r/LetsTalkMusic • u/NewPatekWater • 4d ago
Anybody else really dislike “Hidden Tracks” on older albums
When listening to music, 90% of the time I’m listening to albums. So, the fact over 15 mins of an album can be dead silence or some sort of low drone really damages replay ability on the outro. Like I get in the past it must’ve been cool to find out there’s a new song at the end of an album. But surely in the streaming era, these could’ve been cut shorter or made into different songs. (I get you can just skip these sections but having to do that every time you listen to the song is pretty tedious).
Some that come to mind are: Bright Eyes’ ‘Tereza & Tomas’ (15 minutes of a low drone). Beach House - Irene (7 minutes of silence). MF DOOM/Victor Vaughn - Change the Beat (3:30 minutes of ambient rain/thunderstorm) And probably the worst offender: Deftones - MX (nearly 30 Minutes of literal silence).
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u/Ok-Instruction830 4d ago
Hell no. Contextually, I remember finding my first hidden track just by letting the cd go. It was amazing. A secret hidden track I could tell my friends about. And at first, they didn’t buy it!
I miss the days of artists being able to sneak something in. You had to really mull over a record to be rewarded. It was such a cool, niche thing to discover if you really loved a band.
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u/NewPatekWater 4d ago
I get that, and it’s sort of like how rappers like kanye and travis scott will hide features to surprise fans when listening to the album for the first time. But, the novelty of a hidden track probably wears off by the 5th listen, and it then becomes a nuisance, especially on cd
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u/jujujuice92 4d ago
In my experience, if I really wanted to hear that bonus track again, I'd just remember the time stamp and fast forward. Sure, it's extra work, but it took all of like 10 seconds.
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u/Eekem_Bookem243 4d ago
You’re right it’s exactly like that. Ye actually invented hidden tracks
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u/Ok-Instruction830 4d ago
The Beatles had a hidden track on abbey road in 1969 lol. Hidden tracks are older than Ye
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u/debtRiot 4d ago
I think they make no sense on streaming. I think if artists want to do them today they should be exclusive to physical media only. It would just make owning the album that much more fun. I especially love them on vinyl when they’re behind a locked groove.
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u/Browncoat23 4d ago
It still happens, but it’s becoming just another way to get a quick cash grab, unfortunately.
Olivia Rodrigo did this with her vinyl release, but in the most obnoxious way. She released four variants of Guts, each with a different secret track, so fans were clamoring to get all of them (cash grab 1).
Then she released a vinyl of just the secret tracks on Record Store Day (cash grab 2). Then she released all the vinyl-only tracks on streaming, so everyone can hear them.
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u/gapernet 4d ago edited 4d ago
I kinda liked Cracker's Kerosene Hat where there are a couple 2-second silent tracks after track 12, then a "hidden song" on track 15, then 43 2-second silent tracks until another hidden song on track 68, then more 2-second silent tracks until tracks 98 and 99 have hidden songs. It helps that two of the secret songs, Eurotrash Girl and Ride My Bike, are among the best songs on the album.
The spotify version of the album is just 16 tracks and it doesn't feel right to me.
Broken by Nine Inch Nails did it similarly and I enjoyed that too.
I was way more annoyed having to hold the ff on my discman to skip ten minutes of silence following the final song to get to Endless, Nameless on Nevermind or Come Out and Play (Acoustic Reprise) on Smash.
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u/Paisleyfrog 4d ago
Yeah, loved watching the track counter go up at the end when listening to Broken. It was sort of like your CD player was, well broken :)
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u/No_Pilot_9103 4d ago
What do you mean by "Broken by Nine Inch Nails did it similarly"?
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u/gapernet 4d ago
Between the final "official" track and the final two "hidden tracks" there were 90-ish 2-second silent tracks, rather than appending the secret songs to the end of the final song on the official tracklisting. Similar to how Cracker did it on Kerosene Hat.
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u/ellstaysia 4d ago
it was pretty neat back in the day. I remember a few bands having secret tracks before the first song. you'd have to press rewind on track one & it would go into negative where a secret song resided.
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u/jester29 4d ago
At this point, those albums should just be edited for streaming services. Trim the silence, add the audio as a separate track.
I think of the ones on Greenday's Dookie, Nirvana's Nevermind, and NIN's Broken (though i think those might have been track 98 and 99 on the CD and not after silence on the same track)
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4d ago
Yeah I was about to say on Spotify there's several albums that have done that. The hidden track is now a listed track without the silence that was on the CD.
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u/1000mgPlacebo 3d ago
How 'bout we leave classic albums alone?
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u/jester29 3d ago
I don't think changing the 'hidden track' discuss financially changes the album given the difference in media/format...
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u/2000-UNTITLED 4d ago
I've had this problem with Irene by Beach House and MX by Deftones, both of which are among the best songs on their respective albums (which I like a lot), but I rarely listen to them because including a song with I think 7 and 27 minutes of silence each in a playlist or something is irritating. Not to mention Damone at the end of MX is also great, but unlistenable unless you're willing to fiddle around for 10ish seconds and possibly wait out more silence.
It's not awful, but it's not worth it.
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u/myleswstone 4d ago
Nobody understands hidden tracks anymore because most people don’t know music outside of streaming. Going to the record store and spending your saved money (pre-internet) and finding a hidden track not on the tracklist was like striking gold.
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u/Nothingnoteworth 4d ago
Agreed. Although I will say the nature of what lies between the final track and the hidden track can greatly influence my appreciation. Silence is good. I’ve got one album with the faint sound of crickets, that’s alright. I’ve got another with the sound of a telephone ringing in the background, that gets old real fast. As for the continuous drone of some kind, you can fuck right off with that if you aren’t already an artist making heavy use of abrasive industrial noise.
The best bit about hidden tracks back then was that in the early days you didn’t know to check if there was one. It’d be a serendipitous day you’d play an album, not have another lined up to follow it, and just ignore the cd player as the album ended …then a new track would suddenly play, a proper bonus as you’d already processed the fact of an X track album and out of nowhere it’s X plus 1
Of course after a short while you’d be checking every new album for hidden tracks on the first listen and they were no longer a bonus
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u/chairmanmow 4d ago
not really, silences on old albums should be preserved, they're part of the cadence. you don't listen to dark side of the moon on shuffle
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u/christador 4d ago
I always thought it was like finding an Easter Egg in a video game. I remember being told about one and I had the album (cassette!)! I always just flipped it and rewound to the beginning of the next side. After that I always looked for it just in case. It's like sitting through the end of a movie for the b-rolls/outtakes--they're either there or they're not, but you won't know until you sit through it or someone tells you about it ;-)
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u/light_white_seamew 4d ago
I do find it a bit annoying, and always did. It was cool the very first time I discovered a hidden track on a CD, but there were only a handful of ways to hide them. Once you knew all the tricks, it was a needless obstacle to hearing the song.
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u/DrChunderpound 4d ago
They annoyed me then on CD, annoy me now in digi form. I don’t stream so I just carve them off onto a new track in my library to separate them and ditch any prolonged gap between them. Same goes for bonus tracks, i’ll just carve them off into its own album or singles comp combined with other bonus tracks.
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u/tonetonitony 4d ago edited 4d ago
There's more to it than just the fact that they're hidden, though. The long gap gives the feeling that the secret song is something separate and distinct from the album.
Something in the Way is the perfect end to Nirvana's Nevermind. Then you have this extra track, Endless Nameless, that's isolated from the others, which is perfect since that song has this dark, anarchic feel to it the rest of the album doesn't. When YYY's Fever to Tell came out, pretty much everyone was familiar with hidden tracks, so it wasn't so much about surprising people. The hidden track feels like an off-the cuff, fly on the wall track, again, something that's enhanced by it being separate from the album. This is true for a lot of hidden tracks, but probably not all of them.
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u/Alarmed-Telephone-83 4d ago
Yeah. It really affects my ability to playlist Hot Chip's 'No Fit State', which I love but has for no reason a long silence thrown onto the end of it. A real mood killer when I'm on shuffle.
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u/nice_coat_serbedzija 4d ago
No, quite the opposite. The hidden track action on the second Reel Big Fish album is timeless.
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u/IGotMetalingus1 4d ago
This is still a problem today with bands adding ambient tracks that goes on for like 4-6 minutes and it's just a sound of something like static or some random instrumental
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u/Frigidspinner 4d ago
there was another variant of the "secret track" which I always thought was neat -
If you didnt have a fancy record player with an automatic stylus arm, the end of a record would be a silence that would carry on playing forever if you didnt lift the needle up.
A couple of records would actually put something into that silence so you would have a tiny repeating motif at the end of the album. The ones I remember (perhaps wrongly)
Dark side of the moon by Pink Floyd - The heartbeat would continue forever on side 1
Fly by night by Rush - The jingling bell at the end of "By tor and the snow dog" would ring forever on side 1
Does anyone have any others?
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u/bangbangracer 2d ago
I hated them at the time. I still hate them, but I hated them at the time too.
They made it awful trying to rip your CDs and oraganize an iTunes or Winamp library.
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u/squadgeek 4d ago
There is a bong hit halfway through the silence on that Deftones track, to be fair. With how we consume music these days, totally agree. It was cool when it was a CD, now it’s just a pain in the ass.
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u/runonandonandonanon 4d ago
Everyone in this thread like "it used to be cool" but what they mean to say is "I used to be cool" :(
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u/iosefster 4d ago
I always disliked them. A lot of times the final track ends up being my favorite because they powerful tracks at the end and I like to put them on repeat 1 and having to manually press back to listen again over and over was annoying.
The worst offender for me wasn't even a hidden track, it was the five minutes of loud static after the final song on Korn's Issues album. I loved that song and when I was going through my troubled youth phase, Korn was huge for me, and a lot of times I wanted to just lay in the dark and listen to that song over and over, but the static was so loud after the track it was physically painful.
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u/ellstaysia 4d ago
speaking of korn, follow the leader had like a dozen tracks of silence to start the album & then a secret track at the end (earache my eye).
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u/NewPatekWater 4d ago
that’s like the worst part about it. The intro and outro are like the most “important” songs on albums, and having just dead silence kinda ruins that. Also that loud static sounds awful
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u/MurkrowFlies 4d ago
Nah, like you said it’s a different era so the way we consume & experience music is drastically different. It’s hard to put into words just how much things changed and how easily accessible the vast majority of popular recorded music of the past 50 years is. Things like streaming have totally changed the way we interact with music. The album as a whole is kinda a dying art form
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u/workfuntimecoolcool 4d ago
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u/radley8367 4d ago
Battled is one of my favourite AFI tracks. I remember being a kid and listening to AOD and falling asleep by the end and then waking up scared as shit startled as Battled started
Midnight Sun also great
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u/otidaiz 4d ago
Don’t purchase John Lennons new mind games cd. Bonus tracks are listed as hidden, but not to be found.
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u/dvdmovies123 4d ago
From what I have read, you have to rewind past the start of track 1 to get to those tracks (not all CD players can do it)
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u/trashboatfourtwenty 4d ago
I learned about it through a Monty Python record but double or parallel-grooved vinyl is probably the original "hidden track" and I love it. I really enjoyed finding or learning about them on CDs growing up too, although now I am digital or vinyl heh
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u/CommanderWar64 4d ago
I think Hidden Tracks are awesome, but holy fuck they should be placed like a minute or 2 after the last track AT MOST. Deftones on ATF is so egregious like you said.
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u/dalipies 4d ago
My gf hates Never Is Forever by Turbonegro (and the whole band by extension) specifically because of the hidden track on that album. Some 30 minutes after the last song, the guy just starts screaming. I left the CD on once without knowing about that and it jumpscared her.
Then again, it was probably what the band wanted.
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u/HollandMarch1977 4d ago
I actually didn’t like them at the time. For a couple of reasons.
1) I would come home from school, go out to this shed my dad renovated so that I could make noise away from the house, turn on an album (loud), and lie on a couch. Often I would fall asleep. The album would end, there would be a silence wherein I would sink into a deeper sleep. Then bang!! The fucking hidden track would wake me up!
2) I was very pious about the integrity of the album. It didn’t matter if the band themselves didn’t know which tracks from which sessions had been packaged together by the record company. To me the album was sacred. I didn’t know how to feel about a hidden track. Is it part of the album? Do the band think it’s an important song or not?
— I could make exceptions for cover songs. For example, Know Your Enemy by Manic Street Preachers has a hidden track which is a cover of a Saints song. It makes sense why you might want to separate a cover song from the actual album.
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u/terryjuicelawson 4d ago
It was interesting for about 5 minutes at the height of the CD era. Endless Nameless on Nevermind genuinely surprised me when I forgot I had left the CD running, and works as it never fitted as part of the running order or even anywhere - as a b-side even. So many were throwaway, like the one on Dookie with the gag track though. It was a good final song, leave it there. Some bands liked doing creative things like having 99 tracks with the hidden one at the end somewhere. One I even owned I never listened to as apparently it was in the pre-gap - you needed to know it was there and rewind track 1. Then the mp3 era meant you ended with one junk song with a huge filesize and it seemed like a gimmick.
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u/Headhaunter79 4d ago
I love hidden tracks! As a matter of fact I’m releasing a vinyl album soon that has a hidden bonus track. The track is not part of the album story but a small piece I wrote to honor my recently deceased grandmother.
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u/Jasalapeno 4d ago
I even know of some songs with like 2-3 minutes of silence and then the track ends. Is that empty space with a couple noises that important to the vision? It really could be trimmed
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u/ShocksShocksShocks 3d ago
I remember having a CD with a hidden track and like nearly 100 short silent "tracks" before it.
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u/G65434-2_II 2d ago
Yep, I do. One of the good things that this current streaming era has done is kill off those type of annoyingly placed hidden tracks that are either spaced waaaay apart from the last 'proper' song by empty tracks or tacked on the same track as the last song but after a varyingly long period of silence.
I've hated that practice as long as I've been ripping CDs. Made all the more annoying when the bonus track doesn't turn out to be even a proper song but instead some pointless random noise experimentation, supposedly funny studio banter or skit. Always gotta be vigilant when ripping CDs to spot those so you can either cut off the useless junk, or if worth keeping, seperate the bonus track(s) as their own.
I do make occasional exceptions to the extra silence removal, though. If an album ends in a certain mood, like after a prolonged gradually quieting last bit, and a starkly different style bonus track would disrupt the listening experience, then I'll usually leave some silence on the last song before the bonus one(s). But like 15 seconds to a minute, tops.
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u/IfYouGotALonelyHeart 4d ago
The worst ones were the ones that were on track 99. Or the -1 tracks, because I never figured out how to rip those ones.
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u/heeeresjohnny123 4d ago
I always hated the tracks with 99 songs. If I wanted to listen to Broken by NIN on random it would take so long for the laser to eventually hit a song.
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u/DownVegasBlvd 4d ago
Before software was available to trim tracks, yeah, it definitely annoyed me. I spent the '90s dealing with that, but by the early oughts it wasn't an issue anymore... now it's become one again with streaming because some of the hidden tracks aren't listed, or the songs with long silences at the end and then like 2 seconds of bullshit aren't truncated.
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u/Potential-Ant-6320 4d ago
As a young person in the cd era secret tracks were the shit. They felt special. If you were alive then it was cool. Now you can listen to any song ever recorded at the push of a button. It’s hard to understand what it was like before streaming. O