In music journalism, the debut album is a well-known and understood art. Many bands’ best-loved albums are their debut ones, like Franz Ferdinand or The Strokes, but many music journalists and artists look over the importance and quality of the sophomore album.

The trap of the debut album is the time an artist is able to work on it, essentially their whole lives until its release, while a sophomore album is a much more condensed time. The amount of time an artist has to work on a debut album means that the songs are either a bad representation of the artist’s future songwriting, or, that the wide array of songs are from so many different stages in the artist’s life that they are incohesive.

The sophomore album often doesn’t have this problem, it’s only con is that it almost always represents the success of the future of the artist. So I would say that often a Sophomore album is more indicative of an artist’s success than a debut.

The sophomore album also gives the artist a chance to grow and shape their image. Some bands know how they want to be perceived the minute they began, but many don’t. My favorite artist, Declan Mckenna’s first album is an album he wrote between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, with a large variety of sounds and themes. Meanwhile, his sophomore album is much more cohesive and musically complex, something that changed as he ages.

Some of the best albums ever have been sophomore albums; Bjork’s Post, The Libertines self-titles, What’s The Story (Morning Glory)? and more.