Belphegor. My friend used to listen to them in high school a lot when I was just getting into metal, and 10 years later I started giving them a go. Now I’ve been listening to them with some regularity and have some favorite songs, which also show up in my rotation regularly.

The Beatles

Black metal as a genre. I could not believe that anyone seriously listened to that. It was either random noise or actually scary stuff (I am the black wizards actually scared me for some reason lol). But after enough exposure and playing Freezing moon myself, I actually got to enjoy it to the point where now I listend to black metal 80% of the time.

In the same vein, “Sons of Winter and Stars” by Wintersun was so unharmonized and terrible to me when I first listened to it, but after a few listens it became one of my favourite songs

I couldn’t stand Linkin Park when they were first getting popular. I felt that they were too edgelord-y for me and wrote them off. Now, I wish I had actually given them a shot earlier on.

Babymetal, it’s early days had so much vitriol throw at them and I was right there.

Ghost. I always wanted to like them, but could not get into their sound. When they won their Grammy in 2015(?) I called a buddy who was huge into them and asked him to curate a playlist for me. I could not do it.

Then in 2018 I saw them open for Iron Maiden, something about seeing them in person. Papa and the Ghouls had this energy about them. Now they are one of my top listened to bands.

Skrillex. At first I thought he was making random noise. But the more I listened, the more I could hear the musicality and innovation of it. Then I learnt he can actually play guitar and piano. The appreciation of Skrillex got me onto other dubby type bands.

I didn’t realise U2 once did make great music! Can recommend 1001 albums generator - it’s righting a few musical wrongs in my brain :)

I wasn’t a fan of ’80s pop music when it came out. But now there’s a layer of nostalgia, and the weirdness of that music is now fascinating to me. So I might not actually like it still, but now I appreciate it.

Most of the pop music hits I loathed back in the ‘80s as a teenager. Sounds like comfortable nostalgia now and the snobbery I had about what ‘real music’ supposed to be is gone.

Mindless Self Indulgence

Meshuggah:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9LpMZuBEMk

Listened to them before I got into metal, came back to them later and now love them. That’s from probably one of their more accessible records, they also have more experimental stuff like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw3SdOFmubU

Slipknot.

Still don’t like the look the band has, but I like the music now.

Korn is almost the same except I still also don’t really like their music.

Fall Out Boy

This comment goes for pretty much the whole grunge genre, but especially Pearl Jam. I hated the vocals. But then I went a few years without listening to the radio at all so I forgot they existed, and got pretty into Rush. I guess Geddy’s vocals desensitized me or something because I eventually stumbled on Pearl Jam again and… they actually kicked ass.