Napalm Death were formed in 1981, and were still developing their proper sound when drummer Mick Harris joined in late '85 and pushed their limits into what is now known as grindcore. That lineup recorded what became the side A of the first album, ‘Scum’. The last remaining original member, vocalist Nic Bullen, left after that, and the band cycled through several more changes, such that Harris is the only one present on the sides A and B of the album.

Harris was in the band for two more albums, leaving in '91 to form jazzcore band Painkiller with John Zorn and Bill Laswell. Napalm Death's lineup stabilized by that time and continues with the new drummer Danny Herrera to this day, with the exception of ditching the second guitarist and later adding another one.

Funny enough, Harris started a side-project Scorn with Nic Bullen right after leaving Napalm Death, and they originally played sort of industrial metal. Bullen again bailed in '95, whereupon Harris changed to industrial illbient, before releasing ‘Greetings from Birmingham’ in 2000, the sound of which might be familiar to everyone here. Except Londoners somehow reinvented basically the same sound a bit later, turning it into a genre of its own.

The same year '91, Harris was also a touring drummer for Godflesh, a project of Justin Broadrick who was the guitarist on the side A of ‘Scum’.

While Hütter was absent (to study architecture), Kraftwerk's lineup was basically Neu with Florian Schneider. There are a couple bootleg recordings of this lineup: ‘Ruck Zuck’ and ‘K4’, offering some Kraftwerk tunes being played by Neu.

Upon his return, Hütter promptly kicked out Rother and Dinger, and they formed Neu proper.

TBF, though, Kraftwerk is pretty much Ralf und Florian (hue hue) — starting way back with their proto-krautrock band Organisation.

The Swingin’ Medallions have had a rotating group for most of their career, but Wikipedia does say that the drummer, Joe Morris, has been consistently with them since ’62. So I guess they’ve only had one. And they were still performing last year.

The Wiggles only have Anthony as an original member.

Gong also weirdly started some spinoff projects that had nothing to do with the original band except for some involvement of Daevid Allen in their formation. In particular, the ‘Zu Band’ organized by Giorgio Gomelsky became New York Gong for a performance at Zu Manifestival, joined by Allen and his colleague Chris Cutler. Allen went back to Europe soon after, while the band toured North America playing Gong's stuff, and then were on tour in France for two months, discovering that “they couldn't stand the European way of life” and parting ways with Allen.

The band then became Material, members of which were involved in NYC's 'downtown scene', and which launched decades-long and very productive careers of producers Bill Laswell and Michael Beinhorn, musicians Fred Maher and Mark Kramer, and engineer Martin Bisi. Particularly, Laswell and Beinhorn are known for producing Herbie Hancock's ‘Future Shock’ album and ‘Rockit’ single (the latter almost entirely made by them), Timezone's ‘World Destruction’, Public Image Ltd.'s ‘Album’, and Material's own ‘Seven Souls’ with William S. Burroughs — aside from Laswell's over two hundred releases centered on his bass guitar.

Yes for a couple of decades was like the anti-Ship of Theseus. They would go on tour with everybody who had ever been in the band at any point. They even had Peter Banks (guitarist on their first two largely unknown albums) and The Buggles with them.

Actually kind of a cool concept as their studio albums used a lot of overdubbing which was impossible for single musicians on stage to reproduce. Having 17 guitarists means you can do it all.

Yes: Features no original members.

This is technically true, but Yes does still have Steve Howe who was the guitarist on their first hit album ("The Yes Album" in 1971).

I'm outing myself, but La Bottine Souriante is a Quebec/French Canadian folk band who's founding member are all no longer current members.

Pretty sure the Village People are not the original crew. Also it would be surprising if it were, considering their participation at Trump inauguration.

Technically "Panic! at the Disco", if you can count every band member except the singer leaving, and being replaced by sessionists

The guy who wrote YMCA & still performs as the cop in the VP is a HUGE trump fan and maga assholes. Also claims the band/song is not a gay anthem. I'm not fucking kidding. They're all fucking delusional.

you must have different definition of "all" than I

EDIT: I cannot read

Oof, ty for the info

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidevolk, damn shame tho, I liked their pre 2013 work better

Babymetal?

so no

so no

there's a metal band called Zao that's been around for ages and have had all members replaced. they wrote a song (called ship of Theseus) about it.

I fully misread 😭

Some of these are real stretches involving band names getting swapped around.

The original band called "Judas Priest" broke up entirely. KK Downing, and Ian Hill were in a band called Freight together. Al Atkins of the now-defunct Judas Priest joined Freight, and they decided the now-available name of Judas Priest was cooler. It was not the same band. Furthermore, before their first album was recorded Atkins was replaced with Halford, and Tipton also joined. So I would count Ian Hill, Rob Halford, and Glenn Tipton all as founding members.

Opeth is similar. The first Opeth before Ackerfeldt broke up without recording any albums.

Then the original trio regained the name!

Lol this is a good one

ELO is an interesting case. Pinning down the original members is already a bit tricky, because the first album was really just a side project of The Move, before Roy Wood left to start Wizzard in the middle of doing their second album. If we're generous and say their third album was really their first as a seperate band, we end up with a group that's fairly static throughout the 70s and that most fans would call the classic lineup. the only two truly original members, though, were Jeff Lynne and Bev Bevan, and everyone else in the and was technically considered an employee, which you can imagine led to all sorts of legal chaos

in the late 80s Jeff decided to shutter the band. Bev Bevan wanted to continue but Jeff considered himself synonymous with ELO being their writer, so eventually the two of them agreed to let Bev tour under the name ELO Part II with a lot of the members of the classic lineup. In the early 2000s, Jeff wanted in again but the "employees" thing and some legal trouble between him and Part II left him wanting to start fresh. No one knows the full story, but Bev, who was seemingly still enthusiastic about touring, suddenly decided to retire. Part II had to rebrand to The Orchestra, no longer having a The Move representative, but kept touring. Meanwhile Jeff did an album and a short tour with his new ELO, which had their classic keyboard player but The Orchestra had basically everyone else from the classic lineup. Jeff's ELO went dormant until 2015 where it went by the literal name of Jeff Lynne's ELO. Keyboard player Richard Tandy recently passed away, and with violinist Mik Kaminski retiring this year from the Orchestra, ELO has not one but two ships, one of which has been completely and thoroughly Theseused and the other just one plank away.

The Hype Williams duo made some great hypnagogic pop in 2010-12, and then stopped. Then in 2016 it turned out that they handed the project over to some completely different people, who released two or three more albums since then. These new releases suck in comparison.

Napalm Death was what popped up first in my mind. I remember it being a bit weird at the time with a band that swapped every single member.

Oh, man. I've totally heard of over half of these bands.

Jinjer is still awesome!

That makes sense, I suppose the bootleg song Heavy Metal Kids was also from that proto-Neu period? Because as great as it is it's such a different aesthetic...

Btw what are your thoughts on early Kraftwerk/Organisation in general? Do you enjoy those albums? I found them wildly varying in quality, ranging from incredible to unlistenable...

The Ink Spots are an interesting case. They're a vocal group from the 30s. Not only did that group Theseus itself and then dissolve by the 50s, but afterward there were legal disputes. A bunch of the past members claimed rights to the name. Courts ultimately said 'nobody owns the name, you can all use it'. So anybody with any connection was going around performing as The Ink Spots, and those groups were also changing members. Over the decades there were probably multiple fully Theseus'd versions of the group going at the same time.

Andrew Hickey has a good podcast episode on it that you can listen to/read. https://500songs.com/podcast/the-ink-spots-thats-when-your-heartaches-begin/

I never knew bands could reproduce by mitosis.

fair enough they aren't known for any particular song more so then thier art performances.

I think "The Skatalites" qualify, simply out of the age of the band.

Not up to date personally, but I feel like at one point Guns n' Roses was just Axl and all different musicians

I don't know about other bands but the bit about iron maiden is really stretched.

I guess if you consider the first lineup to be the one for their first concert in a bar's basement, alright. But if you take the first album, Dave Murray was already in the band and still is.

And half that band half already died almost 50 years ago.

Yeah, ‘Heavy Metal Kids’ was on ‘K4’, which is a recording from a Radio Bremen concert (with pretty good quality). The track names there are unofficial, afaik. Some of them could be variations on properly released tracks or those recorded on other bootlegs.

Frankly I myself amn't a fan of some early Hütter-led experiments, like the incredibly drawn out ‘Ruck Zuck’, which sounds interesting a couple times and is kinda meh after that. This particular track was reinterpreted by the different lineups, and Organisation's version is groovy, while Neu-Schneider's one is more hypnotic and at the same time raw in comparison.

It's very obvious that Kraftwerk were still looking for their proper sound back then. I'm due for a relisten of the first albums, but also am in no hurry to do that, as I never could find anything quite catching the ear. But completely dismissing them like Kraftwerk did is imo unwarranted, it's a document of the era. Also Dinger was bringing some energy to the music that they couldn't properly realize until Hütter was gone.

Foreigner

Napalm Death though the current line-up has been the same since their third album with sad exemption of Jesse Pintado who passed away in 2006.

IIRC that was the plan, but it turns out worldwide metal audiences don't really work that way.

Glenn Miller Orchestra was formed a while after Glenn Miller (of "Glenn Miller and his orchestra"-fame) disappeared in 1942. The new band was more or less a continuation of the old band, with some overlap in members. They're still active today.

IIRC, the intention was for Deep Purple to continuously have members come and go, effectively making them a Band of Theseus. However, there was one lineup that was a lot more successful and famous, so changing the lineup would be detrimental to success.

Yes, that's because it was. The album Chinese Democracy was basically a solo project by Axl.

I don't want to set the world on fiiiire.

Newsboys, a major Christian rock band founded in 1985. All original members have been replaced.

Their most-recent lead singer, formerly of DC Talk, turned out to be a super rapey POS.

Blood Sweat & Tears had like 200 members, my dad knew one of the founding members and went to one of their concerts a couple years back. Got to talk to them after the show and not one of them had even heard of the guy. Feels like the ultimate example of this

Tangential, but I this made me realize I honestly don't know the member names of most of the bands I listen to. I kinda know their faces if they have videos.

Founding members are those who founded the band, who are (potentially) different from anyone on any record.

Although Judas Priest's case is special, according to a comment below.

I’d say Kraftwerk was Ralf und Florian initially, but I’d suggest Karl became an essential member from The Man Machine onwards.

Ralf and Florian weren’t ones to give any credit unless credit is due, and Karl’s name is all over many of their best songs and composed many of their most famous melodies.

I find Kraftwerk post-Karl way too sterile and Karl post-Kraftwerk too unrefined. I think Ralf and Karl really complemented each other in terms of composition and production.

I just read up on it, and wow, yeah, the stories about Tait are pretty repey. It's pitiful in several ways.

Journey?

Any originals left in that band?

It turns out it was I who misread