What was the most surprising thing to happen in 2013? Was it when Benedict XVI became the first pope to resign since 1415? Or when Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the NSA? Or was it when Beyoncé made the world stop with the release of her self-titled visual album? The correct answer is Beyoncé. She wasn’t the first artist to drop an album without warning, but Beyoncé changed the album release and promotion game. And in its wake came a number of other surprise album drops, often referred to as ”pulling a Beyoncé.” No matter how long-awaited or beautifully made, each felt at least a little derivative of the one that jump-started it all.
Still, almost three-and-a-half years later, albums continue to drop without warning, even as the audiences they’re meant for have grown immune to the element of surprise. Bryson Tiller delighted fans this week by dropping his new album True to Self a month early, a surprise in the strictest sense of the word. But following a long line of unannounced releases — including Drake’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late in 2015 and James Blake’s The Colour in Anything in 2016 — blunted its potential to astonish.
Even beyond that, the world today is full of so many extreme bombshells that the unexpected arrival of a handful of new songs, even excellent new songs, can hardly make a dent in the public consciousness. In the current political climate, a person can body slam a member of the news media on one day and be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives the next. Global nuclear annihilation is always a tweet away. And then there's Trump. From his November win to his recent NATO speech, he’s dropped what feel like nonstop surprises on us over the past few months.
In a time when the news is full of horrors and scandals to be surprised by, the surprise album drop feels like a relic from a bygone era.
With folks constantly keyed up for the next scoop or breaking headline and anticipating the next potentially life-altering political development to arise, it’s especially hard to catch fans off guard. A surprise album drop just doesn’t pack the punch it used to. And as every day brings a different shocking news story to the foreground, album drops are harder to time: Anything has the potential to be buried by presidential and president-adjacent antics. Record companies arguably didn’t have this level of competition for public attention under Obama or even under Bush.
News cycle aside, the novelty of the surprise album drop has worn off and its goals have become muddled. Traditional record promotion strategies like pre-release singles and strategic press have now become optional and the element of surprise that “pulling a Beyoncé” depends on has diminished each one. Frank Ocean managed to recapture some of the excitement that audiences felt after Beyoncé with the surprise drop of his sophomore album Blonde last year. But even that release was in itself something new, the end result of a long campaign of speculation and false alarms that had been in motion since channel ORANGE came out in 2012, itself released a week early by surprise.
In a time when people aren’t even sure what to be surprised about anymore, the surprise album drop is a relic from a bygone era. That’s not to say that music fans can’t or don’t want to be surprised anymore. But it’ll take more than a simple unannounced release to engage us more than news broadcasts and social media reaction feeds do every hour of every day. Innovation isn’t dead in music; music promotion and great albums – scheduled and unscheduled – continue to come out. But it’s high time to just admit it: Surprise albums drops hardly work as surprises anymore.
