For example, a band like Joy Division. Two masterpiece albums in the form of Unknown Pleasures and Closer, and the untimely death of Ian Curtis cut it all short. They were even heading into the direction that New Order eventually went in, and it would have been interesting to see what Ian Curtis would have done if they fully made the leap into electronic music while he was still alive.
Might be a bit on the Zoomery side of cultural conversation compared to the rest of this thread, but the duo Her’s were tragically killed in a road accident while on tour in the US. They made songs that were cheesy but still emotionally resonant, which is a hard balance to hit.
Their music would blow up even more online in the years following their death, I know there was a lot of of TikTok buzz around them during the pandemic, when a bunch of bedroom pop artists were gaining a ton of traction. While I hate that platform, it can be pretty good for promoting music naturally when people aren’t gaming the system (which they’re doing all the time - fuck TikTok). I think some of their famous songs are still considered TikTok clichés, but I wouldn’t really know.
I didn’t even know they were dead until this year.
There’s always this conspiracy of labels preferring to promote artists who are dead because they can pocket more money from dead artists, and I think about that when one of their songs pop up.