Albums that sound like Greatest Hits collections, but are actually all-new...

well the first Velvet Underground LP is an obvious one - varied sounding songs pretty much all well-known

RTX – Veterans of Disorder

the first Pretenders album

Missing Persons - Spring Session M

Born in the USA

Daft Punk - Discovery
Kendrick Lamar - DAMN.

The Cars S/T

Prodigy - Experience

Alphaville - Forever Young. (I'm a bit surprised that only four songs on that album were singles.)

Cyndi Lauper, She’s So Unusual

Future Islands - Singles
(not a compilation as the name suggests but a studio album)

Flappy otm

"golden hits" = 3 inferior re-recordings of their early '60s hits, 3 covers, and 4 new songs. it was reissued in 2004 under the similarly misleading title The Best of the Paris Sisters

https://i.imgur.com/GJFo8or.jpg

And the cover photo is obviously not The Paris Sisters!

huh, it's obviously them! (and fwiw they're wearing proper clothes on the back cover). I'm not sure who thought a lingerie photoshoot would revitalize their image and I'm not sure how many pervs bought the album on the strength of the cover art, but they never had any more hits and they broke up a year later

honestly all 3 Vampire Weekend albums. I was going to say especially the first one but it's really all of them

xp I stand corrected, I have never seen swinging sixties Paris Sisters. I always think of them looking like this:

http://www.history-of-rock.com/Paris_Sisters.jpg

I don't really like "Back In Black" but for a year or 2 I thought it was a greatest hits album.

Turns out "Singles Going Steady" is a comp. I wasn't sure until just now.

I keep second guessing that one too

There's alot of overlap between this and "all killer, no filler" albums, but there's a difference between something like the first Cars or Pretenders albums that were all great songs but still were obviously the work of the same band recorded around the same time. Some albums are full of great songs but have tracks that sound much older or newer than they are, or barely sound like they're all the work of the same band. Those have a 25 year retrospective greatest-hits feel and multi-artist compilation vibe respectively, and are much more rare and interesting.

It's craziness that "Excitable Boy" hasn't already been posted to this thread.

Electric Six have, unbelievably, got on to have 14 more albums that the one you've heard something.