All musical artists want an audience for their music, but audiences have expectations.

Audience expectations can severely limit the creativity of pop artists who find themselves unable to embrace new sounds out of fear that their old fans will react unfavorably to the shift. Other bands and artists will take the opposite approach by noticeably retooling their sound to coincide with whatever modern audiences want at the time. Then finally, there are those artists who all but ignore the wishes of their most vocal listeners and instead just make whatever music they want to, changing genres at the drop of a hat — and often finding unexpected success as a result.

Whether they’re chasing their muse or simply chasing a No. 1 hit, these 7 artists changed their sound drastically at least once throughout their careers.

Neil Young

Neil Young has never really stopped changing genres and venturing into new musical territories throughout his 56-year-long career in music. In between solo albums and outings with backing band Crazy Horse, most of Young’s catalog vacillates between acoustic folk or country rock and amplified hard rock.

But Young’s biggest stylistic gamble came in the ‘80s, when he released Trans as his first album with new label Geffen Records. The album is a striking blend of electronic and analog music featuring more synth than guitar and masking Young’s distinct warbly vocal style with a vocoder.

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Label head David Geffen was furious with the release for its lack of appeal, so when Young followed up the album with Everybody’s Rockin’, an abbreviated collection of rockabilly covers, Geffen sued him for making music “unrepresentative of himself.”

Chromatics

Adam Miller began Chromatics as a solo project in 2001, recording lo-fi krautrock-influenced post-punk using a four-track. The band quickly grew to a four-piece with members being consistently shuffled in and out for years, leaving Miller as the only consistent member.

Their first two LPs mined the same vein of arty garage punk before drummer Ron Avila left and was replaced in live performances by a drum machine. The drum machine was just the beginning of a seismic shift in Chromatics’ sound from noisy art punk to dreamy synth-pop, with influence pulled from Italo disco. The sound shift on their third album Night Drive was by most all account a big success, with the album and its successor Kill for Love becoming critical favorites.

The Replacements

The Replacements started as one of the most unhinged acts in ‘80s hardcore punk, writing songs that chugged along at breakneck speed with singer Paul Westerberg howling humorously self-deprecating and irreverent lyrics over all the guitar distortion. They gained a reputation for onstage drunkenness that carried over to the later days of their career, when Westerberg’s irreverence turned to raw-throated emotional sincerity.

Starting with 1983’s Let It Be, the band more or less discarded the punk energy and adolescent humor of their early efforts (“Gary’s Got a Boner” notwithstanding) and embraced more traditional midtempo melodicism, losing one of their founding members Bob Stinson as a result. By the end of their career, the band was essentially a Westerberg solo project, focusing on openhearted power-pop over fuzzed-out punk rock.

Radiohead

Few expected Radiohead to last long after the success of their breakthrough single “Creep,” in part because the song came from a debut album (Pablo Honey) that was nearly indistinguishable from a hundred-other British alternative rock records at the time.

Determined to move past their early status as one-hit wonders, the band found more intelligent, ambitious avenues in alternative rock on their next two albums, The Bends and OK Computer. Their next album was 2000’s moody Kid A, wherein the members abandoned their guitar-based approach for an electronica album that had more in common with Kraftwerk and avant-garde jazz than it did with their earlier LPs. Their albums since have skillfully blended standard rock arrangement with orchestral flourishes and electronica to different degrees.

The Clash

The Clash is often regarded as the British punk band, even though only their first, self-titled record is truly punk. On subsequent albums like Sandinista! and London Calling, their sound became defined by more standard midtempo rock, as well as frequent forays into whatever diverse genres caught their interest, including reggae, ska, funk, rockabilly and even hip-hop.

Their discography isn’t defined so much by any one sound, but rather by the band’s anti-authoritarian, far left outlook. So, even as the band members became more interested in reggae and funk than Ramones-esque three-chord punk, the songs still sounded like The Clash. Their willingness to bring punk attitude to disparate genres has been a major influence on essentially all alternative rock bands since.

Sugar Ray

Sugar Ray existed as a hardcore funk metal band for nearly a decade before releasing the catchy soft-rocker hit “Fly,” recorded with reggae artist Super Cat. The song sold well enough to go double-platinum, despite sounding almost nothing like the rest of the band’s other, more aggressive material.

Like Radiohead, the band was aware of its status as a potential one-hit wonder and thus decided to embrace the new sound on 14:59. The album went triple platinum, and Sugar Ray never looked back to its nu-metal roots.

Flaming Lips

The Flaming Lips have always been thoroughly indebted to ‘60s psychedelia and drug culture, but it wasn’t until the 1999 release of The Soft Bulletin that they became the lushly-orchestrated critical darlings they are today.

They formed in 1983 and released several albums of psychedelic pop and noise rock, often featuring goofy overlong song titles like “Talkin’ ‘Bout the Smiling Deathporn Immortality Blues,” first dipping their toes into the world of layered studio production on their major label debut Hit to Death in the Future Head. Their first mainstream exposure came from the catchy 1993 novelty hit “She Don’t Use Jelly,” but The Soft Bulletin finally turned them into an enduring act, thanks to their Pet Sounds-esque mastery of layered studio manipulation instead of their earlier experiments with fuzzy guitar distortion.

Rather than settle into a groove, however, The Flaming Lips have continued to subvert expectations with an album of fuzzy psych jams (Embryonic), another of moody ambient noise (The Terror), a couple track-for-track tributes to classic LPs (With a Little Help from My Fwends) and a slew of other material released in unconventional ways, like a flash drive of new material encased inside a giant gummy skull.