I was indecisive on titling this one, but to elaborate I basically mean bands that changed their genre and it ended up resulting in hot garbage.

Here's some examples:

Sentenced. They made top-fucking-tier extreme metal for those first two albums, made some more ehh okay stuff that I don't personally care for and then just stopped making any thing worthwhile. Like Amok is okay if you like the European School of Melody when it comes to metal in the vein of Iron Maiden but that shit is not my jam.

Atrocity. Oh my god this one makes me so sad. They released two OSDM albums, the first one is a concept album that I personally don't really care for but it's alright, the second one is fucking excellent. Highly recommend "Todessehnsucht" to anyone a fan of Florida-style Death Metal. Then they just stopped making good music altogether, it just fucking sucks.

In Flames. I'm going to be honest here, I don't care for Swedish Death Metal beyond Entombed and some of the Black/Death stuff. However, their Swedeath stuff was infinitely more tolerable than the alt metal bordering on metalcore garbage they started making later on.

Also, just going to mention em just so y'all have to be a bit more clever, but it would be very easy to answer with a band that went from Gothic Death-Doom to boring rock music like Anathema or Tiamat.

Honorable mentions, as in bands that don't quite fit the criteria for one reason or another but very easily could've had things gone differently: Sepultura (went from pioneering extreme metal to nu metal to boring groove/thrash), Paradise Lost (if they kept doing what they did on Host), Root (changed from their excellent extreme metal debut to some really boring stuff later on), Atheist (later released "Jupiter" which isn't bad just really boring, and technically still progressive death metal so it's technically not a genre change even if a style change) and Cryptopsy (not sure if I have to elaborate).

Root's "dark metal" material rules. and is definitely not boring. Pretty forward thinking and unique--even if I enjoy their earlier releases more.

In cases like this, everyone always mentions Celtic Frost (proto death metal/thrash metal, to gothic rock, to grungy sounding glam rock) and Discharge (hardcore punk pioneers, to glam metal.)

Some of the "Grave New World" stuff might have worked as a sort of indie sounding glam metal band- had the band had the foresight to 1) change the name of the band and 2) market themselves to the Sunset Strip, Ratt/Winger/Guns n'Roses fan base. But instead they kept the name "Discharge" and tried playing their glam metal material to their old hardcore punk fans. It...didn't work; lets put it that way.

"Cold Lake" might have been accepted as a one-off Tom Warrior solo project, much like Mantas's solo project when he first split with Venom. It didn't really work as a Celtic Frost album, and even Tom himself has admitted as much.

I believe it was Pyogenesis (Always get them confused with Pyrexia) who started off as an average death metal band and went full on emo/alternative rock later on; neither incarnation was very interesting though I do prefer their death metal stuff.

I guess i don't have to explain Decapitated

I want to say Samael but I like some of their transitional stuff. Eternal and Exodus had some good tracks, and Passage is just fucking great. After that it was all downhill, at least what I've heard from it.

That performance where the crowd immediately turns on them (Live at the Farm '86) was hard to sit through, yeah. Good lord was that one giant misfire.

Nah, they got better when they changed style. North from Here is pretty cool, and Amok is fairly decent, but I think everything from Down onwards is much superior to what came before.

Agreed, although I’d say the reign of greatness began with Amok.

Sentenced "North From Here" fuckin rules, a one off masterpiece. "Amok" is pretty good. The rest of their discography sucks.

The only good Sentenced albums are the emo ones.

Agreed on Sentenced getting better. The last 3 albums are great.

New Sentenced rules. Never could get into their stuff before Amok. But maybe I'll listen to North From Here one more time to see if there's anything in it.

Paradise lost - That gradual sculpting of their sound and then deciding they would sound better as a pop rock band.

Cathedral - Faultless doom in the early days and then some kind of gradual attempt at being a comedy Status Quo.

I'm not gonna even front like I've actually heard it but Slagry by Masters Hammer must be a candidate

I only heard the first track but I felt fucking embarrassed listening to that around people even with my headphones in, total fucking trash

That's an insult TBH. I mean The Carnival Bizarre has more great riffs than any other release I can think of since Sabbath's 70s albums.

Also what about Endtyme and VIIth Coming? Neither of those albums fit the 'comedy Status Quo' moniker. They got much heavier again at that point.

Ulver. Was never a big fan of his BM albums but when he tried electronica (a genre which I like) even the highly-praised albums like Perdition City sent me straight to sleep.

Anyway, my takes:

Sepultura - Went from thrash on BTR/Arise to 90s groove metal stuff on Chaos AD, which worked quite well. Then Max lost his mind and the result was a straight up nu-metal album in Roots, which is dire.

Judas Priest - Established their own sound and were selling out arenas with the hard edged Defenders material, then tried to copy Def Leppard on Turbo. However they then did recover and reforge their sound with Painkiller.

Rush - 70s prog epics gave way in the 80s to shorter songs with synthesizers on Permanent Waves/Moving Pictures. This shift was handled well. Then Geddy Lee lost it and they spent much of the rest of the decade making shitty keyboard music with dated and shiny 80s production values.

Metallica - The shift from thrash to TBA and the Loads worked well, but then Lars Ulrich tried to jump on the nu-metal bandwagon with St. Anger and the results were so abysmal it's taken them 20 years to remember how to make a relatively decent album again.

Immediately scanned the thread for Opeth and they haven't been mentioned yet. Maybe they're implied by this part?


I must have listened to Heritage in its entirety at some point and thought it sucked on its own terms, independent of any how dare you strip away all metal elements! complaints.

They've now released 4 post-Watershed albums. Is Pale Communion generally considered the best? Should probably give that a few spins, although it's unlikely anything on it will wow me like "The Moor" back in the day.

Just my opinion but i found Dorrian's stage persona a bit contrived and cringeworthy, and The carnival bizzare bored me to tears.

They kind of got it back a bit with those later albums but i still didnt enjoy them as much as the earlier material.

Running Wild. Went from glorious, no-frills speed metal to cock-rock with computerised drums.

Boris. Went from a great drone band to whatever they are nowadays. They tried going back to drone a few times and it sucked.

Opeth. Their prog rock albums are pretty bad and I'm a huge prog rock fan.

Deafheaven. They were an ok screamo/black metal band. They are a terrible shoegaze band.

Another vote for Sentenced being BETTER after they switched to the more straight forward goth rock/metal. Never been able to get into the Sentenced death metal albums.

The Peaceville Trio-style of "Goth" Rock/Metal fucking sucks, I mean what you got like two good songs off "Gothic" from Paradise Lost and that's about it. Never understood why people even call it Goth, I really don't see any Goth Rock influence. The European Goth Metal scene has produced nothing but hot garbage for the past few decades.

I can't believe the same continent that produced Black Sabbath, Venom, and Bathory also created some of the worst metal since the mid 90s. You got the Swedish Melodeath scene (At the Gates, In Flames), Fakegoth rock (Tiamat, later Sentenced), European-Style Power Metal, all the Symphonic Garbage (Epica, Nightwish), or Black Metal-for-People-Who-Hate-Black Metal (Dimmu Borgir, Theatres des Vampires). It's all garbage. Though that doesn't let the USA off the hook for making nu metal and the -core genres and popularizing that glam garbage.

Cheesy ass garbage. For all the emotions they sing and for all the effort they put in they give it this unflattering production style and these tired corny melodies. They'll put pianos or entire orchestral arrangements in and it'll sound like garbage, things that other bands have managed to do way better (for fuck's sake if Celtic Frost could do symphonic elements in the 80s right why can't you do it correctly now???). Then the riffing oh my god the riffing'll just take the worst of Iron Maiden and amplify it.

Sentenced is just such a good example of this because they made some genuinely excellent good albums on Shadows of the Past and North from Here, and they were like "Y'know what this needs more of? Pop Fakegoth garbage."

I'm just confused, how do you go from making good music to bad music? What band do I blame? Is it Paradise Lost or My Dying Bride's fault?

Cancer being a good death metal band up until The Sins Of Mankind, and then changing styles to whatever the abomination that Black Faith is called.

Also, as far as I'm concerned, Sentenced recorded just two really really good albums: North From Here and Amok. Shadow Of Past (they couldn't even write decent English screwing up their album's title) is the most boring, faceless, uninspired death metal recording of the late eighties/early nineties, and everything that came after the brilliant Amok is diluted, second rate, poor excuse for "gothic" rock with some godawful vocals.

What the are you even talking about? This whole post makes no sense.

Preach! I grew up following Fields of the Nephilim, Southern death cult, Sisters etc etc around, and i got to say there are few things as painful as hearing metal bands try and add 'goth' to their music, as they fail miserably every time.

Its like they immediately decide the goth element must consist of adding someone's girlfriend in a velvet dress on backing vocals/synth, wearing a black shirt and crooning in a 'vampire' voice about "...slipping betwixt her milky white thighs in a graveyard" and playing some bland, inoffensive parping garbage that sounds like a T'Pau B side.

Latter Sentenced emo? More like melancholic rock, please. I don't know, but I am a Finn and the mentality of the band mainly just works with my brain. Okay, they got emotional stuff, what can go in brain of a Finn in their lyrics, but "emo" is a totally wrong term anyway. Is that like "emocore"???

Count me in on the emo Sentenced wagon, that shit is super fun.

I'm not sure Arch Enemy qualifies since they changed their sound (radically) but not their genre. Still sucks though, a lot.

I'm basically explaining that later Sentenced sucking ass is a part of a broader movement of European-style Melodic ass-sucking.

I have a series on my YouTube channel called Catalog Cripplers. It's essentially like a metal version of the Trainwreckords series Todd in the Shadows has. Earlier this year, I made a video where I discussed Blut, the third Atrocity release.

I'll mention a couple of bands/albums that I didn't see mentioned yet in this thread, and I've made Catalog Cripplers videos for both of them.

The first is Crimson Glory. After making two prog-power albums in the late 1980s, with the self titled 1986 debut and the 1988 follow-up Transcendence, Crimson Glory decided to become a hair band on the 1991 album Strange and Beautiful. The fans hated it, and Crimson Glory disbanded after its failure. (They would reform in the late 1990s, and released Astronomica, which had a new vocalist, and sounded nothing like Strange and Beautiful.)



The second is Gladiator. This band is not very well known, but they started out as a Sepultura inspired thrash metal band. They released their debut, Designation, in 1992, and followed it up with Made of Pain in 1993. In 1994, they released their third album, Third Eye, which saw them become a grunge band in the vein of Nirvana and Bush. If they had already been more well known in the metal community, I can only imagine the backlash they would have had.

I fucking hated the electronic Theatre of Tragedy albums. Give me that angsty goffik doom metal instead (which you seem to hate going by this thread but it's whatever - different strokes etc.).

Gothic and doomy and filled with anguish is definitely my shit, I just hate all the European bands who do it poorly.

Yep.
Their catalog was great from start to finish.

Massacra going from excellent death metal to basically lame post-grunge, especially with their last album.

Especially Scandinavia has a large amount of bands that changed and got shit during/around the mid nineties. Not gonna name them all

I really cannot understand why the band and/or promoter thought that it would go down well to play glam metal to a hostile hardcore crowd...

Even more perplexing was that the band called the crowd out.

Carcass after "Heartwork" went down fairly miserably. It took the last album to recover something of their Once Upon A Time greatness.

Entombed. No need to explain what happened after their explosive one-two start.

That n'roll thing is too much awful mixed with death metal.

After reading this, I felt like I was back in 2001, dial up internet, 2 am at a Saturday, reading people attack Dimmu Borgir and their new release Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia

Everything related to that album and that concert has no single logical explanation.
As far as I understand most of the audience at the concert didn't know that Discharge had released a second album with the said new sound, and even more before Discharge that same night Possessed and D.R.I. performed for that audience. And the best thing about it is that if you listen to the songs they played, they were performing the new album from start to finish, they had no intention of playing anything other than Grave New World material.

In my opinion the album and the performance are a failure by Cal, the instrumentation of the album is passable, but his performance is comical, "sounds like Dr.Rockzo" as a Youtube comment I read rightly pointed out. "You guys are closed-minded idiots..." he dared to say when the problem is that no one in the studio told him that his singing style sounded like a joke. And this is palpable when they started playing pre-Grave New World material but Cal insisted on his exaggerated falsetto singing and the crowd kept booing.

Oh and Grave New World for some reason has a 15 minute song. What glam band would make a song that long? At what point did it ever come to their minds to do that if they were looking for mainstream marketing? Nothing makes sense.