Bad Religion formed in 1980, released the absolute banger punk classic “How Could Hell Be Any Worse?” In 1982, and almost immediately afterwards released “Into The Unknown” in 1983 which got such a terrible reception the band broke up and pretended it never happened.

It wasn’t until 1985 that they got back together released “Back To The Known” and 1988’s “Suffer” when they redeemed themselves and fully distanced themselves from “Into The Unknown.” For years they never even listed it on their discography and refused to talk about it.

Despite various narratives it wasn’t a gag or a joke, the band thought it was going to be their breakout masterpiece and they made tons of copies of it. Epitaph, their own label, bet on it heavily.

After it flopped they basically disavowed it, never reissued it, never played songs off it, got pissed off when people asked about it. Only 30 years later did they include it in a box set history and have somewhat made peace with part of their history they regretted.

To be honest it’s not that bad, if they’d released it under a different band name it probably would have been fine but by this point fans had an idea of what they wanted from Bad Religion and this was not it. I always thought it was interesting that they tried to hide it.

In my circles, the fact that they wouldn’t talk about it and got angry when others did only made people more curious about it and created a real collector base for it that wouldn’t have happened if they just said “ooops, mistakes were made, next!”

This was 20 years before Barbara Streisand would accidentally birth the Streisand Effect by trying to get a photo of her house taken down, inadvertently causing way more people to look for and publish photos of her house.

This has many parallels in music and art and celebrity and even crypto and web3. Usually plays out the same way. I often wish we could just fast forward to the “make peace with the history” stage where everyone is happy and leapfrog over the “stop talking about this” drama.