A surprise album or surprise release is an album or single with little or no prior announcement, marketing or promotion. [1] The strategy contrasts traditional album releases, which typically feature weeks or months of advertising in the form of singles, music videos, tour announcements and album pre-sales. Often, the release of a surprise album is the formal announcement of its release. This strategy developed in part due to the prevalence of album leaks on the Internet during the 2000s and became popular by the mid-2010s among high-profile recording acts.
English musician David Bowie's studio album Toy , intended for release in March 2001, was originally conceived with the intention of being recorded and released as quickly as possible, foregoing traditional promotional cycles in the process. While the album was ultimately shelved, not seeing an official release until 2021, the concept was regarded by analysts as an early precursor to the surprise album model. [2]
The English rock band Radiohead's 2007 studio album In Rainbows is often credited as the first surprise album. [3] [1] [4] [5] The release was announced on the band's blog ten days prior, which DIY magazine describes as "a pretty unexpected move" at the time. [1] Shortly after the release, Radiohead's bassist Colin Greenwood stated the band had several motivations behind the album's release format, including the increased popularity of the internet as a tool for discovering music, frustrations with the traditional release and promotion format, the freedom of not being signed to a record label at the time, a desire to do something special and unique, and an interest in broadcasting their music directly to listeners globally at the same time. [6] It also served as a countermeasure to Internet leaks of albums, which had become prevalent at the time. [1] In Rainbows is also credited for starting the pay-what-you-want model. [5]
After ending a tumultuous relationship with Interscope Records in 2007, Nine Inch Nails independently released Ghosts I–IV and The Slip in 2008. Both were released for free (with the option to purchase higher-quality digital or physical editions) and were released under a Creative Commons license to allow fans the ability to edit and remix the new music as they desired. [7] Nine Inch Nails manager Jim Guerinot said the idea to release the albums without prior announcement was to pre-empt a leak and control the marketing, stating: "Internet searches peak around the leak, not around the single or the album. By the time the album comes out, it's done." [8]
In 2011, American rappers Jay-Z and Kanye West advertised false release dates for their collaborative album Watch the Throne , in part an effort to pre-empt leaks. This strategy inspired the singer Frank Ocean to surprise-release his first album Channel Orange one week earlier than its publicized release date. [9]
Between 2011 and 2012, David Bowie recorded The Next Day in complete secrecy, [10] requiring personnel involved to sign non-disclosure agreements. [11] At the time, the public was convinced that Bowie had effectively retired. [12] On January 8, 2013, his 66th birthday, the music video for "Where Are We Now?" was uploaded to YouTube in the early hours of the morning, with his website announcing that listeners could buy the single on iTunes and pre-order The Next Day. [13] Within a couple of hours, Bowie made headlines around the world. [14] The single peaked at number six on the UK Singles Chart, becoming Bowie's highest-charting single since 1985's "Absolute Beginners". [15] Upon release in March 2013, The Next Day debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart and number two on the US Billboard 200. [16] [17]
Beyoncé is also credited with the further popularization of the surprise release strategy. Following the leak of her previous album 4 one month before its scheduled release date, Beyoncé began working on her next album in secrecy to prevent a repeat. She shared details of the album only with a small circle of people and often shifted the release date, which was only finalized a week before its release. The album was kept a complete secret from the general public until the moment it was released. [18] Eponymously titled Beyoncé , the album was uploaded exclusively to the iTunes Store on December 13, 2013, just after midnight in the United States and became the fastest-selling album in history of the iTunes Store within three days of its release. [19] The commercial success of the album was a factor in shifting the global release date for all albums to Friday. [20] Beyoncé later explained that her intent was to reinstate the idea of an album release as a significant, exciting event that had lost meaning in the face of hype created around singles. [21] Harley Brown of Vulture wrote, "Ever since Beyoncé's self-titled visual album appeared like a Christmas miracle on the iTunes store at midnight on a Thursday in December of 2013, the rules for how to release a record were rewritten literally overnight." [22] According to Vulture writer Lindsey Zoladz, the release was made possible by, "presumably, an entire rain forest's worth of nondisclosure agreements". [23] The singer would also adapt the release format for her follow-up album Lemonade in 2016. Jay-Z surprise released his 2017 album 4:44 , and the following year the couple surprise released the collaborative album Everything Is Love as The Carters. [1]
By the mid-2010s, the music industry had entered what Zoladz called the "surprise-album era". While Beyoncé's name became synonymous with surprise albums, subsequent acts used the strategy in different ways. For instance, certain artists unexpectedly released an album, or a selection of tracks, that had been announced at an earlier date in an effort to outpace Internet leaks, as in 2015 with Björk's Vulnicura , Madonna's Rebel Heart , and Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly . [23]
Some surprise albums created controversy. In 2014, Irish rock band U2 partnered with Apple Inc. to release their thirteenth studio album Songs of Innocence through the iTunes Store at no cost to half a billion people. The album was automatically added to users' music libraries in iTunes, which for those with automatic downloads enabled, resulted in an unprompted download of the album to their electronic devices. Many users did not want the album and several months after the release were frustrated that they could not delete the album from their devices. [1] [24] David Sackllah of Consequence of Sound noted that "U2 and Apple deserve credit for thinking ambitiously, but they overestimated the band's relevance with fans, and many felt like the automatic download constituted an invasion of privacy." [5]
In 2016, American R&B singer Frank Ocean surprised released his visual album Endless , to complete his contract with Def Jam, and quickly followed up with Blonde the next day independently, both as Apple Music exclusives. The act of Frank Ocean leaving Def Jam called into question surprise albums and exclusive digital releases. An anonymous Def Jam employee said to Buzzfeed at the time, "Our view is that giving exclusives to individual streaming platforms for long periods of time is not good for the artist, it's not good for the fans, and it limits the commercial opportunity for everybody involved." [25] By 2019, Vulture and The Music Network published editorial articles questioning if the surprise album release format had peaked in popularity and effectiveness. [4] [22]
In 2018, American rapper Eminem released his tenth studio album Kamikaze without any promotion or pre-announcement following the polarizing reaction of his previous 2017 album Revival , making it his second full-length studio album in 8 months. In a four-part video interview series with Sway Calloway, he laid out the reason for releasing the album this way. "When you go into an album, you can go into anything with the mindset of, 'This is gonna suck.' I feel like giving them no warning was the best thing to do. When the Revival track list came down the pipe, it was like overwhelmingly, 'This shit is going to be trash.' Nobody really wanted to be wrong about it. I'm not saying everybody, but a lot of people had already formed their opinion." [26] Eminem's next studio album in 2020, Music to Be Murdered By (and the Side B – Deluxe Edition) was another surprise release. In an interview on his radio channel Shade 45, he explained the tendency of dropping surprise albums: "I feel like when an album is coming out, if I give people notice. They start seeing the track list and they know it's coming, I feel like, my best shot to avoid it is just to drop it, instead of people thinking to themselves like 'if he got this person on the album, I ain't f**king with it.' It gives everybody too much time to think about it and their expectations of what they think it should be, I will never meet that. So this is kind of theory I have based ever since Revival." [27]
In 2020, American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift's eighth studio album, Folklore, was released with less than 24 hours' notice to much surprise among listeners and the music industry. [28] The album was created in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, under total secrecy; Republic Records, Swift's record label, were informed about the project only a few hours before its launch. [29] According to Elias Leight of Rolling Stone , while Swift had preferred traditional album-release cycles and was "a rare holdout" among major recording artists, Folklore's surprise release acknowledged that "the new class of winners release music steadily and adapt quickly to capitalize on sudden flashpoints, rather than trying to force those flashpoints to happen on any sort of regular, preordained schedule. If music industry success used to be all about muscle, now it's more about speed." [30] Five months later, Swift surprise-released her ninth studio album, Evermore , which she dubbed as Folklore's "sister" record. [31] Vulture stated that the news of another surprise album from Swift "came as a major shock", as she has been "the industry's most prominent loyalist to the pop-album rollout", who turns her carefully planned releases into "an art of their own". [32] In 2022, hours after the release of her tenth studio album, Midnights, Swift surprise-released seven additional songs written for but not included in the original 13-song tracklist. [33] [34]
Rachel Finn of DIY said that while surprise albums were becoming too common to be truly surprising, "it gives artists breathing space to really make an impact and retain control over the way their music is released, pre-empting album leaks and taking their album out of the pre-album press cycle to let the music speak for itself." [1] Entrepreneur and freelance writer Cortney Harding wrote in a Medium article that while surprise albums give artists more flexibility, the strategy can usually only pay off for well-known musicians and can be problematic when the album is exclusive to a specific streaming service. [35] David Sackllah of Consequence of Sound noted that while many major artists had attempted a surprise release, few had matched or surpassed the level of excitement of In Rainbows. [5] Writing for The Ringer, Lindsay Zoladz expressed criticism toward overuse of the term that began to dilute its meaning as music journalists were using "surprise album" to describe albums that were previously announced. Zoladz stated:
"'Surprise album' has become such a ubiquitous term that its meaning becomes more vague with each passing tweet. (Last month the Chicago Tribune even used it to describe Drake's Views , an album that not only had a previously announced release date, but which Drake himself had been teasing for the better part of two years.) But even when the phrase is used more precisely, it's becoming a bit hollow; we're living through a deluge of albums — even something as long promised as Rihanna's Anti — that lay claim to that trendy term 'surprise,' but have, like Lemonade, given us a lot of hints that they were coming." [36]
Holly Brook Hafermann, known professionally as Skylar Grey, is an American singer, songwriter, and record producer. In 2004, at the age of 17, Grey signed a publishing deal with Universal Music Publishing Group and a recording contract with Linkin Park's Machine Shop Recordings under the name Holly Brook. Her debut studio album, Like Blood Like Honey (2006), served as her only release with the label.
Justin DeYarmond Edison Vernon is an American singer, songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist. He is best-known as the primary songwriter and frontman of indie folk band Bon Iver. He is also a member of the bands Volcano Choir, Big Red Machine, the Shouting Matches, and Gayngs, and was previously a member of the now-defunct band DeYarmond Edison. Known for his distinct falsetto voice, Vernon has received widespread acclaim for his work, predominantly with Bon Iver.
Beyoncé is the fifth studio album by American singer Beyoncé. It was released in the early hours of December 13, 2013, through Parkwood Entertainment and Columbia Records as a complete surprise. Developed as a visual album, every song is accompanied by a non-linear short film that illustrates the musical concepts. Beyoncé's desire to assert her full artistic freedom served as inspiration for the album's dark, personal subject matter, which incorporated feminist themes of sex, monogamy, beauty standards, relationship problems and criticism of capitalism.
The album era was a period in English-language popular music from the mid-1960s to the mid-2000s in which the album was the dominant form of recorded music expression and consumption. It was primarily driven by three successive music recording formats: the 33⅓ rpm long-playing record (LP), the cassette tape, and the compact disc (CD). Rock musicians from the US and the UK were often at the forefront of the era, which is sometimes called the album-rock era in reference to their sphere of influence and activity. The term "album era" is also used to refer to the marketing and aesthetic period surrounding a recording artist's album release.
"Ring Off" is a song recorded by American singer Beyoncé, taken from the reissue of her fifth studio album Beyoncé (2013), subtitled Platinum Edition (2014). The song was released on November 28, 2014, to contemporary hit radio in Italy and urban adult contemporary in the United States as the second single from the reissue. A midtempo reggae-tinged ballad which is built around a slight dancehall rhythm and dubstep-influenced beats, "Ring Off" addresses the end of a marriage between Beyoncé's parents. It was written in a form of open letter of encouragement for her mother Tina Knowles.
Folklore is the eighth studio album by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. It was a surprise album, released on July 24, 2020, via Republic Records. Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, Swift canceled the concert tour for her seventh studio album Lover (2019). She conceived Folklore during quarantine as "a collection of songs and stories that flowed like a stream of consciousness", working with producers Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff virtually; Dessner and Antonoff operated from recording studios in the Hudson Valley and New York City, respectively, while Swift recorded her vocals in a home studio at her Los Angeles residence.
"Cardigan" is a song by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift and the lead single from her eighth studio album, Folklore (2020). Republic Records released the song on July 27, 2020. Written by Swift and its producer, Aaron Dessner, "Cardigan" is a folk, soft rock, and indie rock ballad, with a stripped-down arrangement of a piano, drums, and violins.
"Peace" is a song by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift from her eighth studio album, Folklore (2020). Swift wrote the song with its producer, Aaron Dessner. According to Swift, "Peace" is her most personal song on Folklore. It has a minimal composition of a soft piano and harmonized guitars over an electric pulse, combining elements of R&B, funk, and jazz. In the lyrics, Swift's character pledges her commitment to a lover while acknowledging the downsides she might bring to their relationship.
"Betty" is a song by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift from her eighth studio album, Folklore (2020). It was written by Swift and Joe Alwyn, and the former produced the track with Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff. MCA Nashville and Republic Records released the song to US country radio on August 17, 2020. "Betty" is an Americana-inspired song combining country, folk rock, and guitar pop. Its production consists of a harmonica, a pedal steel, guitars, and a key change after the bridge.
"Epiphany" is a song by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift from her eighth studio album, Folklore (2020). Written by Swift and its producer Aaron Dessner over an ambient-chamber pop composition consisting of a slow piano line, cinematic strings and howling brass.
"August" is a song by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift from her eighth studio album, Folklore (2020). Swift wrote and produced "August" with Jack Antonoff; Joe Alwyn was credited as a co-producer. A dream pop and guitar pop ballad, "August" features elements of soft rock in its guitars, strings, and vocal reverberation. In the lyrics, an unnamed female narrator expresses her sorrow over James, a 17-year-old boy who reconciles with Betty after a fleeting summer romance with her. She is a character involved in a love triangle depicted in three Folklore tracks, the other two being "Cardigan" and "Betty".
"Exile" is a song by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift featuring the American band Bon Iver. It is from Swift's eighth studio album, Folklore (2020). "Exile" was written by Swift, Joe Alwyn, and Bon Iver's frontman Justin Vernon, with production by Aaron Dessner and Alwyn. Republic Records released the song to US alternative radio on August 3, 2020.
"The Last Great American Dynasty" is a song by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift from her eighth studio album, Folklore (2020). The life of the American socialite Rebekah Harkness, who once lived in Swift's Rhode Island mansion, inspired her to write the song.
"Mad Woman" is a song by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift from her eighth studio album, Folklore (2020). The song was written by Swift and its producer, Aaron Dessner. "Mad Woman" is a ballad that confronts gaslighting and the sexist taboo regarding women's anger.
"The Lakes" is a song by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, taken from the deluxe edition of her eighth studio album, Folklore (2020). Written and produced by Swift and Jack Antonoff, "The Lakes" is a midtempo indie ballad, set to acoustic guitar and strings, with themes of introspection and escapism that reflect on Swift's semi-retirement in Windermere, the largest natural lake in England.
"The 1" is a song by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift from her eighth studio album, Folklore (2020). Republic Records released the track for download on October 9, 2020, in Germany. Swift wrote "The 1" with its producer, Aaron Dessner. A folk and soft rock tune with elements of indie folk, it has a slow-dancing composition consisting of piano and percussion. In the lyrics, the narrator positively introspects a failed romance, detailing the time when she found "the one" who never came to be.
Evermore is the ninth studio album by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift. It was a surprise album released on December 11, 2020, via Republic Records, less than five months after her previous studio album Folklore. Evermore was a spontaneous product of Swift's extended collaboration with her Folklore collaborator Aaron Dessner, mainly recorded at his Long Pond Studio in the Hudson Valley.
"No Body, No Crime" is a song by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, featuring the American band Haim, from her ninth studio album, Evermore (2020). She wrote the track as a result of her fixation with crime documentaries and podcasts, and co-produced it with Aaron Dessner. A tune featuring styles of country, country rock, and Americana, "No Body, No Crime" is a murder ballad about the murder of a woman named Este, narrated by her friend who avenges her. Republic Records in partnership with MCA Nashville sent the song to US country radio on January 11, 2021, as a single from Evermore.
"Long Story Short" is a song by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift from her ninth studio album, Evermore (2020). She wrote the song with its producer, Aaron Dessner. "Long Story Short" is an upbeat song that consists of dynamic programmed and live drums, synths, strings, and guitars; music critics characterize the genre as synth-pop, electropop, folk-pop, and indie rock. The lyrics see Swift reminiscing about a dark part of her past and her contentment with a current state of mind.
"This Is Me Trying" is a song by the American singer-songwriter Taylor Swift from her eighth studio album, Folklore (2020). It was written and produced by Swift and Jack Antonoff, and Joe Alwyn was credited as co-producer. The track is an orchestral pop and dream pop tune with a production featuring an organ, slow-paced beats, and horns. "This Is Me Trying" was inspired by Swift's state of mind during 2016 and 2017, when she said she was at her lowest. The narrator of "This Is Me Trying" proclaims themselves as an unwanted person who struggles with existentialism and alcoholism.