10 comedown albums after masterpiece records
Many artists spend their entire lives trying to perfect their masterpieces. No matter how many times people have tried their best going into the studio, there are only a few who can claim to have a stone-cold classic under their belts that they managed to capture in between those walls of glass. When they reached the top, though, people like Tom Petty realised that there were a lot of unknown factors that came with falling back down to Earth.
Before we get started, do comedown albums mean that they are necessarily terrible? No, of course not. In fact, there are a lot of picks occupying these spaces that could go toe-to-toe with the classic from before, but when looking at the tone of the record, it’s a lot more bleak compared to what everyone had expected from their favourite artists going forward. This was a change of pace, and more often than not, it was because of the previous project’s success that everyone felt so desensitised.
However, having this kind of material invites some new opportunities for both the artist and the listener. Most people think they have a good idea of who their favourite artist is, but the minute they start listening to them unpack their insecurities or get brutally honest about their place in the world, they start to show a different side of what makes them tick outside of delivering one anthem after the next.
If anything, there’s a good case to be made that every comedown record of this calibre deserves its own realm of classic status. There was no way that anyone would start with these, but once you’ve heard the crux of what any artist can do, this is where they start to show their true colours.
10 comedown follow-up albums:
10. Alice in Chains (Dog) – Alice in Chains
Every aspect of Alice in Chains’ career seemed to be driven by their own vices. Despite their countless hits off of Dirt like ‘Rooster’, everyone could tell that Layne Staley was going down a very dark path, and it was not going to end well if he didn’t clean up his act. While the supergroup Mad Season did give him some time to work away from his inner demons, the acoustic masterpiece Jar of Flies gave way to one of the most emotionally raw records the grunge metal act ever released.
Despite being their namesake, Alice in Chains was at half-capacity throughout most of this record, with Jerry Cantrell taking lead vocals on half the tracks. As much as Staley tried to give it his all, great moments like ‘Sludge Factory’ also sound bittersweet in retrospect, almost like the singer knew that his demons had got to him and that he would probably succumb to them further down the road.
There are still moments of clarity like ‘Heaven Beside You’, but the majority of the album feels like the group desperately trying to hold themselves together for one last hurrah before everything collapsed. And since Staley would be found dead of an overdose in 2002, this would be his final official statement to the world.
9. Hard Promises – Tom Petty
The dreaded follow-up album has never been that kind to heartland rock. There are many who can make one masterpiece after the next look easy, but if you look at giants like the Eagles, there aren’t many fans who claim that The Long Run doesn’t have a certain feeling about it coming after Hotel California. But when all Tom Petty needed was a break and a hug following the run for Damn the Torpedoes, Hard Promises was when he began getting a bit darker with his lyrics.
Despite having one of the biggest hits of his career in ‘The Waiting,’ many of the deep cuts here show Petty in an emotionally vulnerable place. He had been through the wringer and come out with his songs, but now that he was famous, he seemed more insecure than ever. There will occasionally be high-energy songs like ‘Kings Road’ and ‘A Thing About You’, but ‘Insider’ and ‘Something Big’ say a lot more about what Petty was getting at.
He was looking at the version of America that he had seen while out on the road and was painting his story as the sort of Gothic tragedy that you would see in some Western novel. It does have a sort of happy ending on ‘You Can Still Change Your Mind’, but no one’s going to listen through this whole project and find a ton of happy-go-lucky tunes.
8. Damn – Kendrick Lamar
It’s hard to really throw out the classic title very often for an album that’s not even a decade old. The passage of time is the only way to judge these kinds of things, but as we start to knock on the ten-year anniversary, it’s clear that the world of hip-hop was shaken up the minute that Kendrick Lamar dropped To Pimp a Butterfly. It was the kind of project that felt like hip-hop had been given a sense of hope, but when Lamar stepped up to the big time yet again, he was far more alone than he could have ever dreamed of.
Since To Pimp a Butterfly didn’t set the world on fire the way that he thought it would, Lamar went back to the drawing board and made Damn as a response to what he had been seeing. The neighbourhoods he called home didn’t suddenly change, and while they weren’t expected to by any means, Lamar’s case study of how he feels damned by some divine curse was still fairly compelling, especially when he goes through the seven deadly sins.
Although the U2 feature in the middle of everything is pretty surreal, it’s not a big shock why Lamar eventually got out of the business for half a decade after it dropped. He may have received a Pulitzer Prize for his work here, but he knew that if he wanted to grow as an artist and as a man, he needed to take time away to work on himself than to trap himself in this headspace for too long.
7. Danger Days – My Chemical Romance
As soon as My Chemical Romance broke out onto the scene, rock and roll felt much bigger again. The garage-rock revival acts like The Strokes and The White Stripes were interested in stripping everything back to essentials, so when a record like The Black Parade knocked everyone on their ass, people remembered that rock could be gargantuan compared to every other genre in the world. Everything the emo icons made was based on some story, though, and it’s hard not to look at Danger Days as The Black Parade in a funhouse mirror.
If the story of their masterpiece was a heavy drama about a man dying from cancer, this Mad Max-style trip through an American dystopia was like turning on a completely different genre of music. Although the group hadn’t lost their touch for writing hooks on tunes like ‘Bulletproof Heart’ and ‘Na Na Na’, there are pieces that feel like they are trying to recapture the spirit of their last album and sounding completely over it, like ‘Scarecrow’.
While Danger Days puts a nice bow on the end of their recorded output, it’s also why people should be sceptical about whether or not the group chooses to make any new music going forward. If they are up to it, that follow-up is going to get made, but it would have to have the right set of circumstances for it to come out and wow everyone on the same level as their 2000s work.
6. Tusk – Fleetwood Mac
How does a band follow up an album that eventually made its way into half of American homes? Fleetwood Mac may have had an inkling that Rumours would do reasonably well after their first project with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, but its ascent as one of the most profitable musical works of all time made almost no sense considering how much turmoil was surrounding it. Now that the supposed rock and roll soap opera had come off the road, everyone had a different idea for what the new direction should be on Tusk.
Despite the foundation of the group is intact, it was about to enter shaky ground once Buckingham began toying with what made them so good, to begin with. He envisioned the group as musical chameleons, so after songs that capture their core sound like ‘Storms’ and ‘Sara’, there will be momentary freakouts where Buckingham goes on a mini rant like on ‘Not That Funny’ or ‘What Makes You Think You’re The One’.
Granted, those freakouts give it character, but it’s not the kind of traits that you would find in someone completely comfortable in their own skin. Coming off of recording sessionswhere everything turned out right, this is the sound of the group desperately trying to harness that energy again while other members throw everything at the wall and hope that something sticks out above the rest.
5. Standing on the Shoulder of Giants – Oasis
In a perfect world, Oasis probably would have bowed out the minute that the Be Here Now tour ended. As Noel Gallagher put it, their high point was supposed to be their third outing, and when public opinion slowly started to change, it was back to the drawing board to see what else they could do after conquering the world. With the group at half-capacity and Noel getting sober, Standing on the Shoulder of Giants was where everyone needed to catch their collective breath.
After sacking both Bonehead and Guigsy halfway through production, many of the tunes on the album feel like Oasis indirectly neutered themselves to some degree. While that gives way to more laid-back tracks like ‘Go Let It Out’, it’s also hauntingly prophetic to hear Noel sing tracks like ‘Where Did It All Go Wrong’, as if he knew that the keys to the musical kingdom had been taken away from in one fell swoop.
While this indirectly launched the second phase of the group with Gem Archer and Andy Bell on guitar and bass, respectively, Standing on the Shoulder of Giants is actually a brilliant look at what fame can do to a person. Both Liam and Noel ran towards the top of the charts as fast as they could, and when they finally reached it, they realised just what comes with paying for it.
4. Brand New Eyes – Paramore
Paramore seemed to have an uphill battle before anyone had even heard of them. Aside from Hayley Williams sticking to her guns in keeping them a band and not a solo project, their debut All We Know is Falling had already dealt with the fallout of losing one of their core members during its production. While they were on stable ground with Taylor York in the group, they soldiered on after Riot by making one of the most unhinged releases that the pop-punk world ever spit out.
But Paramore never fit that genre label in the first place. Williams was always miles better as a vocalist than the Patrick Stumps and Jordan Pundiks of the world, so when they decided to spread their wings, she could end up doing a lot of different styles in no time at all, whether that meant softer material on ‘The Only Exception’, anger on ‘Ignorance’, or one of the emotional belters of the modern age, ‘All I Wanted’.
Even though half the group quit in protest after the album hit shelves, Brand New Eyes became a bit of a skeleton key for them to explore future soundscapes later down the road. It was still closer to pop-punk around this time, but if they hadn’t taken the chances here, we might not be able to appreciate them making a post-punk record like This is Why years later.
3. Foo Fighters – Foo Fighters
Nirvana’s entire ascent wasn’t really for someone with a weak nervous system. None of the Seattle trio were really prepared to become the biggest names in the world, but the minute that Kurt Cobain’s face was given the spotlight during the ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ video, millions of people had a name that they could call the voice of a generation. That kind of spotlight can make for a lot more problems than people realise, and once Nirvana ended, Dave Grohl created a project all about starting from scratch.
While Foo Fighters is known more today for being the name of Grohl’s side project that ended up getting way too out of hand, it began its life as a comedown to Nirvana’s end. No one could have anticipated that Cobain would have been gone in an instant, so many of Grohl’s songs on here were his way of letting out all of that emotion, even if the lyrics didn’t have much to do with anything like ‘This is Call’ and ‘Big Me’.
But if comedown albums are about moving on from success, Foo Fighters was the definition of what a new beginning is supposed to look like. In Utero was the dark masterpiece that the grunge titans had left us with, and now that Grohl was left on his own, his determination to make a new band helped give the rest of the Seattle scene incentive to pick themselves up and start moving forward again.
2. Kid A – Radiohead
By the 2000s, Radiohead seemed completely done with the concept of rock and roll. They still had the potential to make another OK Computer and set the world on fire, but since everyone had come in to ride on their coattails, what was the point in making ‘Let Down’ Part 2 or the long-awaited follow-up to ‘Paranoid Android’? All Thom Yorke wanted was isolation from his old sound, and Kid A may as well have been the result of running that stadium rock sound through a woodchipper.
While every member of Radiohead shows up for this outing, their emphasis on rhythm and electronic instruments was about as bold of a left turn as any artist dared at the time. And while Yorke was already a bit wary of the kind of anxiety that went into his last record, the lyrics to songs like ‘How to Disappear Completely’ are hauntingly beautiful, as if all he has to do is close his eyes and pretend that no part of fame is really happening to him.
In fact, given how much they’ve been able to blend their electronic and organic soundscapes afterwards, it makes a lot more sense when the album is titled the way it is. This was ground zero for the next phase of Radiohead, and even if the fans ran away to the warm embrace of bands like Travis or Coldplay, Yorke and co. would make the music they knew they wanted to make.
1. McCartney – Paul McCartney
Every single member of The Beatles ended up taking truly strange detours throughout their breakup. Although it was clear that Ringo Starr would be nowhere near the breakout star that George Harrison or John Lennon was, their freakouts could be heard long before the breakup on experimental albums like Electronic Sound and Two Virgins. Once Paul McCartney realised that he was losing his best friends, his self-titled debut was the first time people got to hear the perfectionist being human.
Since Macca was known for being the dictator behind all of the group’s biggest pop marvels, hearing what is, in essence, a demo is a lot more interesting for Fab fans. While many of the tunes were worked on around the same time they were making Abbey Road, ‘Every Night’ and ‘Junk’ have a much more breezy feel to them, with McCartney now being able to live a life in solitude with his wife and kids.
Although the McCartneys would get far more extravagant when putting together Wings in the 1970s, the subsequent McCartney series of albums are a great look at what makes McCartney tick musically. He had already had some showstopping numbers under his belt, but hearing him this raw showed that he could be just as experimental as his bandmates when he wanted to.
