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A companion piece to my other thread about musicians/bands that ultimately returned to their roots for the better, this thread's more about the exact opposite: examples of bands/musicians that you feel became significantly better when they decided to change their sound/genre.

-Bring Me the Horizon

They started out as a deathcore band taking inspiration from the likes of Suicide Silence, with one of their more well known songs of this era in the band's career being called "Pray For Plagues" :

After their first album, however, the band dropped the deathcore elements and instead moved on to traditional metalcore, and are generally seen as one of the better bands to come out of the metalcore scene, even being well liked by metal legends like Rob Halford:

However the band has recently gone through another change, dropping most of the metalcore elements in favor of becoming an alt-metal act:

-Dir En Grey

They started off as more of a pop rock band with songs that sounds very different from what the band would later become known for later on. They also had a much stronger visual kei aesthetic in their early years (basically a "glam rock meets anime" look):

In the early 00s they started adopting elements of metalcore, and started to branch into a subgenre of visual kei called "euroguro kei," a more macabre style of visual kei rock music that deals with dark themes in an almost erotic manner:

More recently they've gone in a direction often labeled as "avant garde metal," usually combining elements of deathcore and progressive metal, they've also dropped much of the visual kei aesthetic while still sticking to keeping the "eroguro" elements in their music:

Stone Temple Pilots

While their first album: "Core" went 8x Platinum and contains some favorites from fans, many people agree that they sounded too much like Pearl Jam when they first came out with it.

For their second album: "Purple", they started incorporating new flavors into their grunge sound, such southern rock and psychedelic rock.

By the third album: "Tiny Music… Songs from the Vatican Gift Shop", they branched out from grunge and started take the more psychedelic sound in more while still sounding modern.

The fourth album: "No. 4", had them go back to a more straightforward rock sound, yet a few tracks still contained a psychedelic sound. This would also contribute to their fifth album: "Shangri-La Dee Da", but I'm not too familiar with that one (it's their least successful album anyways).

After a 9 year hiatus, they came back and released their sixth self-titled album, which contained rock sounds from the 60s and 70s, as well as some more country sounding songs that were found on their second album

After this Scott Weiland was fired (and eventually died) and the only thing that has put out since was an EP with Chester Bennington on lead vocals, which is not worth talking about.