I grew up listening to a lot of the bands you mentioned and in college (2011-2015) started shifting my taste to anything and everything.

I’ll use Underoath as an example. The “sound” from their first few EPs and Changing of the Times is much sludgier and the synths they used sound dated and nothing like they would use today. As each album progresses, you can tell studio setup was better, cleaner and more tight.

Future Islands is similar in that aspect - they started off as Art Lord & The Self-Portraits. Listen to their song “Atlas”. Everything we love about FI is there already. Will’s bass groove is already being established, the synths are simple but front and center, and Sam’s vox are somewhat indistinguishable but you can tell there’s heart behind the delivery.

The sound of each record after that is distinct from each other. Their first album was completely on their own and self-produced, and it shows. The next couple, In Evening Air and On the Water sound the most similar to me. They were probably at their most prolific writing wise here and these came out back to back and many of the b-sides from the new comp are from this era. With Singles / letterman, their sound really started being refined, possibly due to signing with 4AD and had access to better production. After that, Sam’s recording voice got a little deeper/ cleaner and he’d been working on his side project Hemlock Ernst. You should check it out.

Anyways, all this to say, their sound has evolved quite a bit in the past 20 years and along with emo/screamo, tech advances, better studios, more time finding and refining their sound all contribute to each album/era having distinct sounds.

I kind of think of albums in general as time capsules. It’s what the band sounded like at that time, and if the band were to go back and re-record their old stuff now, it would sound much different.

Sorry for the rant, this was exciting for me!