In a certain, ever-expanding corner of the galaxy, May 4 marks Star Wars Day. But here at The A.V. Club, we’re spending this weekend diving into the fourth entries that reset franchises, broke a pop culture curse, or wrapped things up in a gratifying manner. Read on, and May The Fourth Installment Be With You.
Beware the fourth album curse. While it’s unclear exactly where the term originated, it’s gotten its tendrils into the minds of both artists and critics alike. (The earliest use that we could find was this Pulse Music Board thread from 2011. If that is indeed the origin, congrats to Beyoncé’s 4 for breaking free.) The concept is simple: whether it’s due to declining sales, waning interest, or a decrease in creativity, artists tend to hit a rough patch around their fourth LP. To name examples would require an entire inventory of its own. But a curse isn’t a curse if it can’t be broken. The following fourth albums aren’t just non-flops—they all represent career highs where artists either perfected their prior sound or made canny pivots into something that created a little magic of its own. Here are 10 albums that beat the fourth album curse, listed in chronological order.
Led Zeppelin, Untitled (1971)
Technically, this album doesn’t have a name, but make no mistake: We’re talking about Led Zeppelin IV. After the acoustic-infused Led Zeppelin III was received with confusion and derision by critics, the band retreated from the spotlight, refusing interviews and live performances. They emerged just over a year later with a brand-new album produced by guitarist Jimmy Page and kept up the air of mystique by letting the music speak for itself. The album included no written material, no press statements, not even a name. No words; just music. The response, this time, was thunderous. Led Zeppelin IV is widely considered one of the greatest rock albums of all time and a creative high point for the band; it might even be Led Zeppelin’s best album. More than fifty years after its release, its legacy, beyond its now-legendary tracks, is one of uncompromising artistic vision. It’s hard to imagine a band today refusing to release a song so immediately culturally significant as “Stairway To Heaven” as a single, but that’s exactly what Led Zeppelin did: Despite “Stairway to Heaven” getting massive radio play, the only singles from the album are “Black Dog” and “Rock And Roll.” Led Zeppelin IV is a testament to what happens when artists are given the latitude to create art without restrictions. [Jen Lennon]
Queen, A Night At The Opera (1975)
Yes, A Night At The Opera is the album with “Bohemian Rhapsody” on it, and it may always be remembered as such by casual Queen observers. But devotées will know that the entire album is incredibly solid, blending genres with a strong sense of play and humor. The grandiose glam rock of a track like “I’m In Love With My Car” is sandwiched between the almost-ragtime “Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon” and the malt shop romance of “You’re My Best Friend.” The band does go full ragtime later with “Seaside Rendezvous,” a track that practically begs for a Shirley Temple routine to accompany it on the big screen. Today, Queen’s theatricality is often the subject of remembrance, but listening to A Night At The Opera, it’s the musicality that really stands out. The harmonies of the background vocals on “’39” are stunning, and they’re hardly a side dish for the folk-rock style tune. By their fourth album, Queen were at the top of their game, and they knew it. [Drew Gillis]
Bruce Springsteen, Darkness On The Edge Of Town (1978)
Maybe it wasn’t the same level of hit that Born To Run was, but Bruce Springsteen’s fourth album Darkness On The Edge Of Town still reached a perfectly respectable number five on the Billboard charts. Moreover, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s recognized as not only one of Springsteen’s best albums but also one of the great rock records of the 20th century. The sound was harder and the lyrics were darker than the “beach bar” vibes the E Street Band had previously performed, setting the stage for Springsteen’s later work. Far from cursed, it’s a landmark evolution in the artist’s career. But of course it’s a lot easier to see that now than it was then—album opener “Badlands” may not have cracked the Top 40 in 1978, but it’s an absolute blockbuster that’s still delighting arenas almost 50 years later. [Mary Kate Carr]
Jawbreaker, Dear You (1995)
When Dear You was first released, it was overshadowed by something that, at the time, was considered an unforgivable betrayal: Jawbreaker had signed to a major label. The band was labeled a sell-out, and the album was dismissed as slick, trend-chasing commercialism. Jawbreaker broke up shortly thereafter. In the years that followed, though, the album was reappraised, driven by new generations of fans discovering the band for the first time and realizing, with the clarity afforded by distance and time, that not only does Dear You not suck, it’s actually the band’s crowning achievement. Fully recovered from vocal surgery that occurred before the band recorded their third album, 24 Hour Revenge Therapy (but which was erroneously reported at the time as having happened between that album and Dear You), singer and guitarist Blake Schwarzenbach embraced a smoother, less aggressive delivery that allowed his lyrics and the band’s musicianship to take center stage. Tracks like “Accident Prone” and “Sluttering (May 4th)” show a band at the height of their creative abilities. It was a hell of a note to go out on, even if the album was never intended to be Jawbreaker’s swan song. [Jen Lennon]
Radiohead, Kid A (2000)
Radiohead had already landed among the stars with OK Computer, but it was Kid A that blasted them past the moon and into some extraterrestrial part of the cosmos. Kid A didn’t just live up to the rest of Radiohead’s discography; it’s “an album which completely obliterates how albums, and Radiohead themselves, will be considered,” as Brent DiCrescenzo wrote in his historic 10.0 review for Pitchfork. That review was so seismic that it got its own retrospective 20 years later from Billboard, by the way; such is the pole-shifting power of Kid A. The album turns 25 this year, but it still sounds as if it was beamed to Earth by some future species, with us mere humans as its benefactors. There’s a reason an “Everything In Its Right Place” needle drop became such a status symbol for prestige sci-fi shows. And that’s just the first song! Kid A also gave us an unexpected barn burner in “The National Anthem,” the eternal ache of “How To Disappear Completely,” and the astoundingly eerie “Idioteque,” which may as well have been telegraphed from a bunker at the end of the world. If there was ever a curse upon Kid A, Thom Yorke and co. were able to harness its power and feed it right back into the mics a dozen times over. [Emma Keates]
The National, Boxer (2007)
Unlike some other artists on this list, The National didn’t start out with a bang. Yes, Alligator, the band’s third LP, will forever be a beloved record for many (this writer included), but it was on Boxer that The National really started sounding like The National. The 2007 album saw the band hone both their at-home production (Aaron Dessner said a good deal of it was recorded in his Brooklyn attic) and frontman Matt Berninger’s bizarre, evocative poetry to create a restrained portrait of mid-aughts melancholia that feels just as piercing and authentic today as it did nearly two decades ago. Boxer announces itself right out of the gate with “Fake Empire” (still a high point in the band’s catalog) and doesn’t let up from there. “Mistaken For Strangers,” which would later give its name to an excellent documentary directed by Berninger’s brother, Tom, is an uneasy meditation on “another un-innocent, elegant fall / into the un-magnificent lives of adults,” and “Squalor Victoria,” a tug-of-war within Berninger’s psyche wherein he refers to himself as a “middlebrow fuck-up” expands on that theme. The album also features an all-timer run with “Slow Show,” “Apartment Story,” “Start A War,” and “Guest Room,” all of which feature some career-high writing about loves won and lost from Berninger. The National might get mistaken for strangers by their own friends, but Boxer will be forever enshrined on multiple “Best Of The Decade” lists. [Emma Keates]
Beyoncé, 4 (2011)
By commercial metrics, 4 was a bit of a letdown for Beyoncé, if only because she had been the most consistent superstar of the 2000s. But 4 was an artistic turning point, and the album that set her up for the triumph she would experience in the 2010s. After parting ways with her father as her manager, Bey set out to craft the kinds of songs that she could continue to perform for the rest of her career. Some of these work better than others—the Diane Warren-penned “I Was Here” sounds too melodramatic and bombastic beside Frank Ocean’s work with “I Miss You”—but the highs here are practically untouchable. “Love On Top” taps into some Whitney Houston-esque soul to show off Beyoncé’s vocal chops as well as anything possibly could, and the ecstatic “Countdown” is, for this writer’s money, one of the best pop songs of the new millennium, period. By retreating from the pure spectacle of her previous works to focus on songwriting and longevity, Beyoncé laid the groundwork for the respect that would come in the following decade. [Drew Gillis]
Kendrick Lamar, DAMN. (2017)
DAMN. wasn’t just a high point in Kendrick Lamar’s career; it was a high point for hip-hop music, period. The conversation didn’t start with the Pulitzer win, although that did launch the album into an echelon no artist outside the the jazz or classical genre had ever previously achieved. By the time DAMN. won the award, it already had a Grammy for Best Rap Album and the number one Billboard 200 chart position to its name. More importantly, it had Lamar’s fans on its side. Section.80, Good Kid, M.A.A.D City, and To Pimp A Butterfly were highly respected albums in their own right, but DAMN. amplified Lamar’s already significant story telling talent while also proving he could still deliver bombastic, radio-ready hits like “HUMBLE.” and “DNA.” after the denser, more experimental fare of To Pimp A Butterfly. DAMN. could have only come from someone as sharp and earnest as Lamar—it’s as much a wide-ranging, urgently rendered treatise on the state of the country at a very tense time as it is a deeply personal exploration of Lamar’s own history and place within that larger story. Its legacy hasn’t dimmed a bit in the years since. It topped our own Best Albums list in 2017 and found a place on Rolling Stone‘s list of “The 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time” (which also features a few other records on this list) a few years later. [Emma Keates]
Ariana Grande, Sweetener (2018)
Most of the so-called “ex-acts” (as in “ex-Disney Channel/Nickelodeon”) aren’t known for releasing album-length statements so much as they’re known for constant catchy singles. Ariana Grande began her pop career in a similar way, spending much of the 2010s crafting some bulletproof Top 40 hits over the course of three albums that sort of bled together. It was a pleasant subversion then in 2018 when she released Sweetener, the album that arguably put her on the map as not just a singer, but a musical artist with a vision and at least a hand in writing her own music. Working largely with Pharrell Williams, Grande sidelined the EDM sound of the era and fully leaned into the R&B she had always flirted with. Though still a mainstream pop record, Sweetener also let Grande be pretty weird. (See: the screaming groundhogs inserted into the “God Is A Woman” video, or the sample of an irate citizen at a town hall looped into “The Light Is Coming.”) Many (if not most) pop careers are short and disposable by design, but with her fourth album, Ariana Grande proved that she was here to stay. [Drew Gillis]
Correction: An earlier version of this article included Ramones’ End Of The Century, the band’s fifth album. Ramones’ fourth album is Road To Ruin, which is also very good. The article has been updated to remove the album. We regret the error.
