One-Hit Wonders Who Released A Single Album And Then Vanished

The "one-hit wonder" is a curious phenomenon. Musicians pour all of their soul and skill into their craft and then break through to the public with what's regarded as their masterpiece or maybe just a commercial success. Churning out a single hit or album can produce varying results. Some one-hit wonders made millions off of their singular endeavor, while others returned to obscurity. A subset of the one-hit wonder is the one-album wonder. These acts made a set of songs that resonated with countless fans and maybe generated a hit single or two. But then for myriad reasons, they couldn't follow it up. It's not like they tried and failed — they actually never made another record.

Some one-hit wonders definitely deserved more than their 15 minutes of fame, but their disappearance from the cultural landscape was seemingly their own decision. The public embraced these acts and their music, and then patiently waited, sometimes forever, for these singers, bands, and supergroups to head back into the studio and record another album. That, or fate intervened to prevent them from making more music, or doing anything at all, really; nevertheless, a sophomore album would never arrive. Here are the stories of the acts that released one fantastic, influential, and bestselling album and then didn't make another musical peep.

The Beach Boys was a family act, populated primarily by brothers Carl, Brian, and Dennis Wilson. The group was the most successful act of the 1960s surf rock fad, but only one member did any surfing: Dennis Wilson, the band's drummer on its early hits before Brian Wilson's composition grew too complex. After he injured his hand by punching a window in the early '70s, Wilson was necessarily relieved of his drumming duties in favor of Ricky Fatarr, freeing him up to contribute more to the band's songwriting and increasingly lofty creative direction.

Amidst personal problems, including divorce and a penchant for substance abuse that would lead to his dismissal from the Beach Boys for making him unreliable, Wilson spent two years recording "Pacific Ocean Blue." Released in 1977, it initially sold about 200,000 copies and over time would emerge as a critically-acclaimed gem. Wilson attempted a second album, but only got about halfway through, distracted by an addiction to (and rehab for) heroin. "Dennis was not what you would call a completer," his manager Robert Levine told Rolling Stone.

In a particularly terrible episode in the tragic real-life story of the Beach Boys, Wilson drowned at the age of 38 in 1983. Living on his boat in Marina Del Rey, California, an intoxicated Wilson took several dives into the water to look for objects for reasons his friends didn't understand. He took one last dive and didn't come back up.  

Jeff Buckley, the son of 1970s singer-songwriter Tim Buckley, offered something special when he emerged in the 1990s. Possessing a soulful voice with a tremendous range that ached with emotion, Buckley powered his debut album "Grace" to instantaneous critical praise and mainstream success. Rolling Stone, which would eventually call "Grace" one of the greatest albums of all time, named him one of the Best New Artists of 1994, and he earned a best new artist nomination at the MTV Video Music Awards for his clip for "Last Goodbye," a smash hit on alternative rock radio.

Buckley seemed to have a long and interesting career ahead of him until it all ended one tragic night in Memphis. On the evening of May 29, 1997, Buckley was hanging out with a friend and decided to take a swim in the Mississippi River. He went into the water with all of his clothes on, and under the weight of a wave generated by a passing boat, Buckley was pulled under and drowned. He was 28 years old. After he died, Buckley's unreleased music was mired in litigation until it reached the public. The uncompleted songs he'd recorded for a sophomore record called "My Sweetheart the Drunk" were released as "Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk" in 1998.

After playing alongside other blues-rock heavy-hitters in the short-lived 1960s supergroups the Yardbirds, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Cream, and Blind Faith, Eric Clapton was firmly entrenched as one of the most praised guitarists of his generation. In 1970, he teamed up with the Allman Brothers' guitarist Duane Allman to form Derek and the Dominos. "Bell Bottom Blues" only hit 91 on the U.S. charts in 1971, and the album named "Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs," would be its only studio album, after the leadoff single. "Layla" became a two-part classic rock radio staple. The first part is a loud, heavy, and blistering account of unrequited love (which Clapton wrote about his feelings for Pattie Boyd, wife of his close friend, the Beatles' George Harrison) and the second an epic, searching piano-and-guitar instrumental.

Eric Clapton is loathed by other musicians, and that lingering animosity may have played a role in preventing Derek and the Dominos from ever making another album. While recording a potential second album in 1971, drummer Jim Gordon spent five hours tuning his drums. When Clapton went to tune his instrument, Gordon patronizingly offered to do it for him. "Eric got up and slammed his guitar up against the wall and went out the door he said, 'I'll never play with you ever again.' That was it,'" keyboardist Bobby Whitlock told Classic Rock Revisited. Furthermore, Allman died in October 1971, preventing a Derek and the Dominos revival from ever happening.

Before he was a one-hit wonder, Gregg Alexander was a no-hit wonder. Preternaturally talented as a teenager, Alexander moved from suburban Detroit to Los Angeles to sign a record deal with A&M Records, which released "Michigan Rain" in 1989. That, and a second pop-rock album for Epic Records, "Intoxifornication," flopped, but they were well-known enough within the recording industry that Alexander found work as a songwriter in demand. In 1997, the musician took another shot at fame by forming a loose musical collective (in which he wrote or co-wrote all the material) called New Radicals. The de facto band came out with "Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too," supported by the single "You Get What You Give." A piano-based pop-rock anthem encouraging the youthful to stand up as one (that nonetheless threatens and calls out Beck, Hanson, Courtney Love, and Marilyn Manson as "fakes").

"You Get What You Give" reached the top 40 in the U.S., and less than a year later, Alexander broke up New Radicals because he wanted to go back to making music behind the scenes for other people. He re-emerged with hired musicians for one night only in January 2021 — he performed "You Get What You Give" during the inauguration of President Joe Biden. The tune was a font of strength for Biden's family when his son Beau was dying of cancer.

In 2001, Benjamin Gibbard of the indie rock band Death Cab for Cutie visited the home of his friend Pedro Bonito of the band the Jealous Sound. Gibbard met Bonito's roommate, Jimmy Tamborello, an electronic musician who works under the stage name Dntel. They hit it off, and recorded a song together made up of both Gibbard's emotional sensibility and Tamborello's progressive computerized sounds. The collaboration continued, with Tamborello burning CDs of instrumental tracks and mailing them to Gibbard, who'd add vocals and guitar parts. By 2003, and after adding some prominent features from singer Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley, an album was finished. Gibbard and Tamborello named the band the Postal Service, a nod to their unique song-building process.

SubPop Records, best known for its stable of '90s grunge bands, agreed to distribute the album, "Give Up," expecting it to sell at most a few tens of thousands of copies. It's actually sold more than a million units, thanks to dreamy, electronic alternative rock hits like "We Will Become Silhouettes" and "Such Great Heights." Gibbard, Tamobrello, and Lewis returned to their main musical projects, but the Postal Service reunited in 2013 and 2023 for concert tours to celebrate the the anniversaries of "Give Up," still its only album.

For the better part of 1993, 4 Non Blondes was inescapable. In the era when the popularity of grunge pushed anything even adjacent to alternative rock onto mainstream radio and MTV, 4 Non Blondes landed a top 20 hit with "What's Up?" Singer and songwriter Linda Perry ponders the meaning of life and her place in the world, culminating in the easily sung-along-to chorus, "I said hey! What's going on?"

4 Non Blondes would be a true one-hit wonder, never landing another song anywhere near the Billboard Hot 100, not even the follow-up single "Spaceman." Both of those songs came from "Bigger, Better, Faster, More!" — 4 Non Blondes' only full-length album, which according to Discogs sold 1.5 million copies in the U.S. and another 6 million globally. Less than a year later, Perry split up her band. 

Recording that one record had been an unpleasant experience, fraught with label interference and interior hostility. "I had a hard time in the band; not because of them, because I wasn't clear on the kind of music I wanted to do yet. I was just really finding myself," Perry later told People.

While the members of 4 Non Blondes don't communicate regularly, Perry went on to make a couple of solo albums and then became a sought-after songwriter. She's composed hits for Alicia Keys, Gwen Stefani, Christina Aguilera, and Pink.

Hip-hop trio the Fugees were one of the biggest acts of the mid-1990s thanks to "The Score." The 1996 LP featured both rapping and singing of Lauryn Hill, who embarked on a solo career after the Fugees split in 1997. "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill," sold almost half a million copies in its first week alone and won five Grammy Awards for Hill, including Album of the Year and Best New Artist. It's still universally regarded as one of the best albums ever made.

Hill then soured on the music industry and life as a public figure. She settled a lawsuit from the musical collective New Ark, which claimed uncredited contributions to "The Miseducation." Hill became more interested in religion and spirituality and devoted more time to raising her family. Apart from a live album culled from a poorly received "MTV Unplugged" episode, Hill never made a second record. The musician also claims that she didn't make a follow-up because nobody asked. "The wild thing is no one from my label has ever called me and asked how can we help you make another album, ever ... EVER. Did I say ever? Ever!" Hill said in an email to Rolling Stone (via Billboard). "After 'The Miseducation,' there were scores of tentacled obstructionists, politics, repressing agendas, unrealistic expectations, and saboteurs EVERYWHERE."

In the early '70s, Steve Jones, Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock formed a stripped-down rock band inspired by British "mod" bands like the Who, but embraced the emerging punk style with the 1975 addition of mischievous lead singer and general malcontent John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten. Malcolm McLaren, who ran a hip London fashion boutique, took over the band now called the Sex Pistols as its manager and creative director and turned the group into an outrageous, headline-grabbing act that offended older, more conservative Britons while delighting the younger ones. Bassist Sid Vicious replaced the fired Matlock in 1977, just in time for the recording of "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols." It propelled punk into the mainstream, capturing a gleefully destructive attitude as well as sloppy, gritty musical stylings. The sarcastic "God Save the Queen" and self-evident "Anarchy in the U.K." became massive hits and anthems for England's disaffected youth.

There wasn't time for another album, because the Sex Pistol so quickly fell apart. Despite band tension, Lydon increasingly irritated by negative press attention, and Vicious's increasing reliance on heroin, the Sex Pistols launched a U.S. tour in January 1978. At the end of a half-hearted show in San Francisco, Lydon quit the band. By the end of the year, Jones and Cook had resigned, and Vicious died of a heroin overdose.

Nirvana kicking off the grunge rock revolution in 1991 with "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is actually a false fact about the '90s you might have always thought was true. One of the first bands to emerge from the Seattle scene with that revolutionarily fuzzy, garbled, punk-meets-metal sound was Mother Love Bone. The band formed in early 1988, when Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament, and Bruce Fairweather suffered creative differences with the singer of their band, Green River, and connected with Andrew Wood, the stage commanding frontman of Malfunkshun. Different labels clamored to sign Mother Love Bone, and an imprint of Mercury Records released the group's slight, five-song EP "Shine" in 1989, the first nationally available music recorded by any band in the burgeoning Seattle grunge scene.

That led to Mother Love Bone's debut full-length album. "Apple" arrived in 1990, but the band was unable to promote it or enjoy the moment very much. Four months before "Apple" was released, Wood died of an overdose of heroin at age 24. Mother Love Bone was over; Gossard and Ament went on to help start Pearl Jam.

The two main figures in Rockpile brought the project to fruition after establishing prominent solo careers in the 1970s. Guitarist and singer Dave Edmunds made the charts with a gritty remake of the R&B standard "I Heard You Knocking," while bassist and singer Nick Lowe was a star of the New Wave scene with hits like "Cruel to Be Kind." Both favored old-fashioned, straightforward, '50s-style music and so they teamed up to form a rock n' roll revival band, hiring drummer Terry Williams and guitarist Billy Bremner.

In the late '70s, Rockpile became the backing band in the studio and onstage for both Edmunds and Lowe on their solo tours. But only once did everybody get together in one studio to record one collection of songs, and that was 1980's "Seconds of Pleasure." The members of Rockpile preferred to work on their own, however, but did contribute to each other's solo work in subsequent years.

R&B singer Cassie emerged in 2006 with a self-titled album released by Bad Boy Records, the label run by Sean Combs, also variously known as Puff Daddy and Diddy. Debut single "Me & U" was a smash, topping Billboard's R&B chart and reaching No. 3 on the pop chart. Further offerings from the album and compilation appearances tanked.

From 2007 to 2018 Cassie was in a relationship with Combs, leading to allegations that the label was giving the singer preferential treatment that she didn't deserve, part of the backlash that also included a negative reaction to poor live performances, which the singer attributed to stage fright. After some leaks of incomplete songs proved she was working on new material, Cassie announced that an album called "Electro Love" would be released sometime in 2009. After singles from the LP tanked, the album was shelved indefinitely and was never finished, nor was another record, promised to see the light of day in 2012.

Cassie also dealt with the distraction of tremendous struggles in her personal life. In 2023, five years after her breakup with Combs, the singer filed a lawsuit accusing her former partner of multiple acts of domestic violence and sexual assault that endured during and after the relationship.

After forming in 1983, a good demo tape got British band the La's signed with Go! Discs in 1987. It took almost three years for the group to finish and release its first album. It took so long to complete because frontman and main songwriter Lee Mavers meticulously fine-tuned every aspect of the record in search of perfection. Nevertheless, that the La's album performed admirably, bolstered by the intercontinental hit "There She Goes," a flop when it was released as a standalone single in 1988. Matching jangly guitars with a sing-songy groove and Mavers' charmingly strained vocals, "There She Goes" has since been used as romantic establishing music in lots of TV shows and movies. The album and that song are credited with helping to kick off the Britpop movement, which combined alternative rock elements with classic '60s British rock.

With a largely different lineup supporting Mavers, the La's toured in 1995, and that was all the band ever did. It never made a second album because Mavers went through agony to create the first one, which he didn't even like. "It never captured anything that we were about," he told Rolling Stone (via Dave's Music Database). "To cut a long story short, too many cooks spoil the broth."