it's called the 'sophmore slump'. the bulk of bands that come out with a fantastic debut album have a hard time living up to their initial success. it's a combination of multiple factors usually ego, and social pressure.

I would relate Bloc Party to this. Silent Alarm was great but like the Killers their last albums have slowly gotten worse.

I had a feeling that someone would mention Bloc Party...

inb4 Guns 'N' Roses

aside from the fact that "lies" came out after "appetite for destruction", and was hugely successful (you might have heard a little ditty called 'patience')

on top of that it could easily be argued that combining "use your illusions" (which is way easier in the age of digital music) into one album's worth of material would result in another great album.

after all that (and the millions of sales those 4 albums collected) yeah they went to sh!t with "the spaghetti incident", although i'm pretty sure "chinese democracy" would have been successful and received positively had it been released 10 years ago.

i'm just razzing you :p:



or maybe i'm missing the point of the thread, every band goes to crap eventually. i thought this was about bands that released 1 great debut album then never came close again.

yeah, i knew that, but i didn't mean their first album was followed by abject failiure. just that, like you said, they had many good releases, but they went to crap eventually.


as for the point of this thread, i see it as bands who do have multiple good releases, (i.e. Gun's N Roses), but then fail to live up to that again

No...but it was funny. :D

Anyway, I think in many cases bands grow and their albums get progressivley...not better per say...but more mature.
Ex. Brand New

There is also the possibility that not all musicians are cut out for a lifetime of creative output. Some bands/artists really only have one good album inside of em'. We're conditioned to believe that if you are lucky enough to "make it big", then its necessary to try to prolong that trajectory by being prolific (record contracts kinda' ensure it), but come on, would you rather have one spectacular album that shines on its own, or one spectacular album that recants its own greatness because of the subsequent obligatory rubbish that came after it?

I thought the Use Your Illusion albums were great personally.

Spaghetti Incident was pretty sh*tacular though.

The Strokes, anyone?