Why Are A Band's Early Albums So Often Their Best?

General Music Discussion
#1

If you’re like me, then with some notable exceptions, you tend to like a band’s early albums better than their later albums. Why did you think this phenomenon is so prevalent?

Let’s Go back Right To The Start Of Hard Rock/Heavy metal and take a look at this phenomenon:

Led Zeppelin: Few people would claim In Through The Out Door or Presence is as good as Led Zeppelin I or II. Still, Zeppelin had more staying power than most and middle era albums like Physical Graffiti and Houses Of The Holy are excellent albums!

Deep Purple: In Rock, Fireball, Machine Head and Burn are classics and among their early albums. How many of you can even claim to have heard the following albums from beginning to end:
The House of Blue Light (1987)
Slaves and Masters (1990)
The Battle Rages On… (1993)
Purpendicular (1996)
Abandon (1998)
Bananas (2003)
Rapture of the Deep (2005)
Now What?! (2013)
Infinite (2017)

Black Sabbath: There first four albums were the prototype for heavy metal! It would be difficult to make an argument for any band having as big an influence on heavy metal as Black Sabbath did, especially if we consider Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple as hard rock and not heavy metal.

I consider Sabbath with Ozzy ad Sabbath with Dio as such different bands so I’m going to compare like with like: I’ll compare early Sabbath with Ozzy to late Sabbath with Ozzy and early Sabbath with Dio to late Sabbath with Dio

First Four: Black Sabbath
Paranoid
Master Of Reality
Volume 4

Last 4 With Ozzy: Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
Sabotage
Technical Ecstacy
Never Say Die!

OK, who likes Sabbath’s first 4 albums better than there last four? Does anyone even think it’s close?

I could go on and on with more bands but I think that I’ll let someone else continue this if anyone would like to do so. Until then, I think it’s fairly clear that despite some exceptions, in general, a band’s early albums are much more likely to be their great, truly classic albums. At best, their middle era albums may be just as good as their early albums and even better in certain ways. I would find it very tough to argue that a band’s late era albums tend to be their greatest, most classic albums.

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#2

To whatever extent this may be true, I’d say a lot of it comes down to the fact that a band’s first album is often the culmination of 5 years or more of songwriting, performing those songs live, and tweaking them. The first few albums are often the “cream” of a live band’s existing repertoire, or even if they aren’t all songs that were completed previously, there will be fragments and licks that have been kicking around for a long time. Unless someone is particularly creative and/or highly motivated, once that vault of pent-up musical ideas has been spent, it can be a big challenge to try to match that level of passion and originality without the benefit of all the pre-debut development years that bore fruit for the first couple of albums.

It was funny listening to Van Halen’s “A Different Kind of Truth” album (2012) and hearing songs like “Big River” that were the first ever “official” presentations of VH songs that had been circulating as bootleg demos and live recordings dating back to the 70s.

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#3

My imagination is that most persons have a limited amount of songs in them, probably 10-20.
That’s probably based on your hearing experience.
That does not mean that that’s all that is the limit in the end but I think the starting point is basically one album.
So for the 2nd album it’d take time to find new hearing experience and time to play with knowledge and technique, and (especially in the past) that rarely happened if your first album was successful.
If contracts forces you to make one album a year and and addition you have to tour around the world there’s simply few time to evolve, so the result is albums with songs that are not the perfect matches of what the musiians want to hear themselves.
That sounds worse than I think it is actually, in fact I’m pretty sure that there are some neat results of the ‘mental b-sides’, resulting from pushing great musicians out of their comfort zone.