10 Artists That Changed Music Genres (And Everyone Hated It)

The year is 1980, and hardcore punk is about to come into its own. As the likes of Bad Brains and Black Flag start to make names for themselves in the underground scene, there's this group of kids from California known as Bad Religion, who set the world on fire with their debut How Could Hell Be Any Worse coming out of the now legendary Epitaph Records. These guys were still kids though, and they were convinced that this perfect fireball of aggression was all just a fluke.

Looking for a new sound, Greg Graffin eventually got ahold of a synthesizer and convinced his buddy Brett Guerwitz to make their next album a prog rock record, which led to the rest of the band quitting in protest. They weren't going to be deterred though, and Into the Unknown is the result of that morbid curiosity, bringing together the instrumentation of a band like Yes to the same kind of production that comes from a hardcore punk outfit.

You can almost make the claim that this album ended up selling negative numbers, not winning a lot of fans over and even causing a large chunk of their fanbase to abandon ship after hearing it. When the original band regrouped, they even poked fun at their little screwup with their next release Back to the Known. Once Suffer came out though, they wiped the taste of prog out of everyone's mouth. This was punk rock, and we didn't have time to screw around with the Genesis style music anymore.