solarstone's Touchstone is still trance at heart, but includes more eclectic styles such as synthpop, breaks, and D n' B.
• Sonata Arctica started introducing some progressive elements to their fully Power Metal music in 2004, with Reckoning Night, but it was quite subtle and no fans cried out loud... until 2007, when their album Unia brought complex, slower and heavily progressive songs. About half their fanbase liked it, while the rest hated it. Their 2009 album, The Days Of Grays, toned down this complexity and progressiveness, but their sound has definitely changed, likely a result of the band Growing the Beard.
• Christian Metal band Soul Embraced started as a fairly straight forward Death Metal band. Their second album brought a bit of Melodic Death Metal into the mix, but it didn't sound too different. Then came their third album Immune. This album was a mix of death metal and Nu Metal, for whatever reason. After that album, they changed their sound again for Dead Alive, a Progressive Metal/Death Metal mix. Their next album Mythos is promised to be their most brutal, so we can only guess where it will be...
• Soulwax has shifted over time from alt-rock in the 90s to "Dance-Punk". Their album Any Minute Now marked the start of the change, as it was an electronic-influenced rock album, and the remix/re-creation of Any Minute Now in the album Nite Versions sealed the deal (rock-influenced electronica album!). This has been largely seen as a good thing, as well as somewhat of a natural progression, as Soulwax's alter egos, 2 Many Dj's, have been electronica-ing it up for a while now.
• Sound Horizon made a significant shift in musical stylings between Elysion and Roman - songs became longer, the primary genre shifted from Baroque Pop to Symphonic-Progressive, and a larger, rotating roster of vocalists (including the band's founder/composer/lyricist/guitarist/accordionist/bagpipes player/occasional pianist, Revo) was introduced to replace Aramary, who had resigned from the band for personal reasons. While there were (and still are) some detractors that weren't happy with Aramary's resignation, the change has worked out rather well for them, and they've been carrying on in this direction since.
• Space did this with practically every album. Spiders was groove-heavy and influenced by Cypress Hill, with much use of drum loops and samples, and Tommy Scott doing what he called a 'Speedy Gonzales' voice. Tin Planet was much poppier, with most of the songs by Tommy, and a mixture of styles from Frank Sintra-esque crooning and disco to showtunes, straight up indie rock and techno. Lost album Love You More Than Football was even more so. Then Jamie Murphy left and the band got Darker and Edgier with Suburban Rock 'n' Roll, which was musically more homogeneous, but had rougher production, synth bass and much slower-paced songs. When the band got back together, thanks to three new members joining, Space changed direction again with Attack Of The Mutant 50ft Kebab, which was heavily influenced by ska, rockabilly and punk, with much faster songs.
• Sparks did this several times. While their first four albums were quirky glam rock, 1975's "Indiscreet" saw them exploring a wide variety of styles. Then, with "Big Beat" they turned into a hard rock band, and 1977's "Introducing Sparks" was a Beach Boys/Surf Rock pastiche. All of these are at least still mostly identifiable as rock music, but in 1979, they teamed up with electronic music pioneer Giorgio Moroder to produce "No. 1 in Heaven," a purely electronic disco-style album. They did another in this vein, 1980's "Terminal Jive", then went in a Synthpop direction for the rest of the 80s. With 1995's "Gratuitous Sax & Senseless Violins" they went Eurodisco. Finally,2002's "Lil' Beethoven" turned Sparks into Orchestral Rock.
• Spawn of Possession still maintains being a Technical Death Metal band, but their 2012 album Incurso puts more of a focus on creating a horror atmosphere than earlier releases.
• The Spice Girls released a third album, after Geri's departure, titled Forever. Their previous two albums had been pure bubblegum pop, while Forever had a more R&B sound to it in an attempt to cultivate a maturer image. Reaction was incredibly mixed and it was the lowest-selling Spice Girls album (though it did sell over 4 million copies worldwide).
• Parodied in the exhaustive fictional back-story of Spinal Tap. Their discography touches on moptop rock (the "Gimme Some Money" 45), psychedelic rock (their debut LP and We Are All Flower People), extended live jams (Silent But Deadly), proto-metal (Brainhammer), progressive rock (The Sun Never Sweats), glam rock (Bent For The Rent), disco (Tap Dancing), and of course, heavy metal itself.
  • Not to explain the joke or anything, but this is of course a pastiche of several famous bands of the 60s and 70s, particularly The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin. We Are All Flower People in particular seems to be intended to have been a mix of Sgt. Pepper and Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
• Rebecca St. James' first self-titled album was of a bouncy teen pop style. Then, for God (her second album), she has also decided to go with a harder rock decidedly Post-Grunge style (in the style of Alanis Morissette, no less). Oddly enough, she claims to have never listened to her secular counterpart while recording that album.
• Stabbing Westward were primarily an Alternative Metal / Industrial Metal band, but their 2001 self-titled album did away with most of the heavier and more industrial elements in favor of straightforward melodic Alternative Rock. The album even included a straightforward love song in "The Only Thing", dedicated to vocalist Christopher Hall's wife; when previous lyrics had anything to do with relationships, they would most likely be an Obsession Song, a Break-Up Song, or have other negative themes. At the time of release, Hall was calling it an artistic choice, saying that they always had songs with beautiful melodies and had just decided to stop covering it up with harsh arrangements - later on he cited Executive Meddling and having to work with a new guitarist who was more used to playing with Glam Rock and Brit Pop acts. The next full album to bear the Stabbing Westward name, Chasing Ghosts, came 21 years later and marked a full return to Industrial Metal.
• Starflyer 59 moved from their previous shoegazing-influenced guitar-heavy sound to a synthpop-influenced sound with keyboards starting with The Fashion Focus.
• Steely Dan have had two:
  • Pretzel Logic sort of half qualifies, as they were in the process of ending the early "real band" phase of their career in favor of their later approach of putting together whatever studio musicians could best accompany them on each track. As a result you get material like "Rikki Don't Lose That Number" and "Barrytown", which seem like the same group that did the first two albums next to more experimental, esoteric stuff like the title track, "East St. Louis Toodle-Oo" (both their only instrumental and only cover) and "With a Gun" (their only song based around an acoustic guitar part, which actually sounds downright folky).
  • Aja is much jazzier as a whole than their earlier albums, and abandons most of the pop-rock influences they had up to that point, to the point of having two tracks longer than seven minutes.
• Despite their reputation for never varying their sound, Stereolab pulled this off a couple of times. Mars Audiac Quintet was where their interest in lounge and exotica really started to come into play in a big way, and then a couple of albums later, Dots and Loops brought in drum'n'bass and jazz stylings.
• Cat Stevens could easily have pulled this off on every other album. To wit:
  • Matthew and Son and New Masters are basically Baroque Pop, popular at the time.
  • Mona Bone Jakon and Tea for the Tillerman are complete and definite folk-rock.
  • Teaser and the Firecat has a little more pop.
  • Catch Bull at Four is basically a mixed bag with the use of electric guitars (on "Sitting" and "Freezing Steel") and organ (on "Can't Keep It In") becoming quite dominant — not that his acoustic moments were gone.
  • Foreigner has a lot of keyboards and sounds like classic rock. Cue They Changed It, Now It Sucks!.
  • Buddha and the Chocolate Box is a combination of the folk- and pop-rock (respectively of Tea for the Tillerman and Catch Bull at Four) with the keyboards of Foreigner and some spiritual lyrics. Cue Win Back the Crowd.
  • Numbers, Izitso and Back to Earth are Synth-Pop.
  • Several albums he recorded as Yusuf Islam (labelled as "Spiritual Albums" on Wikipedia but still actual studio albums in all but name and format) are basically spiritual messages on Islam.
  • An Other Cup and Roadsinger are folk-rock all over again. Cue his Career Resurrection.
  • Tell 'Em I'm Gone is folk-rock with some blues-rock in the mix.
• Country Music singer Doug Stone was mostly a balladeer on his first three albums, all produced by Doug Johnson. His debut single and Signature Song, the Tear Jerker "I'd Be Better Off (In a Pine Box)", was the most prominent example of his style. By his fourth album, he changed producers to James Stroud and began cutting more upbeat material, such as "Addicted to a Dollar" and "Born in the Dark". Many reviewers at the time noticed that Stroud's production gave his material a harder edge.
• Stone Sour's debut Self-Titled Album album was heavily Nu Metal-influenced and didn't sound all that different from Corey Taylor's other band, Slipknot. It wasn't until Come What(ever) May did they find their place as a more melodic Alternative Metal/Hard Rock band that directly contrasts Slipknot's more chaotic sound.
• Stone Temple Pilots started as a 90s grunge band typical of the era, but switched to 60s/70s-inspired Psychedelic Rock with Tiny Music.
• Styx started as a hard rock band with prog influences. They abandoned the prog element relatively early on, and then went completely pop with Cornerstone.
  • Then they tried to go back halfway with Kilroy was Here, which is at least part of the reason it broke the band up.
• Alan Vega initially produced proto-industrial avant-rock with the group Suicide in The '70s, but in The '80s, he switched to New Wave, then went back down the Darker and Edgier path to Industrial.
• Suicide Silence codified Deathcore since their inception and became the leading face of it in the genre. However, their fourth album You Can't Stop Me incorporated Nu Metal elements, though they were still prominently rooted in deathcore. It wasn't until their eponymous fifth studio album that they abandoned deathcore entirely for a 1990s-style nu metal sound. It wasn't well-received by the fans, to say the least.
• Summoning went through a pretty dramatic change in Let Mortal Heroes Sing Your Fame (and subsequent albums), switching from black metal to a much more relaxed, epic style.
• Taylor Swift has pulled this off twice. Her first three albums were fairly standard country pop albums. Her fourth album, Red, saw her incorporate more overtly pop styles into her music (including some dubstep and EDM production), and her subsequent three albums were purely pop. Then in 2020, she further subverted expectations by dropping Folklore, a quieter, more stripped back folk-pop outing with assists from Bon Iver and Aaron Dessner of The National.
• Switchfoot had a couple of these. Their first three albums were a mix of grunge and surf rock, then The Beautiful Letdown went in a more alt-rock/power pop-punk direction, then a few albums after that, Hello Hurricane went back to the surf rock, with some acoustic rock mixed in. Then, with Fading West they started incorporating more electronic elements.
• The Sword was a stoner metal band with a style best described as modern Black Sabbath until High Country, which was a lighter stoner rock album that dropped most of the metal elements.
• Talk Talk started out as a New Wave band that already experimented with their sound as soon as during production of the second album. By the fourth one - titled Spirit of Eden - they may have became a Ur-Example of Post-Rock.
• Talking Heads had a few; Remain in Light was filled with repetitious, dense African rhythms that sounded way different from their previous albums (Although it was hinted on in "I Zimbra" from Fear of Music). Three years later, they had Speaking in Tongues which was a more funky, synth-poppy album. Two years after, Little Creatures had more Latin influences, with some Americana which their next and final two albums both took inspiration from.
• t.A.T.u. did this. Twice. Their sophomore album Dangerous And Moving was considered by some as the contested album. However, some of the fans consider said album as their favorite. This led to them having different sets of fans. Some only like the first album, some only like the second album, some only like the third album, etc.
• Steve Taylor released the bulk of his albums in the mid-eighties, full of synthesizers and eighties sensibilities. During the break between I Predict 1990 and Squint, not only did he spend time working with a whole different band, but grunge happened. The result is Squint, perhaps his finest album ever. And his last.
• Nearly every Tears for Fears album.
  • Songs from the Big Chair expanded the original album's synth-pop template with influence from jazz and electronica (as well as a Robert Wyatt-style ballad in "I Believe").
  • The Seeds of Love took influence from '70s Progressive Rock and '60s psychedelia, particularly The Beatles. It also upped the jazz influence and threw in some world, new age, and gospel music influence for good measure.
  • Elemental had a slicker modern sound with a more cinematic scope.
  • Raoul and the Kings of Spain was a Concept Album about Roland Orzabal's Spanish heritage and incorporated a lot of influence from flamenco and other styles (although this was not present on every track).
  • Everybody Loves a Happy Ending went back to the psychedelia-influenced sound of The Seeds of Love, but was in general substantially brighter and more modern.
• Thrash Metal band Testament has basically every album after Souls of Black.
  • The Ritual is probably best described as the band's Black Album, going for a more traditional metal sound with some songs still being thrashy and others the least the band ever had been at the point. The song lengths also took a massive jump, with three songs over six minutes and one over seven, and the album itself being roughly 15 minutes longer than the previous one and almost 10 minutes longer than prior longest Practice What You Preach.
  • Low, the first without famed lead guitarist Alex Skolnick, was much heavier due to a shift to Groove Metal, a return to shorter songs and featured harsher vocals from Chuck Billy.
  • Demonic continued the pattern of Low to the point of being considered the closest the band ever got to a Death Metal album.
  • The Gathering was a return to thrash, and was by far the most aggressive album up to that point (largely due to Dave Lombardo's relentless drum attack on it), with tempos not seen since the first two albums and keeping many of the DM overtones from Demonic. The song "Legions of the Dead" sticks out as likely Testament's single heaviest song.
  • The Formation of Damnation, which came out 9 years after The Gathering, is best described as a mix of their 80s and The Gathering sounds due to Skolnick returning.
  • Dark Roots of Earth mostly sticks to the Damnation sound, but it does have the long song lengths not seen since The Ritual.
• They Might Be Giants moved up from "Two guys, an accordion, a guitar and a drum machine" to a full band for their fifth album, John Henry.
• Christian alternative metal band Thousand Foot Krutch did this with every single album. Their first album was essentially rap-metal with a couple of pop-punk songs thrown in. Their second album was pretty straightforward nu metal. Their third album was soft alt-rock/alt-metal with little screaming and only a few heavier songs. Their fourth album was more traditional alt-rock mixed with post-grunge and heavy metal. Their fifth release is mostly heavy metal with some heavier alt-metal and some slower rock tracks of a much different quality than their others, and the album is the band's heaviest to date. The End Is Where We Begin is essentially a mix of everything, even the rapping.
• TNT evolved from straightforward metal on their self titled album and Knights of The New Thunder, to somewhat of a fusion of Hair Metal and Hard Rock on Tell No Tales and Intuition, with some touches of more traditional metal. Then in 1992 we got Realized Fantasies, which completely shifted to melodic glam metal. In 97, we got Firefly, which somewhat cashed in on the grunge/alternative metal trend that was occuring at the time. Then in 2004 the classic lineup was brought back and the return to melodic rock was made with My Religion. In 2007, new singer Tony Mills was brought in and the new album The New Territory was released, coming in with a sound similar to that of 70s bands fused with the classic TNT sound. Cue Broken Base.
• Mike Tramp has changed his sound a couple of times throughout his career, making it more a case of New Sound Career. It started in 1978 with Mabel, a Pop-Rock One-Hit Wonder band that achieved huge success in Denmark but were completely unknown in the rest of the world. Their second and third albums had a more electro-pop-like sound, with the band not even being involved in the production of the third album. After a few years with Mabel, the band broke up, and Mike Tramp moved to New York and started White Lion, a Hair Metal band that achieved huge success after they released their second album. After the third album, they started losing some fans due to the more political lyrics on songs like "Little Fighter". Before the 80's were over, White Lion had broken up due to creative differences, and Mike Tramp went on to form a Grunge-band called Freak Of Nature in the early 90's. Freak Of Nature had a more raw sound than Mike Tramp's past bands. However, Freak Of Nature ended before they got big, and Mike Tramp went on to working on a solo-career. His first solo-album, Capricorn, went way back to the retro rock sound of the 70's, and he continued this trend for a few albums. Then he started working with producer and guitar player Soren Andersen, which resulted in two slightly harder albums under the name Mike Tramp & The Rock'N'Roll Circuz. After those, Tramp felt he needed to take a step back, and released two Acoustic albums, Cobblestone Street and Museum, followed by yet another retro-rock album, Nomad. His latest album, Maybe Tomorrow, continued in the same vein as Nomad.
• Trentemoller was originally minimal dance/glitch house/neo trance, but mostly abandoned dance beats for his second album, Into the Great Wide Yonder Starting with Lost, his albums incorporated Dark Wave influences.
• Tribulation started out as death/thrash metal that occasionally played with elements of other metal subgenres on The Horror, but made a complete shift to a strange hybrid of death metal, traditional heavy metal, Italian horror soundtrack prog, psychedelic rock, and gothic rock on The Formulas of Death.
• Indie band TV on the Radio had a more organic, experimental post-punk sound on their album Return to Cookie Mountain, which was a critical darling. Following that one was Dear Science, which has a more electric sound and is more accessible in general. That one was rather well-liked as well.
• U2 evolved from post-punk on Boy to a more straightforward rock sound by War (U2 Album), then they looked into blues and country for The Joshua Tree and Rattle and Hum. With Achtung Baby, they had a complete Genre Shift to a more modern alternative rock sound and added more electronics, eventually culminating in the ambient concept album Original Soundtracks 1 (released under the pseudonym Passengers) and the largely electronic Pop. After that, they went back to a more Joshua Tree style sound with All That You Can't Leave Behind. No Line on the Horizon manages to combine just about everything from the rest of their career, with Joshua Tree anthems and Achtung rockers right next to Passengers-style ambient pieces on the track listing.
• British reggae band UB40 started off with a reverb-y, dub-influenced sound and very political lyrics. Their fourth LP, the Cover Album Labour of Love, introduced a significant pop element which gradually grew until, on Promises and Lies, they were pretty much an adult contemporary pop band with some reggae for flavor. Since that point, their mix of pop and reggae has varied from album to album.
• Keith Urban's Fuse was his first album since his 1999 solo American debut^note he had one American album in 1997 as one-third of The Ranch, and a solo album in his native Australia in 1991 not to be produced entirely by longtime co-producer Dann Huff. Urban chose eleven different producers, including several with no experience in country, to create an album that was generally well-received for its varied sound after the holding pattern he seemed to be in on his previous two discs.
• Urge Overkill started as a crappy noise-rock band ripping off The Jesus Lizard, Big Black and other contemporary Chicago bands. With Americruiser they hit upon their style, a combination of punk, power pop and arena rock. They never looked back and continued perfecting the formula until they struck the jackpot with Saturation.
• 5150 by Van Halen. After 6 albums defined mostly by the combination of Eddie Van Halen's guitar wizardry and David Lee Roth's comic persona, Roth left the band. He was replaced with Sammy Hagar, Eddie started including more and more synths, and their songs became poppier. Cue Broken Base, which endures to this day despite Roth having returned.
  • Also the largely forgotten Balance album, Van Halen's rather misguided attempt at grunge.
• If you listen to The Velvet Underground's four albums, none of them sound exactly the same:
  • The Velvet Underground & Nico: Eclectic art rock
  • White Light/White Heat: Loud garage rock
  • The Velvet Underground: Mainly folk rock
  • Loaded: Pop
• The Veronicas going from typical princess pop rock to synthetic pop with a classical edge on their second album. Acoustic pop rock in their debut, eletronic classic elemental 80's pop in their second album and RNB sampled rock pop in their third.
• With A Northern Soul, The Verve changed their orientation from their previous spacey psychedelic rock to alternative rock. They continued with this style on Urban Hymns.
• Village People (The Renaissance Album)
• It's hard to tell exactly what Tom Waits became after Swordfishtrombones, but it's nothing like what he was before. And it made him a legend.
• Scott Walker has done this multiple times. Starting out as in the mildly sophisticated boy band The Walker Brothers, he then went solo and released four solo albums of increasingly odd and dark baroque chamber-pop. Halfway through the fifth album, Executive Meddling forced a change to a more commercial sound, and several bland MOR albums followed which were appreciated by nobody at all. After a Walker Brothers reunion, he re-emerged with an eccentric electronic based album in Climate of Hunter, later followed in the 90s with Tilt which developed a terrifyingly indescribable experimental sound he's stuck with since then.
• Blues legend Muddy Waters released the psychedelic rock influenced Electric Mud in 1967. Fans were outraged beyond all reason.
• Ween seems to like to change it up quite a bit.
  • One might say they've had new sounds on every song on many albums. Compare this to this. the fact that even Gener's vocals change a lot helps. (this and this are sung by the same guy.)
  • In fact, the interesting thing about Ween is that they're typically so all over the place that 12 Golden Country Greats is not a New Sound Album because it's all country music, but because it's all one genre at all.
• Weezer has a few of these:
  • Pinkerton is the most famous example in the band's history. It strays away from the clean radio-friendly power pop sound that producer Ric Ocasek helped develop on Weezer (The Blue Album) in favor of a rawer sound with pulsing drums, thumping basslines, and even crunchier guitars. It caused quite a bit of controversy among fans when the album was first released that Weezer soon went back to their old sound with their follow-up, The Green Album, although Pinkerton was soon Vindicated by History.
  • Raditude brings another change in sound, pushing the band into dance pop while retaining elements of their old sound for the most part. It wasn't well-received.
  • Pacific Daydream presents the biggest change of their sound, crossing into straight-up synth-heavy pop territory with little of Weezer's old sound in sight
  • OK Human is a Baroque Pop album, complete with Rivers Cuomo playing piano instead of lead guitar, and the band being joined by a small orchestra.
• Kanye West pulls this with every album; although all of them stick to his signature style of mixing Alternative Rap and Glam Rap they all do it in a different way.
  • His first album The College Dropout relied heavily on soul/funk samples and gospel-like choirs.
  • Late Registration had more of a jazz and Baroque Pop influence, with lush string and horn arrangements giving it a rich, orchestral texture.
  • Graduation mixed in elements of pop, Hard Rock, electronic and house music to create a more anthemic sound befitting for large stadiums.
  • 808s & Heartbreak was the most drastic shift since it wasn't even hip hop, instead it is an almost unclassifiable mix of Synth-Pop, R&B, experimental minimalism, and pop music with auto-tuned singing to intentionally create a cold, robotic feel that reinforces the depressive themes of the album. Kanye described the album in interviews as "black New Wave Music".
  • He then took all of those styles and mishmashed them all into one glorious package along with elements of modern indie rock and Progressive Rock to create My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Which is now considered one of the greatest albums of all time.
  • He pulled it again with Cruel Summer, which pushed his music more towards Glam Rap and Trap Music, although it still maintained a lot of the operatic, progressive elements of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
  • Yeezus is probably his Darkest album yet. Lyrically, it contiunes on the Glam Rap path set by Cruel Summer and Watch the Throne while throwing in the occasional political tune. Musically, its a smorgasbord of genres, combining Trap and Dance Hall with elements of Acid House, Dark Ambient, Punk Rock, Industrial Hip Hop, Dubstep, and Glitch. All of this in 40 minutes.
  • The Life of Pablo is a kaleidoscopic mix of different styles with everything from 'old Kanye' style soul samples and gospel to House Music and trap.
  • ye features spacier, distant production with many similarities to cloud rap and modern rock in its production.
  • Kids See Ghosts with Kid Cudi brings back a lot of the guitar-driven, hard rock elements of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy with Psychedelic Rock to make a more atmospheric and adventurous album.
  • Jesus is King is a full-on gospel album.
• The Who changed sound very frequently. Their debut album My Generation is blues-rock, similar to to what The Rolling Stones were doing at the time. They then moved into psychedelic pop with A Quick One and The Who Sell Out, and then then keyboard-heavy art rock with Tommy, Who's Next and Quadrophenia. In contrast, The Who by Numbers is stripped down and back-to-basics. The last three albums of their initial run (Who Are You, Face Dances, It's Hard) have a more AOR arena rock sound.
• Like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf fell to a new low with his "psychedelic blues" album, The Howlin' Wolf Album. Not only were his fans disappointed like Waters', he himself expressed his own disgust for it right in the liner notes.
• Lee Ann Womack emerged in the late 1990s as a "neotraditional" country singer with a hardcore honky-tonk sound. But 2000's I Hope You Dance had very slick, lush, and bombastic country-pop production, as exemplified in the title track (which became her biggest hit despite being a total antithesis to her usual style). She returned to the more traditional sound with There's More Where That Came From five years later.
• XTC started out as a hyperactive New Wave band with punk, reggae and funk influences. These were mostly dropped after the departure of Barry Andrews and arrival of Dave Gregory, which steered them towards a more complex sound inspired by 60's pop on Drums and Wires (though still definitely New Wave). When the band stopped performing live, they produced the gentle pastoral folk rock album Mummer, and expanded on this sound - by Skylarking, they had evolved into full-on 60's-inspired pop rock with psychedelic, folk rock and baroque pop elements.
• Parodied in "Weird Al" Yankovic's mockumentary "The Compleat Al", where it was suggested that after a few albums of comedy music, he became deeply introspective and wrote/recorded an album ("Me, Myself, and I") of a rather different, serious tone. Unfortunately, the story goes, the master tapes were accidentally erased by an airport metal detector, and the world would never know Al's new sound.
  • This was possibly influenced by Rolling Stone's completely false 1969 article about the supposed lost Beatles album Hot As Sun, which was wiped from existence in the same manner.
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs practically went alternative dance with It's Blitz!, an album that still sounds like them (largely because of Karen O's unmistakable voice) but is vastly different than Show Your Bones, and DEFINITELY different than Fever to Tell.
• 90125 by Yes. The first album by a reunited band with a new guitarist (Trevor Rabin), 90125 saw the band reduce their song lengths and simplify their structures, while retaining enough weirdness and instrumental proficiency to remind fans that it was still a Yes album despite its newfound accessibility. It resulted in the band's only #1 hit, "Owner of a Lonely Heart". Some parts of the fanbase went straight for Old Guard Versus New Blood, with the "Troopers" representing the former and the "Generators" (named after the band's followup Big Generator) the latter, but the majority seem to enjoy both periods just fine.
  • This was actually intended as a spin-off project (named "Cinema"), until Yes vocalist Jon Anderson liked the sound of the demos and decided to join.
  • Drama from the same band is worth mentioning here, as it brought a new wave influence to Yes (courtesy of The Buggles' Trevor Horn, who helped define that musical style throughout the '80s) years before 90125. Some critics, like Jeremy Parish of Game Spite, argue that it did a better job of bringing the band into the new decade than the two subsequent albums. Not satisfied with taking Yes in one new direction, Horn and his bandmates also wrote Machine Messiah, the heavy metal-flavored lead track that would become an influence for the harder sound of neo-prog artists like Dream Theater.
• Neil Young: In an attempt to troll his label, Geffen Records, Young changed his sound on practically every album he released for Geffen in the 1980s. ^note Trans was Electronic, Everybody's Rockin' was Rockabilly, Old Ways was Country. It got to such a point where Geffen attempted to sue Young for recording music unrepresentative of his classic output in the 1970s.
• Zanias's first album, Into The All, was neoclassical/ethereal darkwave in the league of fellow Australian band Dead Can Dance. Then her Extinction EP adopted EBM influences. Her second full-length album, Unearthed, is full-on industrial dance/futurepop, and her third, Chrysalis, goes Lighter and Softer towards synthwave.
• Frank Zappa: Zappa had a new sound every single album, even during individual tracks! He was so versatile that even hardcore fans may not like all the albums he released.
  • Freak Out: Psychedelic rock, love song parodies, political protest songs and complete madness.
  • Absolutely Free: More epic in scale, with direct musical quotations of Igor Stravinsky and Gustav Holst and a majority of political protest songs and hidden messages.
  • Lumpy Gravy: A very intimate musical collage of instrumental music, sound effects, distortions of tapes and surreal conversations.
  • We're Only in It for the Money: Again a collage sound, with mostly rock, but avant-garde classical music too. Protest songs about the hippie culture, which was very audacious back in 1967, and songs satirizing police, parents and the square people. Apart from that Zappa introduced songs like "Let's Make the Water Turn Black", full with inside jokes incomprehensible to other people.
  • Uncle Meat: A collage album with more emphasis on instrumental music, though occasional recordings of Zappa with band members and song with totally surreal lyrics are also heard. It's less heavy on the satirical stuff.
  • Cruising with Ruben & the Jets: A total break with Zappa's image: no satire, no bawdy comedy, no experimentations, no political messages, but a Homage to Doo-wop music, which was totally unpopular at the end of the 1960s.
  • Burnt Weeny Sandwich: Mostly instrumental songs and two sung covers.
  • Hot Rats: A more jazzy sound, mostly instrumental except for one track.
  • Chunga's Revenge, Fillmore East, June 1971, 200 Motels and Just Another Band from L.A.: a more blues rock oriented sound with two new lead singers, Mark and Howie from The Turtles. The lyrics are far more bawdy and mostly center around rock bands on tour and their sleazy intercourse with groupies. There is also more emphasis on songs that have the allures of a comedy sketch with just a drum in the background as musical accompaniment.
  • The Grand Wazoo and Waka/Jawaka: Jazz albums, mostly instrumental, with less emphasis on songs. Comparable to Hot Rats in that regard.
  • Over-Nite Sensation, Apostrophe ('), Roxy & Elsewhere, One Size Fits All: The music here combines hard rock with epic and increasingly complicated jazzy jams and a full band with professional musicians. The lyrics are more surreal and/or focus on bawdy topics without much politics.
  • Bongo Fury, Zappa in New York and Sheik Yerbouti: Rock albums mostly recorded live, with epic songs and instrumentals. Zappa's guitar solos start to get longer and longer.
  • Zoot Allures: A darker, sleazier rock sound, where instrumental work and songs are in balance.
  • Studio Tan, Sleep Dirt and Orchestral Favorites: Mostly instrumental albums with a Genre Roulette sound that almost sounds like the soundtrack to a Looney Tunes cartoon at times, exemplified by the musical sketch "The Adventures of Greggery Peccary".
  • Joe's Garage: A Rock Opera with a story that is continued from the first until the penultimate track. Introduced a xenochronic sound and the second side of the double album is surprisingly melancholic for a Zappa album. His trademark ultra-long guitar solos start to become more prominent.
  • From the 1980s on, Zappa's albums became more politically pointed again (and unfortunately so specific in their targets (Ronald Reagan, Moral Majority, televangelists, MTV,...- that most of it is very dated), combined with more bawdy songs sang with increasingly more silly, comedic voices. More classically orchestrated albums came out (The Perfect Stranger, Francesco Zappa, London Symphony Orchestra, The Yellow Shark), two completely instrumental albums with guitar solos (Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar, Guitar), compilations of memorable moments during live concerts (The six volume You Can't Do That on Stage Anymore series, Make a Jazz Noise Here, Playground Psychotics, The Best Band You Never Heard in Your Life, The Lost Episodes, Ahead of Their Time, Läther), Synclavier stuff (Jazz from Hell, Civilization Phaze III).
• Internet Glitchgrind band Zombie Sneak Attack had two of these, after seven albums of what even the band themselves describes as "unbelievably horrible noises" they released Psychotropic Seminiferous Tubules, a broadly sweeping concept album complete with narration and bits that can almost be described as music. They returned to their signature sound with A New Kind of Unlistenable and then put out Handsniffer, an ambient soundscape style album that sounds like the soundtrack to an avant-garde horror film, oddly punctuated with voice samples from cartoons such as The Simpsons and South Park.
• British post-industrial group Zoviet France does this every album, but most would agree that Shouting at the Ground marked their transition to more strait forward ambient and drone, but that's not to say that any of their music is any less potent.
• ZZ Top introduced synthesizers to their sound on El Loco.

Unclassifiable

• The 1970 album Songs of the Humpback Whale was the first album released to the public featuring nothing but sounds of singing whales. Yes, whales have been around for centuries, so in that sense this album didn't offer anything new, except for the fact that humans had always believed these animals were mute. To hear them actually produce sounds was a big surprise to many listeners in 1970.
• Le siège de Corinthe isn't really an album, but with it Gioachino Rossini changed from his old Italian bel canto operatic style to the grand opéra style that dominated Paris for the next forty years. He wrote three more works in this style, then faded from the operatic spotlight after William Tell.
• Likewise, Giuseppe Verdi saw his style shift around the time he wrote the "new sound opera" Macbeth, where he shifted away from the Donizetti-and-Bellini-land and more toward the Verdian tone. By the time Rigoletto fully established his name in 1851, his previous sound was gone, and comparing many albums of his operas will show the difference.
• Stop Skeletons From Fighting: Thatz a Rap.

---