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: