10 entire albums that copied another band (2024)

The best artists in the world are known to be master chameleons when it comes to their work. Whether it’s someone trying to take over a certain style of music or just turning in a song in tribute to their favourite act, you can find examples all across rock history of people giving a loving nod to those who helped them pick up a guitar in the first place. It’s one thing to do that with an album, but these records proved that artists like Green Day did that a little bit too well.

Across every one of these albums, every musician was looking to make a labour of love for a particular group. Whether or not they even wanted to take their style directly, the shadow of a certain musician usually looms large over each track, as if they were trying to pay homage to them or make the record that they never got the chance to create.

Does that mean all of them should be applauded for their efforts? Well, that’s in the ear of the beholder. As much as some of the musicians tended to make songs that felt like a proper tribute to the greatest, there are just as many who see albums as an excuse to do karaoke with original songs and end up sounding like a husk of what their inspiration once was.

That shouldn’t tarnish the image of either band in the process, either. Regardless of what they were trying to do, each project at least shows a glimpse into where their head was when they first laid these songs on tape. This might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the group’s name, but it’s still one of the more adventurous pieces in their catalogue.

10 albums that copied another band:

10. Tomorrow – SR-71

Towards the end of grunge, it looked like pop-punk was going to lead fans into the next generation. So what if people only had to complain about their problems? Pearl Jam may have been serious, but Green Day had songs that made it look cool to be a bit of a misfit. SR-71 may have tried their hand at making something with that aggro spirit in the 2000s, but the minute that nu-metal kicked in, these one-hit wonders rebranded in the weirdest way possible.

Considering they were the guys known most for the saccharine classic ‘Right Now’, seeing them go from that to loud guitars and melodically harsh vocals made it crystal clear. This is the result of people who listened to Linkin Park once and realised that they wanted that disaffected angst money real quick.

The band even seemed to be in on the joke a little bit, considering their next album was called Here We Go Again and saw them going back to the same pop-punk sounds that they were known for. Some artists have the foresight to know when they messed up but rarely has a group ever managed to catch wind of their screwup, immediately regret it, and put out a new album apologising for their sins.

9. A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships – The 1975

For everything that has been said about The 1975, no one can say it hasn’t been interesting. For every time Matt Healy decided to stick his foot in his mouth by saying something insulting, stupid, or both, their records have always felt like events every time they do another rollout. While it’s already confusing for a band named after one year in the 1970s to crib styles from the 1980s, their third outing was their first attempt at riding on the coattails of Thom Yorke.

Even though there was a brief period in the early 2000s where everyone was taking a cue from Radiohead, hearing that nostalgia come back 20 years after the fact is almost surreal. From skin to core, this feels like the British rockers trying to make their own pop-flavoured version of an album like OK Computer, down to talking about the dangers of technology and having an interlude bit in the middle featuring a Speak and Spell style robotic voice reading something.

Granted, there are parts of the album that do stand out on their own, like the acoustic ballad ‘Be My Mistake’ or the Drake worship on ‘TOOTIMETOOTIMETOOTIME’, but this is the kind of album that Radiohead would have released had they been born in the late 1990s. Great for what it is, but considering that Radiohead had gotten tired of that sound all the way back on Kid A, it’s not like the 1990s cyborgs had gone anywhere.

8. Slang – Def Leppard

No genre has been more damaging to another than grunge was to hair metal. Artists from Sunset Strip still dominated the charts in the early 1990s, and then the minute that ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ dropped, it felt like all of the garbage from the charts had been finally cleaned out. Def Leppard had gotten into the glam metal scene relatively early, but their brand of sonic sheen led to them completely upending their sound for Slang.

Instead of trying to ride it out, Leppard figured the net best thing was for them to take all of their major elements away and try to make a grunge record. Although there are a few parts of the album that sound a little close to Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, the closest it gets to grunge is Stone Temple Pilots, taking their glam roots and combining them with the pseudo-ironic lens of Scott Weiland.

What makes this pivot even more perplexing is that Leppard ended up going right back to their old sound once the pop-friendly sounds of acts like Spice Girls and Mariah Carey started dominating the conversation again. It’s easy for a group like Leppard to assume that they needed to change, but looking back on the time, it looked like they could have waited it out and not embarrassed themselves by going alternative.

7. Bella Donna – Stevie Nicks

It’s almost impossible for someone like Stevie Nicks to sound like anyone else. There are certain moments where her influences shine a little brighter than others, but there are just as many times when you start listening to her music and can’t imagine that it’s even being played by a human. There’s some sort of spiritual connection that she taps into on every album, but when she flew solo the first time, she had the sounds of the heartland on her mind.

Whereas Fleetwood Mac was still rolling along, Nicks was convinced that her new album needed to be her version of a Tom Petty album. Working with Jimmy Iovine and getting a token appearance by the Heartbreakers on ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’, half the album feels like Nicks is taking the basic pieces of the Heartbreakers’ sound and putting her own spin on it.

Rather than having the roaring guitars, the best parts of the album are when the song is dominated by piano, featuring Nicks’ trademark husky alto voice over songs like ‘Beauty and the Beast’. If you take away the piano and replace it with a jangly guitar playing power chords, you’re already halfway to a Petty joint.

6. Be Here Now – Oasis

Anyone who has ever listened to Oasis knows that they love their classic rock. Regardless of the number of times they claim to be the biggest group on the planet, no one gets to that point without pulling from every band that’s come before them. And as far as influences go, few are able to pull more from The Beatles than the Gallagher brothers managed to do on their third outing.

It’s easy to throw a dart at nearly every single record Oasis made and call it a Beatles ripoff, but Be Here Now might take the cake for taking the most liberties with the Fab influences. Outside of Liam trying to do a John Lennon impression throughout half the songs, the track listing feels like they are trying their best to put together Beatles tracks from the ground up, including their own answer to ‘Hey Jude’ on ‘All Around the World’.

Does that mean it’s bad? Absolutely not. Few albums that pull from The Beatles are going to be garbage from top to bottom, and even some of the deep cuts like ‘I Hope I Think I Know’ are perfectly enjoyable. If there’s anything that tore this album down, though, it was making people think that the Britpop legends had finally become one trick ponies and weren’t going to be straying too far away from those first classics.

5. Permanent Waves – Rush

Rush always had a nasty habit of never doing the same thing twice. The first album may have been a loving ode to acts like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, but once they found their core lineup with Neil Peart, every record became a new opportunity for them to learn what they could do in the studio. Despite being known as God’s gift to prog nerds around the world, Neil Peart admitted that Permanent Waves come from them listening to The Police relentlessly.

Since Hemispheres had been one of the most technically ambitious projects they had ever worked on, a lot of Permanent Waves was about getting back to basics. Instead of having to worry about how many sections of a song there were, a track like ‘Spirit of Radio’ featured the kind of skan* rhythm and reggae feel you would get from ‘Walking on the Moon’, especially in the breakdown.

That doesn’t mean that Rush decided to become The Police or anything. This was just a stop gap between them becoming one of the biggest prog groups in the world, but the song does mark a bit of a pivot in their sound. For the longest time, it was all about making something complex, but this is where Rush finally learned that they could have some fun.

4. Anthem of the Peaceful Army – Greta Van Fleet

It’s hard to really blame anyone for sounding like Led Zeppelin. If you were to tell every other group to stop pulling from one of the greatest acts in the rock pantheon, you would have to end up throwing out a good chunk of rock history along with it. In the case of Greta Van Fleet, though, this is the kind of imitation that ends up going just one notch too far.

Although Anthem of the Peaceful Army is far from a bad record, it’s hard to really understand why it needs to exist. Despite being talked up as one of the shining lights that were going to save rock when they first debuted, this whole album feels like they listened to nothing but Led Zeppelin II for years on end and then were asked to make an album based on their findings.

It’s not like they can’t play. The guitars are roaring when they need to be, and Josh Kiszka has an amazing range on him, but it’s telling that the next few albums have seen them going in a much different direction. Because when you get someone like Robert Plant calling you out for taking a few too many liberties with his sound, you know that you’re going to need to innovate if you don’t want to fall into the same retro-rock bargain bins that too many others fall into.

3. A New World Record – ELO

It goes without saying that Jeff Lynne is a massive Beatles fan. The entire reason why Electric Light Orchestra seems to exist as it does today is the fact that they make the kind of music that sounds as if the song ‘I Am the Walrus’ was expanded for an entire career’s worth of music. Although any ELO production could probably qualify as a Beatles reproduction, A New World Record is the kind of loving ode to the Fab Four that all of us really deserve to hear.

Instead of just trying to start with the beginnings of a song like ‘Hey Jude’ and hoping for the best, songs like ‘Do Ya’ and ‘Telephone Line’ feel like Lynne has studied all the tips and tricks of The Beatles and repacking them through a modern lens. There might be a few easy references to the group in songs like ‘Shangri-La’, but something like ‘Rockaria!’ sounds like ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ by way of Wagner.

And it’s not like The Beatles didn’t respond in kind, either, with Lynne being one of the only people who claim to have worked with three of the Fab Four during his lifetime. Out of all the copycats on a list like this, this is the closest that anyone has ever gotten to matching The Beatles’ sound and actually pulling it off well.

2. Hunky Dory – David Bowie

To say that David Bowie has certain periods of his career would be drastically underselling it. Throughout his entire career, half of what ‘The Starman’ brought to music was about making the most that he could in as many styles as he could master. It was easier to see the sonic costumes on Young Americans and Earthling, but when listening to Hunky Dory, Bowie ended up finding himself by indirectly copying one of his greatest idols.

People might only call out the song ‘Queen Bitch’, but the entirety of Hunky Dory feels like something that could have come out of The Velvet Underground. Compared to Bowie’s previous records that got into folksy territory, tracks like ‘Kooks’ and ‘Quicksand’ sound like the kind of ramshackle open-heartedness of Lou Reed’s later period, especially on their self-titled third record.

Then again, you can hear Bowie slowly moving closer to what he was bound to be on tracks like ‘Life on Mars?’ and ‘Changes’, which might be the first perfect Bowie songs after ‘Space Oddity’. The influence of The Velvets may have been palpable from the first few chords, but you can start to see Ziggy Stardust slowly starting to fall to Earth.

1. Money Money 2020 – The Network

It’s within every band’s nature to have some fun whenever they go into making a record. Sure, there might be some pressure whenever they try their hand at something new, but that’s half the fun of being able to take the basics of your sound and twist them into something that nobody thought you could do. And while Green Day has played coy with journalists as to whether they actually were The Network, Money Money 2020 is one of the most glorious Devo parodies anyone has ever made.

Granted, it’s a stretch to really say parody when they do the songs justice like this. Looking to blow off some steam in between recording Warning and American Idiot, the pop-punk trio managed to pump out an album that could stand right alongside albums like Freedom of Choice, complete with the squelchiest keyboard sounds ever committed to tape since the turn of the century.

This also may have indirectly opened the door for the band to collaborate a little bit more, with everyone eventually chipping in in the same way when putting together a track like ‘Homecoming’ on their next record. An album that was put together completely as a joke really shouldn’t be this good, but sometimes the greatest ideas can come from the happiest of accidents.

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