The surprise album release – a few thoughts
If you have ever been on the Internet, you’d be hard pressed to forget the year of Beyoncé.
Back in 2013, Beyoncé released her fifth studio album, Beyoncé, with no prior promotion, singles, or marketing. The public went nuts as expected, and Beyoncé enjoyed unprecedented success, both critically and commercially, for an album with no prior promotion or even a radio single.
More recently, at the beginning of August, Michael Cera (of Superbad and Arrested Development fame) dropped a surprise indie album on Bandcamp titled true that. On Sept. 27, Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke released Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes for a mere $6 on BitTorrent.
There’s so much to be said about the logistics of keeping such projects under wraps, and the multitude of platforms in which they can be released, but for now I’ll stick to the obvious. Can this method work for all musicians, mainstream and underground?
Probably not. It’s clear enough that Knowles, Yorke, and Cera are household names but, for me, that’s only part of the equation. More importantly, one needs to consider, “How many times can this be done before the novelty wears off, regardless of mainstream success? What are these artists trying to say through this release platform?”
It seemed like it had burnt out before it even really started. Backtracking to February, Kid Cudi followed Beyoncé’s suit with the all but dreadfully boring Satellite Flight: The Journey to Mother Moon, to a lukewarm reception by the public and critics. The same thing happened with Skrillex’s Recess LP (incidentally, his first full-length record), and nobody seemed to care, which is all the more striking considering Skrillex’s mainstream success.
But I’ll focus on Yorke for now. A surprise release of Tomorrow’s Little Boxes is hardly unexpected, considering Yorke’s recent discourse on free music and P2P sharing. So, is the release method more interesting than the music itself? Choosing to release it on BitTorrent, while innovative and easy to use, certainly has a political dimension to it that is characteristic of Yorke’s devil-may-care attitude towards commercializing his music. He does, after all, renounce the radio success of “Creep” fairly consistently, and refuses to perform it to this day.
The same goes for Queen Bey. The feminist politics present on the record, while ill-informed at points, clearly resonated as loud and clear as her ballsiness for releasing such an album with zero prior exposure. So, does the success of the surprise album, like any other album, depend on what it has to say? Even what it has to say about its own release method?
Either way, it’s easy for Knowles and Yorke to want to release their music on the cheap, and through a low-key, publicity free method, when they’re far from starving over their work.