In almost every instance I can think of, a band's early material is always their most loved and best material they've written. Why is that the case? How can a band make amazing material during their early years, but then never hit that mark again in the later years?

Either they run out of ideas and use up all the good material, or they overthink the songwriting in their latter years compared to the earlier days when they would just wing whatever they felt was cool. That's a very general descriptor of course but I think it works for many empirical examples.

I think if a band has a new idea or a cool style that's going to make them popular and influential, then they generally get popular in their first few albums. After that, everyone's perception gets tinged by nostalgia.

There's tons of relatively unknown bands releasing album after album. People who know them don't generally say the old stuff was better because it doesn't have that nostalgia filter of the first time hearing something new.

Because when they are younger they have more time/energy to devote only to their music and when they get older they are married with kids. Not to mention it is easier to rest on your laurels when you have already built up your reputation/brand.

Not to mention the old adage that you have your whole life to write your first album and 6 months each subsequent one.

Pretty much this. For the most part, while the early material of many bands is special and has a raw sort of quality to it, a lot of the problem people have is with rose-tinted glasses.

I think Saxon, for instance, got better as they got older. Biff sounds better than ever these days and their albums are full of crushing, propulsive heavy metal riffing...you can't tell me Lionheart and Sacrifice aren't two of their best ever!

There are some bands that do get worse as they get older, and the reasons are so varied it's impossible to speculate on all of them at once. They get tired, they try to experiment too much, they forget what made them so good in the first place, they change their style to a more mature/different one because they have more experience in the field - thus losing that raw, youthful energy ... etc. Who really ever knows.

Artists should get better the longer they've had to work at it and gain more experience. That's the ideal situation. Of course often it doesn't happen that way. As empyreal said, the reasons why or why not are many. Take each artist on an individual basis and don't try to see patterns in everything.

In general though there's a lot of good to be said for youthful energy. It works well for music that's supposed to be brash, unhindered and strong, because generally that's the way people feel in their youth, before their minds and bodies are worn down.

I can think of several artists who got better as they went on, or at least have a middle period of inspiration that's better than what they started with.

Because fans fear change.

It's a perception that's not necessarily true. Bands usually have a developmental period - a few demos, prior bands, even a few albums - before they make their best works. To use your name as an example, Burzum's first album wasn't nearly as well developed as the music would be on the third, and that was after two demos. Morbid Angel's first album is generally regarded as their best, but it came six years into the band's history after several demos and an unreleased album. Manilla Road also had an unreleased album, and the 4th-7th albums they recorded (Crystal Logic through Mystification) are generally regarded as their best.

There is a general chronology to the "best" albums of a band's early days prior to 2000:
-Band records demos and has several stages of revising and introducing new material.
-Band proves themselves competent and produces something that convinces a record company to invest in producing an album for the band.
-Band works with an experienced producer who mentors them and handles the aspects of creating the album that may be beyond them. This optimizes how the band expends energy and effort, and provides an external filter for mistakes they might make.
-Label first exposes a broader audience to this refined product of the band's style.

Despite this, a lot of bands demos and first albums weren't their best. You'll notice though, that they had great peers who split up earlier on. The most prominent and talked about bands are the ones that continued past their prime - you hear a lot more about Entombed than you hear about God Macabre. When a band becomes successful, that encourages them to continue after their creative peak. When you've put years into something from your teens to 20s, if you're making a living off of it, you'll likely keep going because making music past your prime is still way more desirable than getting a regular job. If it hasn't become a significant source of income and livelihood, you will more than likely have a perspective more inclined to not continue past your prime.

Because the early material is the material fans usually hear first and therefore those are the albums they've liked for the longest.

There are exceptions, of course, such as the obvious Metallica. But it's not universal.

Some bands tend to get stuck with routines and are unable to reinvent themselves in meaningful ways. There are only so many riffs Entombed could've written in the Left Hand Path style that would've pleased their fans, and their style re-invention didn't end up well for the more hardcore death metal fans.

Most classical composers are the most renowned for their later work. I'll echo that metal in particular benefits from youthful energy, but consider this: some musicians release their first material in their late 20s, and some in their late teens. Perhaps there is such a thing as too much experience in metal?

Gatherum: that hardly explains why Judas Priest has been unable to recapture their 70s glory, or why Iron Maiden's latest album just doesn't make the same impression as Piece of Mind and Powerslave.

Edit: I've made an observation that particularly many metal songwriters tend to be at their best in their mid to late twenties, about from 25 to 30. The perfect balance of youthful energy and experience, perhaps?

I'm shocked to see that everyone but Zodijackel thinks that all metal bands are better in the early material.

I'm just unwilling to make generalisations in either way. I think many bands have released their best material later in their career (see Arckanum - I don't it got good until Antikosmos) - some of the best bands are like that, I think - but the comparison tends to favour relatively younger musicians (under 40, maybe) particularly in extreme metal.

All of the reasons mentioned are valid. Here are a few others:

Pressure to sell records

This happens when a band moves from independence to a big label. For many of these guys it is the first time they actually make a living from their music. But on the other hand in order to sustain that they need to sell enough albums to maintain that. Plus they are now contracted to the label and they need to take direction from the label (i.e. what bands to tour with, media obligations, what producers to work with). If they do not record an album that the label likes, the label is likely to not invest in promoting it. Some contracts pay bands a ton up front but they have to repay that by achieving certain sales. Ghost has a contract like this right now. You can imagine the pressure of such contract.

Times change

No matter how good a band is, times change, styles change and people change. You either add something new or you stagnate. Those that can change and still be great and deliver inspired music are few and far between.

I think, for many bands, it's hard to capture that initial spark of inspiration that spurred them to write their first batch of songs on subsequent records. Musicians are constantly inspired to create and over time what inspires the musician will change, or at the very least there will be more things inspiring simultaneously... which I think has a lot to do with an evolving sound. For some bands it works well and they're able to expand their catalog while still retaining the things that made them initially great... and then there's those that completely alienate themselves from their initial sound.

Some bands do just get better with age though, look at Thin Lizzy. Every albums is good to phenomenal and they didn't put out their best albums until a decade into their career. That is certainly the exception as opposed to the rule, though.

A band's latest album is always the most interesting one for me. Usually it takes most acts 3 albums before they find their own style. Then there's lineup changes that can always dynamically alter a band's sound - which can come mid career.

IMO Zodi's reply is more an attempt to define what "early material is." Not that he's wrong, but it really falls under what Temple of Blood said earlier with....



The obvious parallel is modern hip hop with artists releasing a multitude of street albums and mixtapes before issuing a proper studio record, often with plus'ed up versions of songs that were club bangers and hits at the street/internet level. Personally, I don't think those count the same way as actual released records, but some people would argue that. Metal actually lost the developmental stage with the changes in music distribution, so my expectation is that as time goes on, bands will actually get significantly better by their 5th-6th-7th album.

The problem is...especially with rock music....you don't want a lot of thought. So having your whole life to write your debut means nothing when I'm looking for you to bang out mass material once a year. Things are just more interesting to me when you remove that organic element. Like Overkill really kicks ass for me from TYOD onward.

I don't really expect that of metal bands though. They aren't jam bands, they aren't experimental, they aren't symphony orchestras or rappers. They're metal bands, and metal bands don't typically release a record every year. The Motorheads and the Overkills with those kind of massive discographies are the exception, not the rule.

I think it's for varying reasons which of course do not qualify for every band. Part of it is the material on a band's early discography is obviously their oldest material that was created before they fathomed staying together as a band for years or decades. Much of that early material refined from the beginning of the band's inception, sometimes for months or years before being recorded for a proper release, rather than being freshly conjured up as they continue to release material. Early material is written for the sake of it, full of piss and vinegar without regard to how it compares to past material.

Bands also tend to replace members gradually, so years down the road their roster might have only one or sometimes no original members remaining. To me this turns a "band" into more of a brand name where the material created years down the road is simply music written under a specific banner that renders the latter discography almost uncomparable to the early material. Aborted and Negura Bunget are great examples of this, since both bands retain only one original member. The new music they put out is of course new ideas and songs, but is perhaps written with a mindset to keep that recognizable "Aborted sound" despite their entire discography being something fairly organic, capturing the band's creativity at certain points in time.

I wouldn't say early material is "better" (although it sometimes is) but much of it does seem uninhibited and less constricted. Of course, opinions are subjective but probably every music nerd out there can think of a few artists they are into where they prefer earlier material to the later works.

Always?!? No.


This.

Bands don't have as much of a formula when writing when they are younger, less pressure from the label and the scene to put something out with 8-12 tracks between 4 and 10 minutes each or so. Some artist age well and experiment as much as they did in their early years like enslaved and boris.

Apart from the youthful energy thing, which is a powerful factor, you also have the effect of bands where the members just sort of move away from the scene and start listening to dadrock and smooth jazz and shit as boring old men. Young bands often just have this great mixture of enthusiasm and a massive love for the scene in which their material falls, but once the band is established as part of the scenes and the members "grow out of" listening to that sort of stuff on a regular basis, they begin to lose their connection with what made their music great in the first place. Related to that is the ever-present notion that "progress = good" that drives lots of artists to continually change their sound and approach in the name of doing whatever it takes to avoid one of the worst crimes you can commit as an artist: stagnation.*

* I'm actually very, very cool with bands sticking with what they're good at and slowly refining and perfecting it over time. See: Inquisition. However, that doesn't seem to be the most common of sentiments, with the default seeming to be to attack bands for releasing similar-sounding albums.

A band's early material isn't always their best. People have this tendency to latch onto things they like and then get outraged when it changes. Also, fans, and especially fans nowadays, seem to have this attitude that a band owes them something. This extends not only to products, but to the type of music the band makes as well. People always have gotten butthurt when a bad makes an album they don't like, but now people react as if someone raped their moms. The truth is, bands get sick of playing the same shit all the time. Do you really think that Metallica want to play Fade to Black ever again? They do it because people would bitch if they didn't and they probably make $10,000 every time they play it live. People grow and tastes change. Also, having a bunch of kids tell you that you peaked before they were even born is not a fun fan base to have. "I'm your biggest fan! But I really don't like anything you have done in the past 20 years."

I agree with all of this. Saxon's 'classic' material was from before I was born. I love all of it, but I maintain that Lionheart is their strongest album from start to finish.

So to answer OP's question, I don't accept the premise to begin with.

Without reading the replies before mine.

I think it has to do that most bands try to outdo themselves and try to come up with something better than the last album.
The fact that they don't have any earlier material to compare with in the beginning might also help, since whatever sounds cool, is cool.

Often they ruin later albums with overly shiny production which is a significant impediment to enjoyment of metal (at least for me). They also add needless 'experimentation' when most bands aren't capable of writing more than good songs. It's much easier to write a good simple album than a good complex album (like 99% of 'complex' albums suck).

Sadly, I think there's a lot of truth to this. I love classic rock and all that shit as much as anybody does, but an exclusive diet of old 60's bands is not very conducive to writing great metal records.

This is a terrible perception. As several have already stated, there are plenty of bands that improve throughout their career. Manilla Road's first couple of albums are awful in comparison to what would come. Iron Maiden got better with album throughout the first half of the 80's. Most of the classic thrash bands improved with their 80's output. Judas Priest is something of an interesting case. They enjoyed their commercial peak, and while they did release Point of Entry and Turbo, they also released Screaming for Vengeance and Defenders of the Faith, and they peaked in 1990 with Painkiller.

The good bands are the ones that improve from their early records. Most of the early thrash bands couldn't improve on their debuts, and thus faded away. The ones that did improve were the ones that stuck around or became famous.

WOAH WOAH WOAH hold your horses!

I was clearly talking about their 80's period. The reviews on this website back up what I'm talking about.

I like the 70s stuff more, but as a functioning band, Painkiller really was the culmination of everything they were doing up to then - they shifted styles so much and eventually came out with a stereotype to end all stereotypes, of the style they helped stereotype to begin with.

My favourite bands/musicians have only gotten better. Every single one, without exception, metal or otherwise.

That being said, some artists simply don't have it in them to produce quality material over and over. Some novelists write one good novel, some directors make one good film, and some bands are only capable of one good album.

Painkiller is certainly an instance of a lineup change affecting the band. They had been pushing a lot of things with the intensity of the guitars and vocals, and the drums finally followed when they upgraded their four-limbed metronome to a drummer.

There's so much variation that, as others have said, it's hard to generalize. Though for some reason, death/black/extreme doom type bands seem to peak earlier, on average, than in other metal genres. Granted, this may be more true of old school bands - old school death metal, or many styles of it at least, being more based off of primitive, adolescent (or adolescent-like) aggression. Which obviously doesn't explain bands like Convulse or Interment, who've come out with excellent OSDM records in their early middle age.

So yeah, for every example there's a counter-example. Really difficult to formulate any coherent "theory" on this stuff.

Y'all have heard of Darkthrone right? Much as I'd say Panzerfaust is their best album, I like their recent stuff as a whole more than the early albums. On average. The attitude is much more engaging imo.

Yeah but the opinion of 'post-Panzerfaust albums are good albums' is a minority opinion.

What about bands who release crap for ages, then suddenly strike gold? I don't like post-Tales Amophis, but somehow they managed to release a really good album with Skyforger. The blue egg album after that was pretty boring though.

Most of the other posters have articulated why this perception exists better than I could. A combination of fresh, young musicians full of new ideas, nostalgia and fan expectations. One aspect I'd like to point out is running out of ideas. As a sometimes song-writer, I know that I run out of ideas eventually, especially when I'm trying to create music in a particular genre (if I wanna write a doom song, for example). I've already written a lot of my best riffs, and it's hard to sit down and hammer something out that doesn't sound like something I wrote before. That isn't to say there isn't some good stuff left in the ol' noggin, as I still have my occasional flash of inspiration, but I do think the longer you write in a particular style, the easier it is to fall into a sort of rut, retreading your original ideas, rehashing your old songwriting tropes, etc. You kind of have to wait for inspiration to strike, where as when you are a new songwriter, ideas tend to flow a lot more freely as you are covering ground you hadn't before then.

I don't think this applies to many stellar bands like Judas Priest, Blind Guardian, Running Wild, Riot, Iron Maiden, Accept, Overkill and others.. My opinion.
All of those became better with time except a few dips here and there but I can't say they were at their peak in the beginning.
Most of these where AWESOME in the beginning too tho. But became more refined later on

EDIT: I may have listed a lot of bands that were really good early on, but maybe not having their first or two first albums as the best... So some of these might not fit the thread anyway

I would have to agree with the OP. Practically every band I can think of played their best material on their early albums. Whether you like all these bands or not, Sabbath, Purple, Priest, Motorhead, Maiden, Ozzy, Dio, Venom, Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, Kreator, Sepultura, Kind Diamond, Voivod, Obituary, Entombed, Morbid Angel, Satyricon, Burzum (to name but a few) all released their best music early on.

Of course, there ARE exceptions, but very few. Priest came back 16 years after their debut and released Painkiller, often regarded as one of their best albums. And some bands are/were fairly consistent with releasing good material, such as Candlemass, Vader, Dismember, Bolt Thrower, Death, Necrophobic and Marduk (some may not agree with me), although with all 7 bands, I still tend to prefer the early stuff.

That's a totally subjective statement. What does one means by "the best"? Yes, Black Sabbath is a hell of an album. As Heaven and Hell is. With 10 years and 7 albums in between. Judas Priest? They released Painkiller almost 20 years after their first release. Unless we are talking about bands that changed their style (that means you Def Leppard) I can think of several bands that aren't that way.