"DAMN." and the Freakout Album.
There’s a storied history of artists creating what I am dubbing “freak out albums”; an album that exists as the oddity in their catalog, the album which splits their discography in those works before & after that record, that album that acts as a resultant of some huge emotional event in the artist’s life. In the case of Kid A , it was Thom Yorke undergoing a mental breakdown of sorts and the other band members experiencing burnout after a period of immense popularity leading to copycats and fear of an inability to satisfactorily follow-up OK Computer . For Yeezus , it was Kanye West on the precipice of domestic bliss, with a wife and a child on the way, as well as a violent reaction to the maximal tendencies and excess that had defined My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Watch the Throne. Even for records like Nirvana’s In Utero or Neil Diamond’s Trans or even when Bob Dylan went electric, this idea of a radical shift or destroying expectations permeates these works or mom