Who Could Be the Next Artist to Have a Big Comeback Album?
My Chemical Romance arrive at the MTV Europe Music Awards 2007 at the Olympiahalle on Nov. 1, 2007 in Munich, Germany.
Perhaps it’s not a new phenomenon, but comeback and reunion albums
have become a more frequently accepted way of life than most bands’
breakups at this point. It seems obvious at this point though; who
wouldn’t want to relive their artistic success for exponentially more
cash than they may have made when they were still building their legend?
Some former creative partnerships have been just too acrimonious to
mend even for a non-hypothetical pile of cash though, as the Misfits,
Van Halen, and the Police all know too well from short-lived truces.
But after A Tribe Called Quest’s swan song last year (We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your service), Brand New’s purported final album last month (Science Fiction) and LCD Soundsystem’s first album following a not-so-definite seven-year hiatus (American Dream)
earlier this month -- all of which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard
200 albums chart -- it's pretty clear that such legacies have legs.
Those three success stories are all widely beloved artists whose public
esteem only swelled in their absence, though there was still some
heartwarming element of surprise to their reunions reaching the summit
that they did.
In descending order of likelihood, here are bunch of other
hypothetical reunion albums that could conceivably threaten the No. 1
spot on the Billboard Top 200 chart if these fervently beloved artists were to reemerge from studio retirement tomorrow.
Tool
Tool
has confirmed for eons that they’ve been working on a new album --
likely spending years alone striving for the perfect drum sound -- and
they also headlined this year’s Governor’s Ball back in June, an unusual
feat for a rock band, let alone one whose tunes regularly evade normal
choruses and time signatures while spelunking past the eight-minute
mark.
But Maynard James Keenan routinely quashes rumors that such a
set is coming out anytime soon -- he’s explicitly put the kibosh on a
2017 release -- and that Gov. Ball set only included one unreleased
song, “Descending,” which bassist Adam Jones still insists will sound
nothing like the finished version, possibly to dismay YouTube
bootleggers. Either way, their last two albums, 2001’s Lateralus and 2006’s 10,000 Days,
debuted at the Billboard 200's top spot and those only followed mere
five-year breaks, and their upcoming album (12 years and counting) would
seem a decent bet to join them. One thing Tool fans know how to do is
wait.
System of a Down
The flipside of Tool
is System of a Down, whose last two albums both reached No. 1 in the
same year, 2005, but they’ve barely confirmed in passing that they are
working on a new record, with Serj Tankian telling this writer in 2015
that the band is “open” to it and they all agree it needs to be a big
“leap” from anything they’ve done before. Considering nu-metal’s
greatest band managed to weave ska, R&B, jazz and disco into their
cinderblock riffs and bizarre political tirades, all before calling it
quits, it’s safe to say it make take a while before they figure it out.
Bassist Shavo Odadjian and drummer John Dolmayan have expressed frustration
to Loudwire this summer, implying that the band’s principal songwriters
are the holdup. Meanwhile, Tankian continues to prolifically release
Mike Patton-styled detours like his jazz ensemble lark Jazz-Iz-Christ
on his own label, Serjical Strike. Fans are undoubtedly jonesing for
this one, and the political landscape could give a new System record
added poignancy (just like A Tribe Called Ques)t if they brought even a
fraction of the old anti-establishment fury to the end product.
While Tool and System of a Down are officially still in business and
making fans salivate for their first new material since roughly the same
time, mall-punk now-legends My Chemical Romance perhaps stand the
greatest chance of the actual disbanded acts to both return and reach
the top of the albums chart. Even with just four years passed since
their official breakup, their presence is most felt as one missing in
action during a particularly emo-friendly rock renaissance, and they’re
positively rebellious compared to the polished new synth-pop Paramore is
peddling and the relatively mature sounds of the new Blink-182 and
Brand New albums making big splashes close to their niche.
The
true analogue here is Fall Out Boy, who didn’t quite split but came back
in a big way with hits and visibility and everything after the
half-decade sabbatical that followed 2008’s widescreen arena-rock pivot Folie a Deux -- and critics have only embraced MCR more over time. Meanwhile, Gerard Way’s 2014 solo bow Hesitant Alien
didn’t exactly kickstart an alternative solo career, and while he’s
been particularly successful as an award-winning comic-book artist, it’s
hard to imagine him staying away from music for too long. Fans
positively plotzed when the teasers for the 10th anniversary edition of The Black Parade last year were thought to be a new album entirely.
New Edition
Did you see the ratings for this year’s BET miniseries The New Edition Story? They’re enough to make you believe in the original new-jack boy band, even if you didn’t notice they released an album called One Love
as recently as 2004. New Edition announced a new album and tour this
year, and those are expected to do their best numbers since the group’s
heyday, though reaching No. 1 would certainly be a challenge; Bobby
Brown and Bell Biv Devoe haven’t had hits since the early ‘90s and
throwback R&B is a tough landscape right now -- even the beloved
TLC’s much-touted final album TLC bowed at a modest No. 38 this
year. Could N.E. compete with the likes of Beyoncé, Solange, Frank
Ocean, and the Weekend on the charts?
Hootie and the Blowfish
Laugh if you must, but frontman Darius Rucker has scored four different Billboard top 10 albums on his own during the last ten years, including two that reached No. 2. The Cracked Rear View
singer now enjoys two audiences, as both the frontman on one of the
best-selling pop-rock albums of all-time and as a highly respected
journeyman in country music who’s scored hits under his given name.
Hootie and the Blowfish have been officially confined to charity
concerts since 2008 but Rucker was quick to clarify that they “aren’t
even split up right now” and that the band would possibly continue after
he releases “three or four” solo country records. He’s up to five.
You
can also bet that enough time has passed that his fans don’t feel goofy
at all about buying a Hootie album in the late 2010s. All that kind of
stands in their way is the fact that they put out four albums post-Cracked Rear View
that many didn’t notice. But Rucker’s solo numbers don’t lie and it’s
hard to imagine him outdoing the group proper, especially when they
pulled off Cracked Rear View.
Sunny Day Real Estate
If
Brand New can do it, why can’t the inventors of their whole world?
Jeremy Enigk’s obscure solo career has been helped by the devoted
faithful, most recently for an album called Ghosts crowfunded
by PledgeMusic that’s expected to drop this year. But it’s been eight
years since he actually released one (2009’s limp OK Bear) and
his fellow founding emo fathers regrouped as Sunny Day Real Estate in
2014 to attempt a new album that got shitcanned, save for a Record Store
Day single (“Lipton Witch”).
It’s been 17 years since the emo greats' last reunion to bear fruit – 2000’s gorgeously produced The Rising Tide,
full of surprisingly Rush-influenced anthems, on the instantly kaput
Time Bomb label. They still wield some of the best-selling catalogue
entries in Sub Pop’s oeuvre -- and emo, the genre they inadvertently
helped create, isn’t going away anytime soon, meaning they’ll continue
to be praised as gods by many. Give them a real label push and a real
album and we could be looking at an underdog story bigger than LCD
Soundsystem and Brand New combined.
Bikini Kill
From a chart standpoint, this may
be the most ridiculous entry here; the greatest and most adored
woman-led punk band in history never scratched the Billboard 200 during
the ‘90s when they existed. And frontwoman-firebomb Kathleen Hanna
hasn’t made much of a sales splash with either her also-beloved
electropunk trio Le Tigre or her current band The Julie Ruin even with a
nine-year absence from recording due to a tragic bout with Lyme
disease.
But possibly more than anyone else on this list, the love
for her old band is so great, and a reunion so never-even-teased that
fans of a certain age would rush to (possible actual) record stores to
buy it – at least, if they knew it was coming. Hanna has admirably
refused to ride the coattails of the more famous artists around her –
her husband Adam Horovitz in Beastie Boys or Green Day, whose smash
second-wind American Idiot she guested on, or Nirvana’s epochal “Smells Like Teen Spirit” which she named.
All it would take is an ethical but industry-savvy liason, like say,
Sub Pop or Merge, to release a new album from one of the most
influential and revered icons of the post-punk era, and finally give her
the numbers to match the clippings and amount of fans with her lyrics
and slogans tattooed on themselves.
Rilo Kiley
Like
Kathleen Hanna, Jenny Lewis’ stardom is measured in love: People are
just crazy for her. Rilo Kiley was largely ignored by tastemakers during
their own time, but beloved by Saddle Creek’s collegiate cult, and
Lewis has since gone on to prove a formidable solo artist who
collaborates with Beck and Ryan Adams (on 2014’s glowing Stevie Nicks
fever-dream The Voyager), while her old band continues to
garner nostalgia without having quite blown up the way anyone who heard
Lewis sing ever thought she would. You can bet a new album would send
old fans flying -- not to mention Haim and Tegan and Sara fans who know
they’d fit right in with today’s alt-rock banner-wavers.
N.W.A
If
you think it’s a past-the-breaking-point stretch to consider the
progenitors of gangsta rap putting out a new album, don’t be so sure.
The feature biopic, Straight Outta Compton, was a box-office hit in 2015, and Dr. Dre’s companion album Compton was widely acclaimed as a healthy replacement for his aborted Detox
project. No Eazy-E? No problem; they’ve reunited and even toured before
with Snoop Dogg filling that slot, and if these are close associates of
the people behind 2Pac, the original hologram performer, do you really
think digitally bringing the far less revered Eazy along would be
considered more sacrilege?
A No. 1 would be absolutely in the bag
should N.W.A resurface, especially if they rebranded themselves as
political activists – what better time to revive the group that made law
enforcement fear the popular power of rappers forever? There’s already
been somewhat of a dry run with Body Count’s Bloodlust this year, the most widely noticed musical project Ice-T has done in forever, and the almost-out Prophets of Rage
album, by members of Public Enemy, Rage Against the Machine, and
Cypress Hill, who are doing better on the retro circuit by joining
forces. N.W.A are bigger than any of those guys and their influence has
only expanded with time; the biggest traditional rapper in the world,
Kendrick Lamar, is a vocal Comptonite.
The White Stripes
The White Stripes
As
with many of the people on this list, Jack White continues sell well on
the road and on the charts with myriad projects that ultimately no one
believes are superior to his legendary duo. The White Stripes closed up
shop ten years ago after scoring a No. 3 album (2005’s muted, oddball Get Behind Me Satan) and a No. 2 album (2007’s roaring, oddball Icky Thump)
respectively, and no truly agreed-upon guitar band has quite filled the
void since (The Black Keys? Paramore? Twenty One Pilots? Certainly no
one unanimous). With rock in decline, and Jack White still a
sharp-playing weirdo who treats the world as his personal toy factory,
the White Stripes who began as a Detroit lo-fi success story would
return today as Zeppelinesque titans. But Meg, never a fan of the
limelight, isn’t having it thus far.
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