While part of me would love to defend bands by saying that touring (and merch is how a band makes the most money, recording and putting out an album more often really doesn’t disrupt that aside from having to learn some new songs.
Honestly, what you said here exactly describes how I feel about Mortal Kombat. Deadly Alliance, the behemoth known as Deception, and Armageddon, which has every main MK character people asked for except Tremor and like fucking Hornbuckle or some shit, all came out two years apart. MK9 came out in 2011 (Ngl, shit story), MKX came out in 2015, and while it had issues, it was actually surprisingly fine story and character-wise. MK11 was 2019 and is the Battles of Mortal Kombat. MK1 came out in 2023, and was almost great had WB not insisted on stupid fucking multiverse shit God knows how many years after Endgame. If you’re going to do time shit or multiverse shit, at the very least do it well.
I guess it wouldn’t be so horrible if they didn’t treat the characters like shit, remove all the wacky side modes like Chess Kombat, fucking Mario Kart, and anything not main story, arcade mode, and versus, not have anything that showed the team having fun (Cooking With Scorpion is the best thing ever), have stupid timeline and multiverse shit, introduce Greek mythology in a series entrenched in eastern culture, have grandstanding real world ethical bullshit about this and that in a game whose main gimmick revolves around who can most brutally murder a man, or be $130 for the full game and DLC before microtransactions.
I guess to loop it back to what you said, I miss when big devs and bands made their work out of passion and to make something beautiful. It’s genuinely incredible how I’m just a year, In Flames went from Colony to Clayman, which has the most amount of iconic songs that resonate with the old and new fans alike— Incredible riffs like Pinball Map and the title track, beautiful melodies like Satellites and Astronauts and Suburban Me, a kickass opener in Bullet Ride, and OFTW simply being OFTW. We can’t get anything now that isn’t overproduced to hell and back and isn’t roofed up with Benson autotune.
Meanwhile, Disarmonia Mundi fans have been waiting nine years for a new album, with four of those being spent on Ettore producing and mixing it, only for the production and mixing to ruin the actually really good music. Although it’s not metal, RARE by Hundredth still stings because it’s one of my favorite albums, and the one album and countless singles that have come out afterwards have all been this nu wave synth stuff that’s exactly like the vocalist’s side project— What is the point of keeping your bandmates around if what you’re going to make afterwards just doesn’t include them?
I could very easily be fine with the wait if what we’d end up getting afterwards lived up to what we loved before— Or hell, if there were lineup changes and/or a bunch of shit behind the scenes going on. That much is understandable. I won’t even fault In Flames for taking four years after ITM because if Clayman 2020 is what we got during the pandemic, then I don’t think I’d want their pandemic music. I’m moreso frustrated with them because Foregone is the In Flames album we got after ITM. If it was any other metalcore band, I’d probably find Foregone to be as fine as it is without being insulted, but again, everything I said about Clayman— And I’m pretty sure that album just barely makes or just barely doesn’t make my top 5. I want the melodies back, man.
