10 Legendary Rock Bands With Sophomore Slump Albums

When the Clash released their debut album, they seemed like they were ready for war. Although they were far from the first band to claim the punk rock tag, they always felt a lot more visceral than their counterparts, writing songs that were a lot more in tune with what was going on in the world at large. Once you try to do that all over again though, things can get a little monotonous really fast.

Compared to some of the less celebrated albums of the punk genre though, Give Em Enough Rope is far from the worst thing in the world. You do have a golden single on here with Safe European Home, and even the commentary from Joe Strummer is still here in spades on All The Young Punks. When you look at the album as a whole though, it's easy to see why this didn't exactly click with fans, leaning a bit too hard into the political talk like English Civil War.

Social commentary has always been par for the course in the Clash's music, but this is where that started to have a few diminishing returns, especially when you have Mick Jones' songs pushed to the background some of the time. Seeing how they drastically changed up their sound on the next album London Calling, it looks like the Clash knew that they needed to go beyond punk altogether if they wanted to speak to the masses.