Run It Back: The 10 Best Sequel Albums
The summer movie season is just about wrapped up, and once again the biggest tentpoles of the season were sequels and franchise extensions. In fact, of the ten biggest box office hits of the summer, only Sinners and F1: The Movie came from original ideas. Of course, some of those blockbusters—most notably Superman and 28 Years Later—were very well executed and phenomenally entertaining, but it is always a little disconcerting when retreads like Lilo & Stitch end up at the top of the mountain.
Movies don’t have the market cornered on sequels, but there is rarely the same kind of emphasis put on album sequels as their cinematic counterparts. But some of my favorite records have been franchise builders or returns to more fertile musical ground, so enjoy this list of the 10 greatest sequel albums of all time.
10. Billy Bragg & Wilco, Mermaid Avenue Vol. II
Some time in the mid 1990s, Woody Guthrie’s daughter Nora reached out to English folk singer Billy Bragg about setting some her dad’s unpublished lyrics to music (Guthrie left behind over a thousand pages of lyrics when he passed away in 1967). Bragg was intrigued, so he recruited the guys from Wilco (who were coming off a major artistic and commercial breakthrough with Being There in 1996), and everyone gathered in Ireland to lay down a bunch of tracks. Mermaid Avenue arrived in 1998, and its sequel landed in 2000. The first album is the more consistently satisfying, but the highs on Vol. II are much higher, particularly “I Was Born” and “Someday Some Morning Some Time.”
9. Raekwon, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… Pt. II
Hip-hop loves a franchise, and more than half this list is made up of rap records. Very often it’s just a gimmick, without any kind of stylistic approach or subject matter focus that links the sequels to their antecedents. Raekwon provided an exception to that rule in 2009 when he dropped the sequel to his legendary 1995 solo debut Only Built 4 Cuban Linx. RZA produced all of the original Linx and only returns for two tracks on the second go-round, but everything else feels like a clean extension of the original. The Chef was a little older and a lot wiser, and his new perspectives on old stories were welcome, and his beat selection (which included tracks by Dr. Dre, The Alchemist, and J. Dilla) is particularly on point, and as on the first record, Ghostface Killah is back in the fold, resurrecting one of the great one-two punches in hip-hop history.
8. Future, DS2
Future’s breakout 2011 mixtape was called Dirty Sprite, so when he decided to name his third album the sequel to that crossover cultural moment, it felt significant. Would he be stepping into the past to pull his sound backwards a little bit, or was this an entirely new rebirth? Ultimately, Future mostly continues his logical roll from 2014’s Honest, but it’s tag-team partner Metro Boomin who really turns this album into a major statement. Metro’s beats combine spry trap drums with some John Carpenter shit. It’s all haunted house sound effects and end-of-days synths. Nothing goes quite as hard as “Move That Dope,” but then nothing does.
7. Method Man, Tical 2000: Judgment Day
Method Man’s solo debut Tical was the first foray away from the main unit after Wu-Tang Clan blew up. It’s a great record, though it seemed it was quickly eclipsed by other classics from his Wu-compadres (including Ghostface Killah’s Iron Man and GZA’s Liquid Swords). It made sense that he would want to extend the Tical brand name (one that he continues to use) with the absurdly-named sorta-concept album Tical 2000: Judgment Day, a less consistent but bigger and more compelling stylistic swing than its predecessor. Rapping from a dystopia in the not-too-distant future, Meth spits about street life (“Dangerous Grounds”), the oncoming apocalypse (the vague techno-stomp of “Judegment Day”), and even recruits D’Angelo to lament the complications of love (“Break Ups 2 Make Ups”). He has kept the Tical series going with generally diminishing returns, but Method Man’s Tical 2000 has too much ambition to deny.
6. Meat Loaf, Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell
The original Bat Out of Hell arrived in 1977 and turned Meat Loaf into a household name on the back of the blustery and bombastic songs by Jim Steinman. After the relatively fallow decade that followed, Meat made up with Steinman (the pair had a famously volatile relationship that often found them not speaking for years at a time even though they each made the other insanely rich) and returned to the studio for another trip back down south. The result is Bat Out of Hell but cranked up to 11: The songs are bigger, the choruses stickier, the guitars louder, the track lengths way, way longer. “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)” was a smash and became the longest title to ever top the Hot 100, but the deep cuts on BOOH II are just as tasty guilty pleasures. When was the last time you banged your head to “Everything Louder Than Everything Else,” and why aren’t you doing it right now?
5. Dr. Dre, 2001
The moment Dr. Dre dropped The Chronic in 1992 and became an MTV staple with maximum SoCal bumpers like “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang,” the world demanded more. Dre produced plenty of music over the ensuing seven years, but his long-awaited proper follow-up to his watershed debut became more and more an abstract idea. It was supposed to be The Chronic 2 (Eminem even refers to it as such on “Forgot About Dre'“) and then Chronic 2000, but Dre’s former label boss Suge Knight dropped a compilation with that same title in hopes of torpedoing Dre in the market. That’s why Dre put out an album called 2001 in 1999 and has nothing to do with deep space exploration or star children. 2001 rules (“The Next Episode” remains an all timer, and “What’s the Difference” still goes so hard), and while it’s one of the few albums on this list not quite as good as the first in the series, it’s hard to improve on the perfection of the original The Chronic.
4. Lil Wayne, Dedication 2
Weezy just adores a sequel—there are very few entries in his catalogue that didn’t get a follow up of some kind. Lil Wayne’s most famous and consequential franchise is Tha Carter, but he also has the multi-part mixtape series SQ, Da Drought, Sorry 4 The Wait and No Ceilings. The most prolific of those is the Dedication series, which kicked off all the way back in 2005 and had its most recent entry in 2018. The second Dedication tape, which dropped in 2006, is in the running for the best mixtape of Wayne’s career (and considering he very well may be the best mixtape rapper ever, that’s really saying something). At that point in his life, Weezy was insanely prolific and critically adored, and this is him at his hardest and most casually inventive. Wayne’s beat selection is also impeccable, and he even manages to sample himself without it sounding narcissistic. It even has Wayne getting political: “Georgia…Bush” is one of the only good things to emerge from the George W. Bush presidency.
3. Smashing Pumpkins, Machina II: Friends and Enemies of Modern Music
The original run of Smashing Pumpkins peaked in 1995 with the arrival of the sprawling Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, which was both critically lauded and commercially massive. The next few years were rockier: Their touring keyboardist died of an overdose, drummer Jimmy Chamberlin was fired because of that death, and the Pumpkins followed up Mellon Collie with a quieter synth-based album called Adore, which received shrugs from most everybody (though I maintain my stance that Adore is half an incredible record and half a just OK one), so frontman Billy Corgan decided to swerve back into the big rock moves that turned his band into a household name with Siamese Dream. But Machina: The Machines of God sounded like the tantrum that it was, and the band decided to call it quits not long after its arrival. As they were walking out the door, they dropped the second half of Machina, which was largely distributed via Napster. The result is not only better than its predecessor, but it’s also one of the best records of their entire run (and almost certainly their last great one). It’s kind of wild that this is the stuff that didn’t make Machina, because tracks like “Cash Car Star” and “Real Love” might have better caught the attention of a fickle public.
2. Bruce Springsteen, Tracks II: The Lost Albums
OK, so this is a bit of a cheat because it’s actually seven albums all at once. But even considering the scope of this project, and considering it comes from one of the greatest songwriters to ever live, Springsteen’s Tracks sequel still ranks as one of his most mind-blowing moments. The original Tracks was a four disc box set that collected odds and ends from the first 20 years of Bruce’s career, and it did a nice job of filling in some gaps and giving official releases to a few beloved live staples. Tracks II kicks everything up a notch, collected seven full albums that Springsteen recorded, mixed, mastered, and then put in a drawer. For anybody looking for classic lost Bruce songs, those are here, but there are also a bunch of stylistically adventurous endeavors that illuminate a lot of the stuff that actually did come out in the same era. The electronics-heavy Streets of Philadelphia Sessions is wall-to-wall great, but I was also shocked to find that I got really into the minimalist and haunting Faithless (the soundtrack to a movie that ultimately never got made) and the melancholic Twilight Hours (which sort of feels like Bruce’s version of a late night lounge album). Even if you already thought Springsteen was the GOAT, Tracks II makes a case for him transcending even that moniker.
1.Run the Jewels, Run the Jewels 2
El-P and Killer Mike had both made their bones in the hip-hop underground and always seemed to be on the precipice of breaking through to that next level. What they needed was each other: After a collaborative tour supporting respective solo albums (with each one appearing on the other’s), they formed Run the Jewels (taking their name from an LL Cool J lyric). The first RTJ album was excellent, but the second one found them elevating one another a thousand levels. The production is tighter and filthier, and both Mike and El-P exchange rhymes with a stylistic fury that feels like a 21st century version of Run-DMC or the Beastie Boys. They also got quite a boost from the otherwise invisible Zach De La Rocha, who dropped his first new verse in years on “Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck).” All of the RTJ albums are good (even the meme-tastic Meow The Jewels), but none of the others have stuff as surgical as “Lie, Cheat, Steal” and “Blockbuster Night, Pt. 1.”