Mumford and Sons did this and broke my heart when they did.

Pearl Jam. For me, Ten was the perfect album - riffs, hooks, emotive lyrics, powerful music, no filler. I stuck with them grudgingly until about the fourth album (Yield?) but haven’t listened to a thing they’ve put out since. It seemed they just got more and more generic with every album, and had less and less of that spark that made Ten so special. I’ve often wondered why - was it a conscious decision to move from that heavily riff-based music, or did they just run out of original ideas?

Sometimes I love it sometimes I hate it. Sometimes I hate it at first then grow to love it. Radiohead is a great example of change that I love. First album was mediocre rock, second was much better rock, third was one of the best albums of all time layered… space rock? Then the biggest shift of all to Kid A. Over and over again.

David Bowie is another example of successfully changing sound over and over.

Beastie Boys went from a hardcore band to hip hop.

I know there are examples of bands where I didn’t like the change but I guess I remember the ones I like more. Weezer and Smashing Pumpkins are two bands that got worse over time, although they didn’t change their sound up quite as much as the above mentioned.

Marillion. - Edited

The Fish era was magnificent. But losing such a dynamic and powerful front man means a band will have to change. Steve Hogarth took them to a new levels, which for me ended with Brave. After that? I kept with them for a while - fronting the money for albums and with a couple of thousand others have my name in the Marbles sleeve notes etc. I buy the albums but they don’t get more than one or two listens - they’ve become a sort of Crowded House tribute band.

Fish on his own? Cracking when doing Marillion stuff (still think he’s one of the best frontmen going) but his own material is just meh. Vigil was a good album. He needs Rothery and Kelly.

On the other hand, Genesis lost a lot of die hard prog fans when Peter Gabriel left - but gained a hell of a lot more MOR/US fans. Unfortunately Ray Wilson couldn’t fit into some very large frontman shoes. And Peter went from strength to strength.

This hit hard with Hooverphonic. They went from essential trip-hop to generic pop music after a few albums. Three great first albums, as an even better force than Massive Attack, and then the magic stopped.

Highly Suspect were so good in their first two albums, but fellow New Hampshire boy Johnny Stevens decided he wanted to be a rapper, and then the band started to suck

One of my favorite bands is Brand New, who had a different sound and feel to each album all while having a few threads that could tie between them. It was enjoyable to experience the arc of the phases the band went through in their lives. Likewise for The Beatles, or Queen, The Who, or more modern bands like the RxBandits (ska -> progrock) or Streetlight Manifesto (ska -> Roma jazz/Calypso/‘other’).

Then there’s creative concept bands like The Decemberists who dig deep into a style for an album, and the dedication to that version of the art form is a cherry on top of the musicality. Maybe Panic! At the Disco falls into this category too for some.

(The above is not an exhaustive list)

Then there’s, well, medio-core

Mostly just when I was younger, due to the type of content.

At 16 growing up with Green Day it’s a wide range between garage punk angry speed and stories in song. After 21st Century’s rock opera two, the band wanted to screw their contract (which had 3 albums left to be completed) so they pushed out Uno Dos and Tre to get out of that record label.

So to go from high speed anger and melodic stories to slightly more repetitive pop style music was tough. Of course now if all fits in the range and since I’m older I don’t just need the high speed anger to jam with.

I’m sure there’d be other examples for bands, but I think that’s a solid explanation of why it happened and why it doesn’t happen as much anymore. I needed their sounds then, why wasn’t it “more of the same” etc.

Somewhere it still does happen sometimes though is electronic music. There’s this vaporwave artists Blank Banshee. They did album 0 and album 1, then MEGA. MEGA was an understandable progression from the previous two, but I did not like it nearly as much as there were some tonal changes. That makes sense though, since for electronica you get a nice patch and work with it widely and then you move on. Doing much more than 1 water album would be a bit much, so I understand why Vaperror only has Mana Pool and the others are different.

deafheaven broke my heart. roads to judah and sunbather are two of my favorite albums of all time, but after sunbather they just started slowly losing their edge like a folding knife you got at the mall. The next three albums were okay, and had flashes of the brilliance of sunbather, but I could see that the band was trying to move away from extreme metal and more toward becoming another shoegaze band. I’m all for artists growing and expanding but I just didn’t care for the direction they were headed. Then infinite granite came out. The thing about infinite granite that stings the most is the song Mombasa, wherein they demonstrate that they’re still perfectly capable of the high flying guitar, low-in-the-mix extreme metal vocals and dynamic rhythm section that I fell ass over ankles for, and that they’re just choosing not to do it for the rest of the album. I even got to see them on a recent tour with Coheed and Cambria (who, it must be said, remain gods astride the earth). I was super hype because the last couple times I had seen deafheaven had been beautiful, intense, Battaile-esque ordeals that shook me to my core. Unfortunately at this show we were about halfway through their third chill, downtempo jazz exploration when I realized that I kinda just don’t care about them anymore. I’m glad they’re doing what they want to do and if this music is the product of George getting sober and growing up, then that’s a fair trade for him and the best of what could possibly happen. But when I saw them on the Sunbather tour I literally rent my clothes with intensity and felt like I was happily under water for like 3 days afterward. I miss it.

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So many of my favorites mellowed out too far. Greenday, Metallica, Crystal Castles, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Franz Ferdinand, Blink 182, A Perfect Circle, the Black Keys, Bush, Elliot Smith (he didn’t get more mellow, but he started adding superfluous drums and such), Fever Ray, Foo Fighters, the White Stripes, Orgy, REM, RHCP, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, Toadies, Type O Negative.

As a counterpoint:

Tool was my favorite band in high school when Aenima came out. Then Lateralus was released in college and it became my favorite album. But when 10000 days was released in grad school I hated it. It took me ten years but I came around and now really enjoy it.

This can go a number of ways, I think.

You get bands who hold on to their original sound with a vice-like grip, and invariably get kinda stale (I’m thinking Green Day here), you get bands that adapt their sound to their current circumstances and current market trends, who end up getting kinda stale. Then you get bands who just do what they damn well please, and that one is interesting to me.

Ultimately, though, we mostly get the second of those. Bands like Coldplay, whose first few albums are interesting, in a middle-class-dinner-party kind of way, but by the fourth record had hit a point where they needed to keep making money, but maybe didn’t have the inspiration they needed to make interesting music. U2, Snow Patrol, Biffy Clyro, and sadly (from my personal view) the Foo Fighters. They churn out records, sell the merch, play the stadia around the world, but the music doesn’t move me in any way, not like their earlier stuff does.

But I don’t blame them; they’re reacting to the world we live in, making music is their career, and they’re under contract to bang out a new collection of tunes every couple of years, whether they’re inspired to or not. Having said that about the Food though, their latest album is genuinely wonderful, so it’s not all bad.

My three favorite artists are Miles Davis, David Bowie, and Kanye West. Three artists that changed their sound every single album.

So no.

It used to bother me a lot more when I was younger, but honestly the older I’ve gotten the more I just look at myself and how much I’ve changed from top to bottom including in a lot of cases things like my tastes in music, and I realize that you can’t just expect somebody to stay stationary in life. We’re all moving, we’re all changing, and you can’t expect a musician to only want to do the one thing for their entire career.

So ultimately, yeah it can bum me out when a band changes their sound in a way that I don’t enjoy, but I’m just thankful that for the moments it did we had a special connection and leave open the door that maybe down the road I will appreciate the new stuff more than I initially did.

I stopped bothering about it. I’m thankful for the albums that the band released when the style fit my taste and I keep listening to these albums. Let the musicians do what they want. Even if it seems bland, maybe it’s what they really want to do.