What artist(s) had a radical change in musical style?

Framecode@lemmy.fmhy.ml to Chat@beehaw.org – 12 points –

I'm talking about artists who completely changed genre or otherwise became unrecognisable. Share some that you know of!

35

Serj Tankian has been all over the place! Since System of a Down disbanded (essentially), he's done a couple rock albums, a classical album, a jazz album, has written a few movie scores, even featured in a Tech N9ne song. He's done it all relatively well too! Guy's super impressive and a big inspiration to me musically.

Taylor swift went from super country in "Our Song" to super pop in things like "Blank Space", " Call It What You Want", and "End Game"

The Beatles changed in the very short amount of time they existed. They put out about ten albums in 7 or 8 years and comparing the first with the last they’re almost unrecognizable. Listening with modern ears it’s clear they’re all The Beatles but that’s mostly because of the ubiquitousness of their music.

I’d also like to think that it wasn’t just a shift from A to B, it was more of a shift from A (Love Me Do / R&B Rock and Roll) to B (Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds / Psych Rock) to C (Abbey Road)

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have been changing their sound constantly since they began as a a band, to the point where this variety is one of the defining attributes of the band.

First album they released was garage/surf rock. To prevent being typecast as a garage rock band their next album was a narrated, spaghetti-western style story album. Since then, they have done psychedelic and progressive rock, thrash metal, acoustic folk, synthpop/dream pop, jazz fusion, microtonal/Turkish rock, two Beastie Boys style tracks, sludge/doom metal, boogie rock, krautrock, and more.

Once you've explored enough of their music and get a sense of their sound you start to notice common styles and characteristics, but it can still be hard sometimes to believe their entire discography is one band.

David Bowie. The man has had a handful of completely different musical careers, essentially.

Ulver started as a Norwegian black metal band with folk and acoustic influences and starting from the fourth album they've been a high-qualiry electronic music project

thrice went from like pop punk to whatever the fuck the alchemy index was to beggars. they're not really changing it up much these days but they were all over the place for a bit

I wouldn’t even call their early albums pop punk. Closer to post hardcore (not nearly hardcore but aimed to that audience at the time.) But yea; Vheissue was a sign of what was to come but AI was totally unexpected at the time from what Thrice was and their newer albums aren’t even close to what they were. But fwiw the new stuff is still really good!

post hardcore is more accurate, sure

i enjoy the more recent stuff but havent been blown away by it since beggars. major/minor was good. hurricane is one of my favourite songs they've done tho tbeitbn felt kinda jjst okay to me. but yeah i realllllly loved them between identity crisis and beggars

for some reason my comment showed up in another post so I had to delete it.

deadmau5 didn’t quite do a change of genre but he sort of just adapted with the times to the point that his older music is kind of unrecognizable. His first album “Get Scraped” is much closer in tone to “big beat” and would definitely fit if it were made by artists like The Prodigy or the Qemists, but even then has a few songs that are fairly instrumental and you would likely hear more of on "Where's the Beat" and "There's the Beat" like "Careless," "I Forget," and "Waking Up From the American Dream." He pretty quickly switched styles to sort of dark, deep House and Techno with “Random Album Title”. Nowadays he sort of plays a mix of both, and even his modern songs like “Pomegranate” sound closer to a pop song and probably would’ve got him thrown out of the underground scene 10 years ago

Being a casual deadmau5 listener (although he does have some excellent music - "Take care of the proper paperwork" is a production masterpiece), I just want to thank you for your comment, I'm currently listening to Get Scraped and it's incredible, very reminiscent of the big beat bands of the 90's. Such a shame it's not on spotify

Ulver went from black metal to synth-pop, and did it well.

Anathema started as a death-doom band touring with Cannibal Corpse and ended up as a post-prog art rock band.

Dir En Grey started as J Pop, then one day appeared on a talk show and were from then on Gothic Death Metal.

Elvis Costello has taken so many radical departures from his musical style that that’s kind of his musical style.

Born and raised in British Pub Rock, Costello’s Almost Blue album turned country… or perhaps more accurately, in the words of a songwriter he covers on this album… “Cosmic American Music.” I have always admired this Brit’s admiration for, and understanding of, what American Music means, as a genre.

He did an album of old school pop with Burt Bacharach.

He did an album of chamber music with the Brodsky Quartet.

He did an album of… it’s not exactly jazz, in all honesty I say it’s just more cosmic American music… with Allen Toussaint.

He did Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz.

The guy digs all kinds music, and lets it show.

Bring Me The Horizon went from deathcore in their early career to bubblegum pop.

WOW i’ve only ever listened to that’s the spirit and a few songs off of sempiternal, just gave some of their oldest music an ear and i never realized they sounded like that at all in the beginning!! that’s crazy

Gg allin went from screaming to country. He also had a split album with tiny tim.

Katy Perry was a riot-grrl indie-rocker before she became a pop diva.

my chemical romance and panic at the disco. their hayday was their first, like, two albums and then they did something completely different. i hate it so much :c

also stars. they used to be my favorite band ever and then went in a completely different direction with the north album. also a very sucky change that dropped them from my favorite band.

i’m with you for patd, fever is amazing and i’m not a fan of bachelor and later, but man i’m sorry to hear you don’t like mcrs newer stuff as much as i do. as much as i do love bullets, imo their golden era is three cheers and tbp

have you listened to foundations of decay? if so, how you feel about that one? sorry for all of the questions ;) i just like taking the chance to talk about mcr with anyone who’ll listen haha

don't get me wrong, i adore the black parade and three cheers :3 it's everything after that that didn't resonate anywhere near as well with me. and no worries :3 i totally understand xD tbh i haven't listened to foundations of decay o: i'll give it a shot, ty 💙

Fall Out Boy also changed pretty significantly around the same time as PATD. I think as they got a larger following they just followed the money. Hard to blame them for it, but they’re first 3 albums are so much better than the later stuff. I’ll absolutely still listen to it, though

good point, yeah! fall out boy was the same way. it's a shame all these emo bands decided to do something different. they were killing it :/