They Changed It, Now It Sucks/Music

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • This will happen just about any time that a band changes its lead vocalist.
  • There will be members of any fan base who react this way to a band's new album.
  • This trope can also occur when the image of an artist changes, even if the music is mostly the same. This is common when an innocent teen pop star sexualises their image as they 'mature', which can alienate a lot of fans that liked them for who they were up to that point. This has happened with Britney Spears, Avril Lavigne, Christina Aguilera and many others.
  • Y'know what? Let's just say most artists on this page and call it a day.
  • Bob Dylan: The Ur Example in popular music. Acoustic to Electric with Bringin' it All Back Home. As The Other Wiki will tell you, this was Serious Business. Please note: this is They Changed It, Now It Sucks that warrants a (fairly long and extremely well-sourced) article on The Other Wiki.
    • His 1979 conversion to Christianity and the resulting Slow Train Coming album led to a similar backlash.
  • Angels and Airwaves was pretty much doomed to this from the beginning. The band was formed by Blink182 frontman Tom Delonge soon after Blink's breakup, and it was meant to be his next big project. Disgruntled Blink fans, still angry about the beloved band breaking up, formed a pretty sizable Hatedom once they realized that Angels and Airwaves wasn't Blink 182 2.0.
  • The Human League began as a very dark synth band whose songs rarely featured any instrumentation but stark synths and vocals. After the band's second album came out, the band's singer Phil Oakey wanted to play pop music but Martyn Ware did not want to, he fired him kicked him out. Ian Craig Marsh followed him and they formed Heaven 17. To replace the members that left, Oakey and Wright got two female students, Susan Ann Sulley and Joanne Catherall to replace them. This did not go down well with their fans. Whilst the album Dare, the first to be released with the new line up, was not stylistically very different from their old work with the exception of the singles Love Action and Open Your Heart, the band had built up a huge fanbase from their earlier line up and the backlash towards the girls was quite aggressive. It should be noted that the single I Don't Depend On You, released in 1979 before their first album under the pseudonym "The Men" sounds exactly like the sort of thing the band would go on to produce in their second line up two years later, which means there is no pleasing some people.
  • When Nightwish lead vocalist, Tarja Turunen, left the group, she was replaced by Anette Olzon. While the band remains very successful, their more vocal fans are insisting that that Anette sucks and that Nightwish should get Tarja back.
    • Other fans believe the band's style started to change into a more euro-pop genre since Century Child.
  • Theatre of Tragedy changed from a pioneering gothic metal band on their first few albums into full-blown Europop with Musique and Assembly. Many fans were not happy, to say the least. Then they got rid of lead singer Liv Kristine, who went on to form her own band, Leaves Eyes, which is actually pretty good.
  • Bone Thugs-n-Harmony: Just about every new release?
  • David Bowie frequently had to put up with this trope, since he changed his sound so often over the years, but the loudest cries came when 1983's mainstream-radio friendly Let's Dance arrived.
  • Ayumi Hamasaki: Everything after the 2001 magnum opus 'I am...' gets flak from fans, and even when returning to composers/arrangers she used in the 1998-2001 period (as in the case with 2010 single, MOON), her music is still Ruined FOREVER!!!
  • Electric Light Orchestra: Discovery
  • Jewel, many times
  • Kanye West: 808's And Heartbreaks (R&B? Auto-Tune?)
  • Linkin Park: Minutes To Midnight, and now A Thousand Suns
    • Interestingly enough, at least one song on their latest album seems to directly address this, with it being the most obvious at lines like "...'Cause even a blueprint is a gift and a curse, 'cause once you got a theory of how the thing works, everybody wants the next thing to be just like the first."
  • Pink Floyd: Your Mileage May Vary as to which phase of the band's history suffered the most from a change of style.
  • Radiohead: Kid A and Amnesiac. Both albums are extremely well received today, however.
  • The Decemberists: The Crane Wife ("Progressive Rock? Where are the sea shanties?") then again on Hazards of Love ("Power chords? Wait, what?")
  • Tori Amos: her last four albums
  • Village People The Renaissance Album
  • Napalm Death: Harmony Corruption onwards, when they started to take on death metal influences (and later industrial and black metal).
  • Some people don't like live recordings, because they feel that it "ruins" the songs that they love so much. On the flip side, though, people who do like live recordings generally don't want them to sound too much like the studio versions.
  • Neil Young: Trans, to the point that Geffen sued Neil Young for not sounding like Neil Young.
  • Many Modest Mouse fans complain that this happened to the band upon the release of Good News for People who Like Bad News, perhaps because it featured radio-friendly material like Float On.
  • Queen's 1979-1982 period comes to mind. Freddie Mercury grew a moustache, the band released a disco single ("Another One Bites The Dust") followed by an even more disco-influenced album (Hot Space), incorporated synthesizers into the band after a "No Synths!" tradition in the studio, and in many ways alienated their hard rock fanbase, especially in America. Queen stopped touring in North America after 1982 as a result, and would not have a major hit in America again until "Bohemian Rhapsody" was rereleased and used in the movie, Wayne's World in 1992 after Freddie's death.
    • It's important to note that the band was never against synthesisers, they just didn't need to use them because they could make their sound effects themselves and wanted to advertise that fact.
    • Word of God (AKA Brian May) said the lack of synths in the 70's had a lot to do with how awful synths sounded at the time. They relaxed the restriction in the 80's because by then synthesizer technology had advanced to where they could actually use them musically instead of just making loud squealy noises.
    • They also remained huge in the rest of the world throughout the eighties and up to Freddie's death. The backlash was entirely in the US. "Another One Bites the Dust" is not generally classified as Disco in the rest of the world either.
    • "Another One Bites the Dust" is not generally classified as Disco in the US for that matter.
  • My Chemical Romance when they dropped their post-hardcore vibe and penchant for truly macabre lyrics and favour of a Rock Opera with a more mainstream feel for The Black Parade. The album was a hit, new fans emerged, and the fanbase was divided.
    • Never mind the music. Gerard's hair is Serious Business. "He cut it/dyed it/bleached it/trimmed it/parted it differently/hasn't dyed his roots, now he SUCKS!"
    • This troper didn't find that transition as troubling as the one between The Black Parade and Danger Days. MCR discovered synths, and nothing was the same.
  • Liz Phair: Pretty much every post-Exile in Guyville album, but 2003's blatantly, unapologetically commercial Liz Phair especially alienated her established fanbase.
  • Metallica's self-titled album was a shift from thrash metal to a style reminiscent of more traditional heavy metal with a bit of hard rock influence. Cue the bitching.
    • Some might say the band started derailing from the thrash metal genre on ...And Justice For All, a relatively over-produced, almost progressive-like album.
      • Still others say the band began to stray from their thrash metal roots as early as Master of Puppets.
        • Even before that, the inclusion of a ballad ("Fade to Black") on Ride the Lightning got some criticism.
    • Then came Load, Reload and St. Anger, which effectively drowned the band into a Dork Age.
  • Cradle of Filth, when they switched over from black metal to... some other kind of metal.
  • Cryptopsy: The Unspoken King. The less said about that album, the better.
  • Faces of countless fans were red with rage when they heard Morbid Angel's new album Illud Divinum Insanus for the first time. In their eyes, Morbid Angel had gone from being one of the best and most influential Death Metal bands of all time to being a cheap Rob Zombie / Marilyn Manson ripoff.
  • The Mountain Goats post-Tallahassee, according to some.
  • Even The Beatles came in for this; their change of style and approach in their later albums (particularly Sgt. Pepper onwards) gradually isolated the fans of their earlier, more traditional 'pop love-ballads' approach.
    • This was pretty Paul McCartney's reaction to the changes Phil Spector make to Let It Be, particularly in the case of "The Long and Winding Road."
  • Avenged Sevenfold's self-titled release has been seen by some as a drastic change in their nature of playing.
    • Some might also consider City Of Evil inferior as well, because it was the first album to not feature M. Shadows' screamish style featured on their previous releases.
  • Oasis had this from many people on the release of their album 'Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants', despite the demand for change from much of the music press following their previous album 'Be Here Now', when Oasis did vary their sound the press hounded them for it. Many Oasis fans see 'Giants' (as well as 'Be Here Now') as misunderstood and unfairly maligned records, especially with tracks such as 'Go Let It Out' and the fan favourite 'Gas Panic!'.
  • When Weezer released Pinkerton, it was blasted by critics and listeners alike for being darker than The Blue Album. Then after shifting back to more upbeat songs, Pinkerton became a fan favorite and the band was criticized for changing their style back.
  • When the survivng members of Sublime found a new singer/frontman/lead guitarist, a certain portion of their fanbase might as well have made this their rallying cry.
  • Judas Priest: Even though Tim Owens moving from tribute band frontman to actual Judas Priest frontman was exciting enough to lead to a film Very Loosely Based on a True Story, he just couldn't replace Rob Halford, so they finally brought him back.
    • Many fans also revolted at the release of the 1986 "synthpop" album Turbo, even though that's a very enjoyable album and - some would argue - one of Priest's best. More importantly, videos based on the Turbo songs got massive airplay on MTV, and Priest (and heavy metal in general) started to attract a lot of female fans, even to the point where there seemed to be as many girls as there were boys at their concerts. It's when Priest tried to make up for this that they arguably started to go off the rails: they worked hard to establish themselves as a purely "thrash" band like Metallica, in the process sacrificing a lot of the eclecticism that had made them popular among all music fans and not just metal ones.
  • When Iced Earth's Matt Barlow quit so he could focus on his career as a police officer, band leader and guitarist John Schafer opted not to find a similar baritone vocalist and instead hired the tenor Tim "Ripper" Owens, who was already a replacement scrappy for Judas Priest. The fans were not pleased despite Owens being a very skilled vocalist in his own right simply because he wasn't Matt Barlow. Europeans were especially volatile.
  • Miley Cyrus' Can't Be Tamed. Some didn't enjoy her darker image and the overusage of "electro-pop-ish" technology.
  • Morning Musume: Happens every time a new generation of girls is brought in. Or after every new song released post-"Golden Era".
  • Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion
  • MGMT's "Congratulations". Well, it's not even necessarily that different from Oracular Spectacular, it just isn't 45 minutes of Electric Feel, which seemed to displease some.
  • Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" single was decidedly more influenced by pop music than her previous punk rock-y efforts. If one visited the official YouTube upload for said video after its release, you would find nothing but a river of flames, most having to do with how she "sold out".
    • And then, when the fans were starting to like her "girly punk" image, she releases the extremely mainstream "What The Hell".
  • Flyleaf's second album. The first was vaguely Christian, if not unnoticeably Christian. The newest one, while not confirmed to be, has a more Christian overtone. There's also the calmer tone of it, fitting the theme of the album in sharp contract to the first album which was full of guitars, drums, and screaming.
  • Taylor Swift is the undisputed Country Music Queen of this trope. Her first album was surprisingly mature in content, especially given her young age. The second, however, switched to a "teen country-pop" format with songs that wouldn't sound out of place on a Miley Cyrus or Jonas Brothers album. Needless to say, this has caused quite the Broken Base to form; one half (mostly the younger half) loves the change in tone. The other (older) half? Let's just say "Soulless Sell-Out" is one of the nicer things they have to say about her (made worse in that, because she writes most of her own songs, she can't even blame Executive Meddling for it.).
  • A small, but vocal section of Dream Theater's fanbase believes that nothing the band wrote after "Images and Words" has any merit. Not just inferior, but totally worthless. This is a problem because "Images" was their second album...out of eleven.
  • Fans of King Crimson shouted this when the band went from prog rock to new wave in the early 1980s. In fact, this has been a constant problem the band has faced; for example, during the Islands era, someone wrote "Play the old tunes - the new ones are crap" on the band's tour van.
  • Shiny Toy Guns' New Sound Album Season of Poison.
  • Apoptygma Berzerk, when they genre shifted to emotronic/rocktronica.
  • This happened to Jean Michel Jarre with the release of about half of his albums. The first and hardest time was when he released Magnetic Fields because his early fans complained that it sounded nothing like Oxygène and Equinoxe. Next time was Zoolook which chased away some more early fans with separate tracks with individual titles. For those who got to like Zoolook as much as his earlier albums, Rendez-vous wasn't experimental and spectacular enough anymore. And so forth. He did sort of go back to the roots in the mid-90s, but then came Metamorphoses with none of Jarre's classic sounds, with no part numbers, with separate tracks, and with lyrics. Even die-hard fans became skeptical upon the releases of Sessions 2000 and Geometry of Love and outright disliked Téo & Téa. Some also say his concerts aren't as good anymore as the huge-scale outdoor shows for six-to-seven-digit crowds which he played in the 80s and 90s. Others in turn, mostly the early fans who bought Oxygène as 12" vinyl in 1976 or 1977, feel he shouldn't even have started to play these big shows because they don't do the overall feel of Oxygène and Equinoxe justice.
  • 90s trip-hop group Sneaker Pimps. Any video of theirs on YouTube is invariably seasoned with comments about how much the band sucked after the original vocalist left and comments in response about how this first group of people just can't "understand" the music now. Bonus points if one of the two most "thumbed-up" comments for the video includes some variation of "What does it matter, can't we just all enjoy the music?"
  • They Might Be Giants, known for a decade as a two-man group with simplistic orchestration (including heavy reliance on drum machines and other fake instruments) blossomed into a full band for 1994's "John Henry." Initially, fans boycotted their shows to protest the change. Obviously this had no effect, as TMBG has been a four or five-man group ever since.
  • Some of Bon Jovi's fans have criticized their more recent country-rock albums because they preferred their older heavy-metal sound.
  • The Red Hot Chili Peppers, from By The Way on. Your Mileage May Vary though, since many fans think Californication is to blame.
  • Kings of Leon post Only By The Night (some say post-Because Of The Times), again, bonus points if there is someone "who loves old and new" and "just wants everyone to chill". Yeah, 'cause YouTubers love to chill.
  • Social Distortion has many fans thinking this as of Hard Times and Nrsery Rhymes. Especially with the more bluesy-sounding songs like Can't Take it With You.
  • A song about this: "Van Halen" by Nerf Herder, where the narrator gives up on his favorite band after Sammy Hagar replaced David Lee Roth.
  • The Beach Boys with Pet Sounds. Despite its critical acclaim, a good chunk of the band's main audience, who were mainly exposed to the sun, surf and girls imagery of their earlier work, didn't know what to make of the orchestrations and introspective lyrics when it was first released.
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