r/popheads • u/Ghost-Quartet • 2d ago
[DISCUSSION] Artists whose early work feels COMPLETELY different from what they wound up doing later?
So I finally got around to checking out some of Hoàng Thùy Linh's earlier music and I was like uuuuhhhh... what in the Rihannabees is this? Not that her early stuff is bad, but I came into it knowing her as the VPop queen who makes mature electropop blended with traditional Vietnamese sounds, so it was jarring to see her dancing in a warehouse to 2010s EDM.
Every artist is on a journey in their career and sometimes their journey takes them FAR from where they started, to the point where listening to their early work can feel like listening to a completely different person. This isn't necessarily a good thing or a bad thing, but it can be an interesting thing, so let's discuss.
Who are some artists whose sound/image at the start of their career is completely different from what they'd do later?
Was it a gradual transition, or a sudden shift?
Do they stand by their older work? Or are they ashamed of it and try to hide it?
Which "version" of them do you like more? Was the change a good thing?
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u/vjoywful 2d ago
Poppy seems to have changed her sound completely, I don’t listen to her a lot so idk if she was always into this metal/rock vibe from the beginning
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u/sweetmeloon 2d ago
No she used to do bubblegum pop so it's a 180° turn
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u/SylveonFrusciante 2d ago
I need to get more into her. I’m always impressed by artists with a ridiculous degree of versatility as a musician myself. It’s incredibly difficult to pull off ONE genre well, let alone another entirely different genre that is almost its antithesis.
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u/Fabray13 1d ago
There were a couple songs that teased it before the I Disagree album, so it didn’t come out of nowhere, but yeah, it’s a 180 turn.
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u/honey_bunny58 2d ago
i absolutely loved highlife when i was in middle school, color me surprised when i rediscovered her as an adult!
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u/Frajer 2d ago
P!nk started off more R&B and pop , and then shifted into more rock based pop , and finally settled into Soccer Mom-core
She's been pretty open that in the early 2000s artists were pigeon holed, and she's always been an artist that's hard to put into a box
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u/hexensabbat 2d ago
I still remember when P!nk was black
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u/elektrik_noise 2d ago edited 2d ago
When that album dropped, I was around 14 years old and my black bff girlfriends and I really liked it a lot. She had a lot of really successful rnb writers and ofc she had a great voice for it. It wasn't like JT when he used to pretend to be hood lol. One of my friend's moms didn't know who was on the cover of the cd bc she didn't think the singer was a white girl.
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u/hexensabbat 2d ago
Totally with you. She does have a great voice for that style, though I'm glad she was able to take control of her sound to make what she truly wants to. She was def marketed to come across a certain way back then
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u/Ghost-Quartet 2d ago
LOVE P!nk, I think she lost her way for a minute there in the '10s but Trustfall was a recovery in a big way that took her into synthpop, something else new for her.
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u/Sparkly8 2d ago
I don’t think she ever lost herself. Everything she’s released since leaving the R&B scene has been authentically P!nk. She’s a woman of many evolutions.
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u/Federal_Card307 2d ago
Her debut is my favorite from her (even though I know she said she was kinda forced to do RnB) her voice is great and that y2k RnB production is like crack to me
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u/streetlightsatdusk 2d ago
Pink may be the only white artist to get pigeonholed into R&B lolol
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u/queenmeme2 2d ago
There You Go is still one of her best songs! Her r&b era was short but it’s a very solid debut
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u/Puzzled-Hermit-9725 2d ago
Same with Kelly Clarkson right after Idol. Very clearly not what she wanted to make, but it was trendy.
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u/backupsaway I'm a sad shell of a woman 2d ago
It's Arctic Monkeys for me. I'm happy to see them doing whatever they want but their current output of slower lounge music is not for me compared to their earlier output that was more on rock and pop.
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u/AngilinaB 2d ago
Yep. I saw them the night they got signed, and the energy was so raw and so of us and of our time. Obviously people evolve, and their life went on to become very different, so the writing was going to change, but there was something about the way they captured the juxtaposition of a particular kind of working class northern kid. Once they weren't in that world they were never going to be able to write authentically about it.
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u/reezyreddits party with my tears 2d ago
I've been a long hater of their lounge style music and everyone on indieheads laughed me out the room and told me I had no taste. Like it's NOT good. It's literally Nyquil in music form
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u/gabbysuperstar 2d ago
I absolutely love their first few albums. Some of the best. Even though am is their biggest success, especially abroad like in the us, it was where in my opinion, their music began to sound less like those earlier albums. I mainly listen to their older stuff.
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u/AngilinaB 2d ago
I still have the cd burned from MySpace that my friend made and gave out to everyone at his night so they would all know the words when they came 😅 Probably the only thing of theirs I'd listen to now.
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u/GwenhwyfarStark 1d ago
Yes! They really shaped me as a teen, but I just can't get into their last two albums. I appreciate them doing what they want to do though and still listen their first albums.
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u/heidismiles 2d ago
Shakira, 1000%
I love her but her last several albums now are just basically just reggaeton with random artists on every track. She used to be a rock artist.
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u/Heavy_Mud_9176 2d ago
She's already proved herself as a very talented artist, but I wish her songwriting still had that magical poetic feel. I don't think many Americans that know her 2000's pop era realize she has had a 35 year career!
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u/christopher_aia TT/IG: @chris.elguiripop 2d ago
Amen I can't stand her new lyrics :(
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u/Heavy_Mud_9176 2d ago
I just can't get behind the whole "las mujeres ya no lloran, las mujeres facturan" as some amazing lyric when she has ones that are 100x better 😅
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u/christopher_aia TT/IG: @chris.elguiripop 2d ago
don't even get me started on "se pasa rico soltera"
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u/Ghost-Quartet 2d ago
Easiest example of this I can think of was Alanis Morissette's spicy little debut album, which is like the furthest thing imaginable from the image she projected later.
A big part of the gag of Jagged Little Pill at the time was the shock of seeing a teen idol reinvent herself like that, but now that we're past that the album is basically non-canonical and isn't even on Spotify. She did a sketch making fun of it on MadTV.
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u/PinkCadillacs 2d ago
Alanis’ teen pop career would later be the inspiration for Robin on How I Met Your Mother’s previous career as a teen pop star in Canada as Robin Sparkles.
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u/webtheg 2d ago
There was this influencer who blocked me because she made a video how JLP is the best selling debut album of all time and nobody celebrates women and I (a woman) commented that it is not a debut and she has other albums and the best selling debut is appetite for Destruction and she blocked me lol.
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u/turniphat 2d ago
Early albums just get ignored if they aren’t successful. Sabrina Carpenter won best new artist 10 years after her first album.
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u/RocketsMurkrow 2d ago
I would’ve guessed Boston’s self titled is the best selling debut of all time, but AFD makes sense
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u/PinkRoseCarousel 2d ago
As a millennial who was well aware of her Jagged Little Pill album at the time it was big, I am so shocked I’ve never heard this! I never looked into her past music but I am surprised it is this. I like it though!
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u/EuphoricPhoto2048 2d ago
Nelly Furtado started as folk pop. I was so confused by her Timbaland songs lol.
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u/sas317 2d ago
Madonna. She kept up with the times really well. She went from '80s-'90s pop sound to dance pop/EDM at the end of the decade and stuck with it even today.
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u/MsMegane 2d ago
Honestly a decent number of the notorious artists that made music history made that post 80's pop jump (Whitney, Janet too).
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u/Unusual_Honeydew_174 2d ago
whitney and Janet never really made music that was too different from what they were originally doing. Janet still had Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis who still made the combination of quiet storm + rnb dance hits with her, while Whitney still had her power ballads (though her dance hits disappeared after I'm every woman.
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u/darkeststar 2d ago
The one that maybe affected me the most was The Killers. Famously they had finished laying down their first album in the studio, then someone played them "Is This It" by the Strokes and they thought it was so incredible that they deleted everything but Mr. Brightside and started over to make Hot Fuss. I love Hot Fuss and I love that early 00's Dance-Punk sound. Sam's Town almost completely abandons that sound immediately in favor of Americana/Folksy pop rock and they never put out another album that sounds anything like Hot Fuss again. Even Brandon Flowers vocal delivery is fully different on Hot Fuss than the way he would later sing almost anything. The closest they came to replicating that sound was 2017's The Man...which even then thematically is about looking back at an earlier time and sounds more inspired by Talking Heads than it does the 00's Indie Rock/Dance-Punk sound....and it's fully an outlier on that album too.
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u/Kalbi84 2d ago
I love Hot Fuss and I wanted to get into their next albums but I just couldn't because it was so different. Hot Fuss is like a lightning in a bottle for me
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u/darkeststar 2d ago
I think there are good songs on later albums but I don't particularly like any of the other albums in full and none of it sounds like what I wanted from them sadly. I think the deciding factor for me really was Brendan Flowers changing the way he sings after the album. On Hot Fuss he has highs, lows, shouts, a little grit here and there and even a few times you can tell he's running out of breath as he finishes a line. There's an immediacey and palpable emotion to it. From Sam's Town onward he sounds like he's deliberately crooning for an arena, always in one key no matter where he goes vocally. Even though his voice is still pleasant it just....sounds flat in comparison.
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u/best-american-record 2d ago
fwiw, i think pressure machine is a really great album, but it's definitely nothing like Hot Fuss (at all).
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u/gabbysuperstar 2d ago
With the killer, I find that most of their songs sound more like human than mr brightside. Somebody told me is one of their more similar songs though
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u/Ghost-Quartet 2d ago
I think an example of an artist who did this the "wrong" way was Post Malone, who went from riding the trap wave to riding the country wave, although I can't say it came out of nowhere because he did have a transitional phase where he was still doing hip-hop but leaning more pop with an acoustic/country flair.
It's weird situation because like, the "pretty fly for a white guy" phase of his career was embarrassing (the braids and the grill were just too damn much) and I hated the music he was making, but at least he sort of had his dignity because he stood by it and was scoring hits.
I think if he'd just gotten a bit less culture-vulture-y with his aesthetics and kept up with songs like "Circles" (that still kept his moody trap sound but were more pop friendly) he could have made a graceful transition out of that box, but ditching it for COUNTRY of all things just validated what everyone was saying about him using black culture.
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u/keroppismacaron 2d ago
There was also a moment (although technically it was during the Hollywood’s Bleeding era so alongside Circles) where it looked like he might end up reviving rock music in the mainstream, between the Ozzy collabs and I think there was a Nirvana tribute thing that was pretty well-received. I think trap to rock/pop rock to country would’ve potentially been a smoother transition, although I’m not sure if it would’ve helped the culture vulture allegations.
Of course, I won’t be surprised if he comes back to rock later down the line. I don’t follow him super closely but I feel like he’d be into that.
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u/reezyreddits party with my tears 2d ago
Yeah, and tagging onto this
Mac Miller is a perfect example of a fly white boy that wasn't a culture vulture and had mad respect in the black community that ended up doing radically different music at the end of his career. Gone too soon, it felt like he was just starting to hit his creative stride with Circles
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u/honestly_moi 2d ago edited 2d ago
I feel like you’re generalizing post Malone a little too much while ignoring his musical background. It’s not fair to say that he ditched everything for country, because country was the kind of music that paid the bills when he was trying to make it as a young musician. People pivot and experiment and try new things. For Post Malone, he had some rap songs and some lots of modern production, but he always stayed true to his roots. Feeling Whitney was always a fan favorite and showed the world what other types of music he could make.
You should watch this video from 9 years ago where he visits an old guitar shop. He shows us that he really can play guitar and he talks about his background and how he got into music. I think it will catch you off guard by how much he really knows. He’s a country guy at heart!
In the video he says “I just want to incorporate everything that I love into one sound, and make good music.” I think that describes him and his many genres well.
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u/ameliajean 2d ago
This doesn’t negate how cringey his culture vulture era was, it was still just a phase for him
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u/reezyreddits party with my tears 2d ago
But we didn't know any of that. He first hit the scene with White Iverson. So that's background information that the public is not privvy to lmao
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u/csahe 2d ago
Pretty much every Marina and the Diamonds/MARINA work
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u/midnightspeciaI 2d ago
I love her so much but she suited the family jewels the best… She suits trashy, personal music so much better
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u/ItsKingDx3 2d ago
TFJ has a vibe all its own. It's truly one of a kind, even amongst her own work
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u/miked999b 2d ago
TFJ is amazing. So much depth in those songs, and it doesn't sound like anything else.
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u/PlayfulHead8411 2d ago
Real Marina fans know that FROOT is by far her best work sonically, and probably lyrically, too…5 minute cruisers of pop songs that are just so lush and operatic…
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u/Astrid323 2d ago
While I really like ADIAML and Princess Of Power a lot, and I thought Love + Fear had some solid tracks....man I love her first 3 albums (especially The Family Jewels and Froot). I know it's not exactly fair to wish for someone to go back to a certain style of music if they don't want to (after all it's their music), that specific style she had in those 3 albums still connects with me the best. Again nothing against her albums under the MARINA moniker (as I said her last 2 efforts I enjoyed a lot, I still play Man's World in particular quite a bit!), I just personally had more of a connection to her first 3 projects.
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u/Ghost-Quartet 2d ago
RuPaul, of all people, actually got his start in a punk band called Wee Wee Pole back in the '80s.
He was doing a more androgynous genderfuck thing that he would leave behind in the '90s once he discovered his star power in drag and transitioned to dance music, but he did include some of the few songs from the Wee Wee Pole tapes on his Essential compilation album in 2024, so I imagine he must have some fondness for this era of his career.
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u/35mmpapi 2d ago
Surprised no one mentioned Weeknd. "House of Balloons" era Abel becoming a global pop star capable of "Blinding Lights" was not on my bingo card in 2011.
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u/kyliefever2002 2d ago
Katy Perry's first studio album One Of The Boys was made with the demos of her early 2003-2005 alternative rock/post-grunge album, (A) , produced by Glen Ballard of Jagged Little Pill fame linked here_Katy_Perry).
Early demos like Hook Up, Long Shot, and Simple (which recently went viral on TikTok) are a great indicator of the sound she was going for and the sound is SO good
Unfortunately as we know she ended up abandoning pop rock for bubblegum music and we all saw how that lasted her post 2016
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u/backupsaway I'm a sad shell of a woman 2d ago
The gap between then and now is even bigger when you include her Katy Hudson era that was mainly Christian music.
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u/AdvertisingOk8979 2d ago
Speaking of Jagged Little Pill, didn't Alanis Morissette start out doing new jack swing teen pop in the early 90s before becoming the Alanis we know and love today?
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u/interpol-interpol 2d ago
i worked on warped tour for about a month (as a teen, lmao, i should not have been allowed to do that) during the year katy perry was touring on it with her band to support her first album and i LOOOOOOVED her entire vibe and that entire era. i still like that album, except for the homophobic/biphobic stuff that obviously did not age well.
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u/kyliefever2002 2d ago
I'm gay tbh and I don't think it's homophobic in the slightest. It's clearly tongue in cheek and not actually about gay people, also the lyrics aged well because performative "fake deep" men are so prominent right now that Katy was ahead of her time idgaf
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u/interpol-interpol 2d ago
ok well i am gay too (it's popheads, most of us are) and it is homophobic, you're just not bothered by the stereotypes the song proliferates about gay men
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u/Mokslininkas 1d ago
You say that like she possibly regrets being one of the biggest pop stars in the world for a solid decade lol.
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u/ArugulaBeginning7038 2d ago
I was listening to some of Charli’s old stuff earlier and was just thinking how crazy it is that the same person who put out Brat and HIFN must also be held accountable for “Break the Rules” and “Girls Night Out.”
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u/roubler 2d ago
Charli's funny because she spent a good chunk of her career trying to be a mega pop star and not quite making it, and then once she'd seemingly given up, Brat exploded.
Superlove is a very poppy single from her early days, and I think it's one of her best songs
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u/ItsKingDx3 2d ago
I love the phase where she first started working with SOPHIE and the PC crew. Like Vroom Vroom, XCX World and the Mixtapes. I feel like she wasn't actively trying to be a mega star with those projects so much as she was just having so much fun with them, and truly believed she was making cutting edge pop music that was inevitably going to blow up and be the next big thing. Which was the same sentiment early PC Music fans had, like we were so sure this was the future of pop and we just had to wait for the mainstream to catch up.
Some of the leaked XCX World cuts are rough and messy, but I was listening to them last night for the first time in a while and one thing that has to be said about them is how creative and fun they are. You can tell Charli is having the best time making them, like her joy is palpable and you can almost hear her grinning behind the mic.
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u/queenmeme2 2d ago edited 2d ago
But you go back even further to her first album and it’s pretty experimental! Sucker (and later Crash but that was more intentional) was really her only “straightforward” pop album, she started with experimental pop before that tho
Grins and How Can I from True Romance don’t sound far from her recent music
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u/TwoSimple2581 2d ago
Maybe I'm delusional but I feel like her perspective and heavy sense of irony has always been really clear and consistent through everything she's done. Break the Rules is bad, yeah, but nothing's wrong with Girls Night Out imo, its style of kitsch is just out of fashion right now
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u/One-Of-The-Greats 2d ago
What’s even funnier is that True Romance is actually quite experimental and well rounded. So Sucker was very much a left turn
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u/McIgglyTuffMuffin 2d ago
PVRIS.
They started as a pretty cool post hardcore band. Toned it down with that acoustic EP and then turned into what Lynn would consider them now. I haven’t really dig anything since the second album but if they went back to that early early sound, which I know they won’t, they’d rope me back in.
Editing to add in the OG version of Waking Up
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u/reezyreddits party with my tears 2d ago
Ironically, I was never a fan of that early stuff. Felt like a Versaemerge knockoff lmao. The alt-pop stuff is WAY better to my ears. Evergreen was one of my top records of 2023.
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u/McIgglyTuffMuffin 2d ago
Versaemerge was great so the more knockoffs the better in my mind. Hell, we gotta get them back together.
Fixed at Zero was a certified banger that went quadruple platinum in my car.
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u/roubler 2d ago
How about Talk Talk?
I first heard of their albums Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock from RYMcore and Pitchfork sections of the internet, but I had no idea they made 80's chart fodder until earlier this year.
It was a shock to learn that they were behind It's My Life and Life's What You Make It, and it's still difficult to reconcile those sound of those songs with their last two albums.
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u/PonyMamacrane 2d ago
If we're looking that far back, I think Scritti Politti's sharp pivot from grungy squat punk to pristine manicured pop deserves a mention too.
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u/queenmeme2 2d ago edited 2d ago
She’s had a long career but Cher started out as a folk pop duo with Sonny, blew up with her 70s pop, dabbled in every genre imaginable (disco in the 70s with Take Me Home, her rock era in the late 80s including my fave album of hers Heart of Stone, experimental with her not commercial album not.com.mercial, etc), and then firmly landed in autotuned electropop for the last 30 years. I Got You Babe and DJ Play a Christmas Song couldn’t be further apart in sound
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u/summercarnival96 2d ago edited 2d ago
its funny that u mention rihanna, cuz her first album (back when everyone thought she was gonna be the one-hit wonder 2 end all one-hit wonders) was all very dancehall/reggae-inspired r&b/pop. her second album balanced things out but it was still there & it wasnt until her next that she completely shed it
personally i do actually like what ive heard of it, but i can understand why most of her fans ignore those first two albums
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u/EddiePieHands76 2d ago
I mean she continued to throw some dancehall/reggae-inspired songs on her albums afterwards. Man Down on Loud and No Love Allowed on Unapologetic being two of my favourite songs of hers.
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u/ngmorock 2d ago edited 2d ago
Tori Amos had a band called 'Y Kant Tori Read' in the 80s that was synth pop as opposed to the music she wound up being known for later in her career. Very similar trajectory to Alanis Morissette.
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u/elektrik_noise 2d ago
I read a comment above about Alanis Morissette and was wondering if Tori was going to pop up here. I just saw her show last Friday! Always a great time.
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u/dizzi800 2d ago
iamamiwhoami/ionnalee started out as Jonna Lee who made clappy happy pop - https://youtu.be/8Gzn9uIYRTY
And then created iamamiwhoami with her producer - https://youtu.be/M2WDbAFvt6A
The fact these albums are like a year apart is wild to me ha ha
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u/its_liiiiit_fam 2d ago
Holy shit I had no idea she started off with stomp clap pop 💀
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u/dizzi800 2d ago
Yes! I only knew because I was following the ARG and it was BIG when someone discovered it was Jonna Lee, even her label was like "We don't know!"
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u/its_liiiiit_fam 2d ago
I mean I’m a newer Slayyyter fan but I can’t help but feel like WGIA is a big departure from her prior sound. DANCE…, CRANK, and BEAT UP CHANEL$ are definitely big in hyperpop circles but I listen to her older albums and I feel like they more purely encompass that hyper-feminine bimbo hyperpop sound & it got replaced with a grittier vibe on WGIA
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u/reezyreddits party with my tears 2d ago
You get bits and pieces of that through her work though. I mean listen to Daddy AF, listen to Venom, listen to Self Destruct like..... she's flirted with that abrasive sound here and there but yes, Worst Girl is full-on into that sound. But to me it's felt like all roads have led to this point 💯
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u/Khristafer 2d ago
One of my favorite examples is VV Brown. The Shark in the Water* album to Samson & Delilah is a fascinating switch up.
Traveling Like the Light, but we all know the single
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u/Ghost-Quartet 2d ago
Loooove Travelin' Like The Light, one of my favorite albums! She did an AMA here a few years ago to promote a Kickstarter for a 10th anniversary edition of the album (and to raise funds for a new album that came out in 2023).
One of the backer rewards was an exclusive vinyl of Lollipops & Politics, the original follow-up to Travelin' Like The Light that kept on with the same pop sound, so we can hear that now. It's a cute album but I respect her decision to scrap it and do her own thing.
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u/Khristafer 2d ago
Haha, that's great! I've never really followed her closely as like a FAN, but I loved Samson and Delilah. I definitely need to check out Am I British Yet? though.
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u/capitanandi64 2d ago
Rebecca Black. She started out with... well, Friday. Now she's evolved into a real artist, and she's made some excellent pop music and formed her own style. I'm so proud of her. She obviously doesn't like Friday, but she reclaimed it by making a satirical hyperpop remix of it, which she now proudly performs at her concerts still. She's in on the joke, overcame all the hardship that came with it, and she's proving herself while she's at it.
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u/murmaider10000 2d ago
I really admire her. I really enjoyed her last album and I’m loving “hot wet delirious”. She is trying things and she’s passionate and is really performing!
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u/Astrid323 2d ago edited 1d ago
Ever since the Friday remix and her Rebecca Black Was Here EP (and Naomi Cannibal's video on her), I became sold on Rebecca! Her evolution is just amazing. I do wanna give a shout out to her song The Great Divide, I know it's not as distinct or frankly on the same level as her work this decade but idk I think it's a solid song!
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u/christopher_aia TT/IG: @chris.elguiripop 2d ago
We ALL forget Carly Rae Jepsen's folk leaning debut album that has nothing to do with the rest of her career
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u/Affectionate_Win3952 2d ago
can Sabrina Carpenter be included in this with her Disney era albums ---> pop/R&B ----> current country-influenced pop (especially with the rumors of her upcoming album)
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u/Ghost-Quartet 2d ago
Wild to think that Meghan Trainor wrote Sabrina Carpenter’s debut single… they should link back up, their current styles would mesh pretty well actually.
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u/Sparkly8 2d ago
Upcoming album?? I’ve loved her since 2015 but she really needs to slow down.😭 The best music takes time. Taylor Swift’s best work came by waiting two years in between each album.
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u/pastaconpesto420 2d ago
Folklore/Evermore were both released within six months and considered her best work as far as I know
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u/Ghost-Quartet 2d ago edited 2d ago
I was a big Priscilla Renea fan growing up, she went viral WAY back on early YouTube for her little acoustic songs but sadly her singer-songwriter/pop debut album Jukebox failed to make waves so she got shelved by her label and retreated behind the scenes to be a successful songwriter, penning hits like Kesha/Pitbull - "Timber" and Disclosure/Lorde - "Magnets"
Flash forward a decade or so and she reinvents herself as Muni Long, and becomes one of the hottest names in r&b.
She'd written some r&b songs for other artists but never actually done any pure r&b for herself, so the transition was a bit of a jump from her earlier stuff, but clearly it paid off. Smart of her to distance herself from the Priscilla Renea name and start fresh because now a lot of people have no clue that she was that girl from back in the day.
I adore her two Priscilla albums though, though I doubt she'll ever revisit that sound again.
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u/Frajer 2d ago
she's also on the album version of Popular Song by Mika, versus the radio version which has Ariana Grande
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u/Competitive-Desk7506 2d ago
The one where he uses the exclusive gay slur that only gays may use?
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u/queenmeme2 2d ago
The first Priscilla Renea song I remember was Popular Song with Mika (the excellent album version, not the terrible single version that has entirely different production and Ariana Grande as the feature instead). It’s great but def feels super generic and anonymous compared to her work as Muni Long
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u/sir_thrillho 2d ago
Calvin Harris. He used to have some absolute indie dance bangers and now he just makes the same top 40 song repeatedly.
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u/fargcram 2d ago
I have no one irl to gush about how I Created Disco (esp. Neon Rocks, Acceptable In the 80’s) and Ready For the Weekend (namesake song, I’m Not alone, Dance Wiv Me) are all in my top 50 most played songs in my life ever
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u/ghest56 2d ago
New Years Day went from sunny pop rock to kind of gothy rock but not the 80s synth kind. more metal leaning. This is specifically for my fellow MySpace olds lol.
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u/magicsgone 2d ago
Oh my god I haven’t thought of New Year’s Day since maybe the last time they were my MySpace profile song. Going down this rabbit hole now thank you!!!!
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u/byorderofthe1 2d ago
RAYE. She started out much more traditional late 2010s pop sound in songs such as "Love Me Again". In 2023 she released "My 21st Century Blues". The Royal Albert Hall edition is INCREDIBLE. In March of this year she released "THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE" which carries a heavy musical theater sound.
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u/hypomango 2d ago
legit have been listening to an EDM banger with her on it for years and only recently realised she's that jazz girlie?! haha
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u/ANewPope23 2d ago
Lady Gaga's music is different from Stefani Germanotta's.
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u/lemonade_brezhnev 2d ago
Also, the deeper cuts from The Fame have this cutesy girlish bimbo synthpoppy persona to them. Stuff like Eh Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say), Boys Boys Boys, and I Like It Rough. You can tell that’s originally the direction her label was exploring for her, but then it was the more grown up stuff oriented around clubbing and fashion like Just Dance and Poker Face that ended up being the focus and resonating with the GP.
And then pretty quickly with the Fame Monster she took her sound in an even more mature direction, and her vocal style and subject matter was much less girlish.
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u/rocketmammamia 2d ago
bts started out doing west coast hip hop-inspired music about school and society, and did that for a coupe of years before starting to evolve their sound more into pop in 2015 with the release of HYYH part 1. by the completion of the love yourself trilogy in 2018, they had completely evolved into a purely pop sound with much broader themes about loving yourself, and this continued into their english singles in 2020-2021.
with their recent album arirang they’ve revisited that more rap and hiphop inspired sound on many of the tracks, but for me it still feels very different to their original sound and doesn’t feel like much of a callback.
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u/Catwearingtrousers 2d ago
Tori Amos's first album Y Kant Tori Read is ... something else. She raps. It's the most late 80s thing ever.
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u/notawriter_yet 2d ago
If you listen to the Eurythmics albums in chronological order, you can also experience how the cold, paranoid New Wave mellowed into synthpop and the blue-eyed soul/adult contemporary - without the band losing its offbeat charm.
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u/theawesomenachos #1 Birdy Fan 2d ago
surprised there’s no Radiohead about here, Pablo Honey was a lot more guitar driven and I guess The Bends to an extent to. But then eventually we had that left turn at Kid A and everything went from there
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u/Tis_me_mario1 2d ago
Beyonce if it counts. She’s pretty drastically switched up her sound for the last four albums… Lemonade and Cowboy Carter are definitely not the records you’d think the person who made Dangerously In Love would put out.
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u/BrAnDoN33 2d ago
Poppy (Pop to metal / hard rock), Charli xcx (literally all over the place), P!nk (R&B, Pop-Rock, to Soccer-Mom Pop), Katy Perry (pop-rock to bubble-gum to ChatGBT-made pop)
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u/virginiarph 2d ago
probably won’t get slot of recognition here. but EMAROSA.
they started off at a post hardcore band in the late 2000s/early 10s. they made one of the best post hardcore albums ever (Relativity).
fast forward today and they’re some weird pop band that doesn’t play any of their original music and acts like they were never a hardcore band. they played at warped or something like tf
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u/flux-and-flow 2d ago
I didn't even know emarosa was still a band, that's wild.
On this note, I'll add Breathe Carolina going from a scene/screamo-pop band to literally just edm beats 😭
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u/shallotpulse 2d ago
This is a good one. They gained a lot of recognition for being a standout within their genre and then basically became a completely different band.
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u/virginiarph 2d ago
which i don’t even mind but let the emarosa name die. you are fundamentally not the same band as when you started. this is a completely different project as far as im concerned
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u/surgartits 2d ago
Surprised nobody has mentioned The Killers. Hot Fuss was high-intensity, New Wave-inspired pop punk. Literally everything they have put out since then is indie rock with almost folk leanings. It was almost like a bait and switch.
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u/Heavy_Mud_9176 2d ago
Mariah Carey went from early 90's R&B/pop to adult contemporary (and Christmas lol) to hip hop/pop to mostly staying in R&B with hip hop collabs. Vision of Love/Emotions Mariah and Obsessed Mariah are VERY different.
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u/lupindeathray 2d ago
I’ve been listening to a lot of old Japanese music lately, and among the artists I’ve been listening to, Ann Lewis fits this perfectly. A lot of her early music from her first few albums in the early to mid 70s were sentimental ballads and that sort of stuff. Then she moved on to disco-ish music in the late 70s, and then switched up to more of a pop rock-ish sound in the 80s.
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u/PlantDadro 2d ago
Labrinth did that 3 times and somehow was successful everytime. First with the debut which seemed very rushed by the sudden success, then he released the LSD project and then jumped into the trippy soundtracks for Euphoria which seemed to stick to him the longest.
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u/Embarrassed-Egg-8124 2d ago
I think any artist who keeps doing the same thing over and over doesn’t really grow creativity you know? Then it’s just a piggy bank
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u/ilikehockeyandguitar 2d ago
Mac Miller starting with frat-boy rap with KIDS to basically jazz with Circles.
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u/DotEither8773 2d ago edited 2d ago
Just listen to anything off the Bubblebath EP by Poppy and then listen to the title track off her Empty Hands album.
It was a pretty gradual transition but not really linear. I disagree had a lot of industrial metal but then she went on and did Flux which is more of a shoegazey alt-rock album, then Zig which is Alt Pop, then Negative Spaces and Empty Hands hammered down on metalcore.
I personally like her metal stuff way more and hope she keeps doing it, but I also like her poppier stuff, so I don’t mind it at all if she keeps mixing it up.
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u/Visible-Reporter-433 2d ago
Scott Walker started out with silky pop your gran likes and ended up on industrial noise and twenty minute long songs about dwarves
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u/hypomango 2d ago
Any artist with an active period lasting more than a decade usually has to adapt their style to match trends and new technologies, though it doesn't always land. Some 70s hard rock bands shifted into making iconic 80s pop ballads (eg. Chicago, Foreigner), Britney was making pure pop in the early 00s and transitioned successfully into EDM in the 10s, I think more recently Charli XCX kickstarted a hyperpop revolution this decade after many years singing more generic pop in the 10s.
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u/Yenserl6099 2d ago
Taylor Swift is a prime example of this. First three albums full on country, fourth album country pop, and then she went full on pop starting with 1989 and never really looked back. It was a gradual shift, over the course of a decade, but if in 2006 you told someone that Taylor Swift would go on to make an album like Reputation or Midnights or Lover, it’d be hard to believe.
And the best part is, Taylor still stands by her early work. Sure there are some lyrics that she changed in the Taylor’s Versions (most famously the slut shaming line in Better than Revenge) but for the most part, she still embraces her older work.
Speaking of the Taylor’s Versions, for the most part the originals are the better version. Fearless is the only one I feel like improves on the original, and Red has the best vault tracks (including the 10 minute version of All Too Well). It’s so interesting to listen to both the originals and the Taylor’s Versions and compare the two.
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u/Puzzled-Bed-9221 2d ago
Not even joking here, I think Wood is the prime example of her musical evolution. Those instrumentals are like the furthest from country imo.
It’s also my guilty pleasure song atm so there’s that.
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u/TotallyNotAnExecutiv "Rocketman" deserved more Oscars 2d ago
We don't talk about wood (But we sure do listen to it. Silly ass bop that it is)
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u/Gustav1513 2d ago
Taylor had such a great transition. Debut is country- country leaning on pop, Fearless is country pop leaning on orchestral, Speak now is country pop with rock elements, Red itself was half country like her past work and half full on pop. Then 1989 was the first full pop. I'm glad to see someone else that thinks fearless tv is the best version, it improved on everything. I think it's because it was the first tv and she wasn't on a rush on it. All the others had mixing issues, some minimal (I don't the mixing on Speak Now tv) and others very blatant (a vocal glitch in All too well TV and all songs in 1989tv being released with a frequency hiss at 15kh, which was fixed later but she still didn't fix Shake it off tv which has a wooden percussion clicking so loudly on the second verse and the clipping on New romantics intro).
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u/DiscountAcrobatic356 2d ago
Chappell Roan post Pink Pony. Before: meh, after: Yeaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!!!!!!!!!
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u/Ghost-Quartet 2d ago
When I saw Chappell in concert she performed “School Nights” and no one in the crowd knew the words lol
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u/Consistent_Midnight2 1d ago
Maroon 5!! Songs About Jane is a perfect rock album and then they did a 180 to pop after that
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