Acts whose debut album is an afterthought in their overall discography

Pantera - Metal Magic
Prince - For You
Michael Bolton - Michael Bolotin

lol croup I thought of bringing up that Goo Goo Dolls album. it's funny because even on the second he only sings about two songs, didn't even get a 50/50 share of lead vocals until Hold Me Up, really.

oooooh Hawkwind is a good one

i just love when, rather than a gradual build to where they were going, the group just has this one really gawky thing at the top of an otherwise polished discography. Like a UK Squeeze thing.

like if Elvis Costello had a self-titled album from 1974 where he's got a moptop and no glasses

Judas Priest

like that BA Robertson album? Xpost

ABBA perhaps ?

Girl Talk - Secret Diary

UK Squeeze had "Take Me I'm Yours" on it, which I think still makes the comps and all that (though, wasn't it recorded separate from the rest?)

ABBA perhaps ?

totally get the logic for this, but i kinda wish some continental european would get really mad about it. "Ring Ring was a #2 hit (in Austria)!"

fair enough .. never knew of it until i got the boxset last week.

tis ace ..

yeah see there you go, i didn't realize uk squeeze had a top 20 hit on it. i just know it as a two star asterisk kinda thing

Styx debut (and arguably a few of the surprisingly hard rocking Wooden Nickel ones that followed, though the second one did have "Lady.")
Also seems like Bob Seger deserves an asterisk on this thread at least (not so much for his debut as for a couple of his later early ones).

...and for the non-album singles before his debut, too.

Sonic Youth s/t EP though I guess Confusion Is Sex would be true for general public if not hardcore fans

They played "Burning Spear" when I saw them in 2000.

is there an afterthought definition? because Sorry Ma cuts get played on tour to this day for the Replacements.

It's neat to see Underworld and Kraftwerk mentioned in succession, because both those are examples of bands that started as something clearly something different than what they got famous for. I mean the "original" Underworld was basically an entirely different band, a five-piece whose direction seemed to be 100% controlled by the record company, though plans from a scrapped third album DID make its way to the more famous version of the group ("M.E." and a few of the dubnobasswithmyheadman-era tunes that didn't make the album originated from the early band). Anyway, that seems like a different thread

another good example would be Yasutaka Nakata's group Capsule, whose first album was a P5-style Shibuya-kei thing that has almost nothing to do with any of their other albums

Age Of Chance are kind of like that, too. And Onyx. But neither of their early versions put out more than a single or two.

Also, though only country people even know her:

Pam Tillis -- Above And Beyond The Doll Of Cutey (from 1983, a sort of fake new wavish thing 8 years before her country debut)

Also there's that '70s Roches album with only two of them.

And David Banner had an album or two before he hit (plus one with Crooked Lettaz), but with rappers you probably start to get into grey areas thanks to mixtapes etc. and who knows how that affects the rules here.

Also the first couple Rapture EPs when they were doing a sort of quasi Gang Of Four thing (one of which gets considered an album I think -- though EPs might be another grey area. And I really have no idea if people care about the Rapture at all anymore anyway.) (Unlike, uh, Blackfoot and Age Of Chance, who I mentioned above and who clearly still get talked about all the time.)

And oh yeah, duh.

k.d. lang & the reclines - angel with a lariat (and one even before that, apparently.)

(Okay, now I'm starting to remember why I stopped posting here. I get too obsessive about this stuff.)

is there an afterthought definition? because Sorry Ma cuts get played on tour to this day for the Replacements.

Not sure Sorry Ma fits the criteria for this thread.

Early Glass Candy and Chromatics albums before they went synthy.

First two Supertramp albums?

Lou Reed's s/t debut certainly has its awkward moments---sometimes the writing, sometimes the drumming, sometimes both at once---but certainly has its keepers too, like "I Can't Stand It," the jangle-pop x Bo Diddly beats of "Love Makes You Feel," and especially "Wild Child"--did he ever do that live? Just so VU Lou, in a Loaded way.
Somebody mentioned Garland Jeffreys' s/t debut in passing: didn't get the (deserved) hype of Ghost Writer(which he'll be performing at Highland in NYC 5/30), but, as with the xpost Joni debut, musical sensibilities seem fully, distinctively formed (though both artists got more topical & varied the arrangements later on).
His phrasing is fluid, alert and adaptable, like he's found a good spot for busking, while keeping an eye on those creeps coming up out of the subway. Kind of a Dion vibe, although doesn't literally sound that much like Dion.
Da Croupier, there's a set of tracks (maybe an album) by Flip City, Costello's pre-Stiff band. Dunno what he looked like or how it sounds (posted here and there), but originally saw it referred to as bluegrass...

Queen

'Keep Yourself Alive' didn't even make it onto Greatest Hits, if I remember. I guess 'Great King Rat' and 'Liar' are fan favourites, but casual listeners probably would know very few tracks on it. The band seemed to approach the material on this album very rarely, if ever, after the mid '70s.

idk his narrative that well at all but isn't Alice Cooper's first album really totally different/not usually talked about?

― soyrev, Monday, May 11, 2015 8:09 AM (13 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes, and this goes for their second album too. Both Pretties For You and Easy Action are generally seen as early curios really, by pretty much everyone. I think Love It To Death is generally considered their debut even if it isn't.

I actually almost mentioned Glass Candy and Chromatics up there with the Rapture, I swear. (Then decided that with '00s indie acts, for all I know, their career trajectories might not even be all that unusual, and wasn't sure if anybody else even knew them. Was probably wrong on both counts.)

Somebody mentioned Miranda Lambert above, and it occurs to me that starting with CDBaby or whatever, this probably isn't rare at all in country -- Kacey Musgraves even self-released a couple albums as a teenager, to sell at shows or serve as demos. And she's far from alone in that. Jamey Johnson put out a self-relased album, then one called The Dollar with an actual top 20 country single before he got the idea to dress up more like an outlaw. That got him a whole different audience that might barely even know The Dollar existed, much less the first one.

Also, Shania Twain put out a flop self-titled album nobody remembers before hooking up with Mutt Lange -- And if you don't have hits in mainstream country, you might as well not exist.

Alanis.

Happy that you brought up Queen, Turrican. I was too chickenshit because I didn't know what the extent of "Keep Yourself Alive" was, hit-wise, and I knew some might harp on "Seven Seas of Rhye"'s original version (sans vocals) being on it.

but yeah, I think it fits perfectly. It's very quaint compared to the material that came later, and maybe not a 'forgotten' album but certainly kind of a dull thud of an introduction.

a gold record can qualify for this imo

can't qualify imo

it's definitely a soft opening but it's hardly a WHOOPS, LET'S TRY THAT AGAIN

I dunno, the band have always been incredibly critical of the production on Queen. For what it's worth, I like a lot of the material on the album.

If we're looking for "WHOOPS, LET'S TRY THAT AGAIN" albums, then Life In A Day by Simple Minds is definitely one of those. They rushed to get the second album out because they were dissatisfied with the debut.

More country qualifiers: Definitely first three Dixie Chicks, probably first five Shelby Lynnes (all of which placed low on the country chart before the album that won her a Best New Artist Grammy!)

Cat Stevens, Mathew and Son.

genesis: from genesis to revelation

kansas debut.

Bataclan tape..

"This next song is called Wild Child. It's about a Wild Child, funnily enough"

John Hiatt? Actually it took him a number of albums to hit his stride, but I don't think anybody talks about Hanging Around The Observatory.

I'm with croup on this, even albums that sell well due to later success (Bleach, the aforementioned Shania s/t, etc.) shouldn't qualify based on the criteria at the top of the thread. If an album sells half a million copies, it seems pretty well "accepted" as part of the discography.

The three pre-Natalie Maines Dixie Chicks records are a good example of "afterthought," in that they never charted or even went gold. This band has two diamond records and the first three releases are supremely ignored.

Okay, yeah, I hadn't realized that Shania debut subsequently went platinum (which is no surprise, I guess). Pretty sure I've never heard anything from it on the radio, but I agree, if it sold that much it doesn't belong.

Don't think I've ever even seen those first two mid '70s John Hiatt albums. Starting with Slug Line in 1979, at least he had new wavers who wanted an American Costello backing him up.

Yeah, that Shania was a staple of mid-price bins after she blew up.

(Pre-Natalie Maines Dixie Chicks albums were okay, as I dimly recall, but Maines brought the charisma. Those first albums were *not* reissued despite diamond sales of the later sets; figure it was a Chicks command, maybe especially from the firing/hiring foresisters, Emily and Martie, both with many marital surnames.)

I got a promo of Ashley Monroe's Satisfied like ten years ago (think she was 17), immediately got involved w several tracks and repelled by others; seemed like the "grown-ups" were practicing musical abuse, with schlock-shop cliches next to striking originals. Release date kept getting pushed back, then publicist finally said it was getting withdrawn from the schedule, for "reworking." She did some singles etc with other performers, established herself as a co-writer, then the thing finally came out, and it still seemed fucked-with (I don't know how much control she had at that point; who knows what kind of contract she signed all those years ago). But it's still worth checking, and personally (minority report) I still find some of it more compelling than her more professional, more detached Like A Rose. Which also has its keepers, but nowadays I like her best as a Pistol Annnie.

Sunny Sweeney has said that she "didn't know what I was doing" when she recorded Heartbreaker's Hall of Fame, but it's another erratic grabber; she sometimes sounds like an alt-universe Natalie Maines, pissed off about still spinnin' her wheels (real hard) in Big Woods Texas.

Marvin Gaye - The Soulful Moods Of Marvin Gaye

an album primarily of standards released a year before Stubborn Kind of Fellow

While Hall & Oates' Whole Oats has no hits, didn't chart, songs from it got covered by other people and the same people all worked on the hit follow-up a year later. But apparently the first single was initially credited to Whole Oats, as they were thinking about call themselves that. So i'd say it's like 2/3rds a qualifer.

Lana Del Rey

Fall Out Boy's Evening Out With Your Girlfriend

a debut album that has been demoted to EP on the band's wikipedia page