Genre Roulette

"This is the thing about the historical adventures... they're not even a dead end of Doctor Who so much as a different show that inadvertently got made under the name of Doctor Who. So that watching them, the major work becomes trying to explain how the heck this story fits in between giant ants and whatever comes next week."

— TARDIS Eruditorium on the Doctor Who story "The Crusade"

Genre Roulette is what the name suggests: A single work that switches between distinct story genres, seemingly at random, e.g. a TV show switches from Comedy then Romance into Horror in just one episode.

As it's hard enough to write well in one genre, Genre Roulette can be hard to pull off seriously. Comedies and parodies, on the other hand, usually don't raise any eyebrows when they do this, provided they continue to bring the funny.

Musical Genre Roulette is closely related to Genre Mashup. The difference is that a Genre Roulette album can have a country song followed by a punk song, while an Genre Mashup album will have a song that's country and punk at the same time. (For the curious, that genre actually exists and is known as cowpunk.) Making matters more complicated is that it is possible to write a song that fuses country and punk (which is Genre Mashup) and a song that suddenly shifts from country to punk mid-song (which is probably more an example of Genre Roulette). For this reason it's often difficult to define where one trope ends and the next begins, especially since some bands liberally use both techniques.

When applied to video game genres (i.e., the style of gameplay), it's Gameplay Roulette. When you are changing genres despite having worked exclusively with only one before, it becomes a Genre Shift. Compare/Contrast with Genre-Busting, which has its story genres established from the very beginning, whereas Genre Roulette will continuously switch between genres as the story progresses. See also Genre-Prolific Creator when it's applied to different works made by the same person.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The Excel♡Saga anime played this with pretty much every episode being a parody of a certain genre. Everything from War Movies, to Dating Sims, to Sports, to Variety Shows to Post-Apocalyptic is given a once over. Excel Saga made a point of this, opening every episode with manga author Koshi Rikdo giving his (reluctant) approval to give the series a Genre Shift. The style and weirdness remained consistent enough despite this, however.
• Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi. It starts off with a parody of RPGs, follows up with a sci-fi/Giant Mech parody (including a mind-boggling time paradox involving a miscolored Gurren Lagann), and keeps juggling genres from there...
• Brigadoon: Marin and Melan is a sci-fi adventure drama, but it's also a middle-school Slice of Life show, a comedy with occasional parodic elements, and a teen romance. One minute you're in the middle of a serious political discussion at an alien council, and the next minute, the aliens are trying to settle their dispute with a pie fight. Serious Mood Whiplash may result.
• Gintama cycles between being a gag manga, completely serious battle manga, and heartwarming slice-of-life (well, as close as it can get in Alternate Universe historical Edo, anyways). According to Word of God each chapter is its own genre.
• Cowboy Bebop seamlessly combines the Space Western, Film Noir and Yakuza genres, among others.
• The Deadly Sins of Evil Light Novel series all have different kinds of stories for the respective arcs they detail in mothy's Evillious Chronicles franchise. The Lunacy of Duke Venomania is a twisted romance, Evil Food Eater Conchita is a tragic horror story, Gift From the Princess Who Brought Sleep is a mystery novel, etc.
• Ah! My Goddess has been around for a while, and it goes through quite a few arcs that shake up the usual screwball Romantic Comedy for more serious fare. The classic Out-of-Genre Experience was the Lord of Terror arc, where Urd shifted from Pretty Freeloader to world-threatening menace, and several later arcs were also more fantasy adventure or romantic drama, to say nothing of several arcs focused around motorcycle racing. These gradually became more common, until by the Niflheim arc, it was a full-fledged fantasy adventure series with a romance-focused premise, largely because Keiichi and Belldandy's relationship had been frozen at a middle-school level for so long that there was really nothing more that the author could do with it.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is told in different parts, with each part featuring a different member of the Joestar family as its protagonist, and often times a radically different plot. The stories of each part can range from a Victorian drama about fighting vampires, to a more comedic school life story about tracking down a serial killer.
• Space☆Dandy tells a different story with every episode, which can span a wide range of story structures and tones. It incorporates the multiple genres well, which is largely due to the fact that, with the exception of the finale, each episode is a self contained story, and nothing that happens in one episode (even literally everyone dying) will affect the next episode.

Comic Books

• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen goes, in order of publication, from Steampunk thriller to Victorian Alien Invasion to a combination of 1950s spy thriller and Zeerust (with multiple other genre pastiches inside a Book Within a Book) to musical set in the 1910s to psychedelic occult story set in the 1960s to a Black Comedy parody of Harry Potter set in 2009. And we don't even know what all the final volume will get into by the time it's done. Seeing as how it's setting contains characters and elements from all genres of fiction, this is probably to be expected.
• Grant Morrison's Seven Soldiers does this deliberately with each of the miniseries exhibiting the traits of a particular style of comic genre. The Return of Bruce Wayne and The Multiversity are also set up the same way, with each issue being a different genre based on the setting (time in RoBW and the worlds in Multiversity).
• Frank and Ernest lands in a lot of different situations.
• Aquaman can be this at times; while most of the iconic DC heroes have their own niche, Aquaman is constantly reinvented. At one point he went from warrior king, to exiled Barbarian Hero, to Messianic Archetype, to Street Level Crimefighter, to mentor to a Heroic Fantasy-inspired Legacy Character in the span of 30 issues.
• Heroes For Hope, an X-Men charity one-shot from the 80s, has twenty credited writers, including comic book luminaries like Stan Lee and Alan Moore and famous authors like Stephen King, George R. R. Martin, and Harlan Ellison. While you can't fault the pedigree or the good intentions, considering each writer is swapped out every two to three pages, the story is all over the map. Within ten pages, the book goes from a morose Magneto nightmare about famine zombies with "dead babies still clinging pointlessly to dead breasts" to Storm getting a Pie in the Face.
• In keeping with Moore's (and Dr. Gull's) view of history as a complex multi-faceted structure that can be viewed and understood from multiple angles and perspectives, From Hell sometimes seems to shift genres depending on whose viewpoint we're seeing. To whit: from Abberline's perspective, the story comes off as a more-or-less standard Police Procedural following the heroic detective pursuing the evil serial killer; from the prostitutes' perspective, it's a gritty crime drama following the daily struggle to survive in the seedy underbelly of London; from Walter Sickert's perspective, it's a personal drama about middle-class Victorian life; and from Gull's perspective, it's experimental speculative fiction incorporating concepts like mysticism, predestination and time travel. ^note  Note that the fantastical elements are never seen from anyone's perspective other than Gull's, leaving open the possibility that he was an Unreliable Narrator.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1: In the Golden Age the book was a Superhero story foremost, but issues focusing on Steve Trevor were Spy Fiction, issues focusing on Etta Candy were generally Westerns, Holliday Girl issues were Teen Drama Mysteries, and rather often the characters would travel to a different world, sub-dimension or time to allow for an issue of Chivalric Romance, Heroic Fantasy, or an adventure on the high seas. There was even a baseball issue, that was mixed with Spy Fiction as a Steve Trevor focused tale.
• Clone Wars Adventures covers a wide emotional spectrum of genres in each new issue (more than one Cosmic Horror Story, Jedi on spy missions, slapstick Armed Farces tales, War Is Hell stories, etc.).

Fan Works

• The first half of Sluagh reads like a hard-boiled detective story, morphs into a war epic, then into eldritch horror around the Battle of Druim Cett, and then turns into high fantasy (complete with mythic landscapes and Gods), all of which clashed quite a bit with Rowling's brand of Urban Fantasy. Also, there are shifts within the shifts and they occur with little to no warning.
• Hivefled started off as a soap opera, descended into Gorn, then went into action thriller, then into a light-hearted adventure, then back to the action until the two stories met, upon which the genre did a 180 and became a wacky comedy, though now it's becoming a dramedy.
• The Vinyl and Octavia Series essentially jumps genre with each new story in the series, although primarily it's a comedy. At time of writing, we have: an action-adventure (with little comedy), comedic slice of life, romance, murder mystery, courtroom drama, and prison break as the different genres in the series.
• The Racket-Rotter Chronicles seems to change genre with every new Arc; It starts off as a Slice of Life Romance with comedic overtones (Arc 1), then becomes more of a dramedy (Arc 2), then turns into Gorn/Horror (Arc 3), and is now currently a sort of horror/friendship hybrid (Arc 4).
• The Infinite Loops. Even ignoring the Mega Crossover of the premise, individual snips within the same chapter can range from comedic, to surreal to horrifying to romantic to philosophical. It helps that there are over a dozen authors... per story.
• The Victors Project: While the dystopian setting remains constant, the tone and style of the story vary from chapter to chapter, going from Noir Episode, to tales of La Résistance, to family drama, to the pure comedy gold of Dido's chapter.
• Arcadia is ultimately a harem smut fic but it goes back and forth between Teen Drama, conspiracy thriller, Urban Fantasy, Romance and elements of Horror as well.

Films — Animation

• Millennium Actress becomes many genres, including Romance, Drama, War, Action and Sci-Fi, all reflecting the acting career of its protagonist.

Films — Live-Action

• Cloverfield: The three installments of the franchise are horror, but it jumps from one horror genre to the other. The first movie is a Found Footage deconstruction of Kaiju movies (as in, how awful would it be to be in a city attacked by a giant monster), the second is a Psychological Thriller in which three people are trapped in an underground bunker, and the third is a Sci-Fi Horror in which a space station experience goes haywire.
• Daredreamer has Winston and Jennie's daydreams run the gamut from a punk-rock robot apocalypse to a gentle ballet, with the filming style shifting to accommodate the different genres.
• Man of the Year does this, shifting between comedy, thriller, drama, and mystery all the time.
• Practical Magic switches between Horror, Romance, and Comedy.
• Xtro, which constantly jumps all over the place.
• Brotherhood of the Wolf is a mystery, martial arts film, monster horror film, drawing room drama, spy film and historical epic depending on the scene.
• Save the Green Planet! has some regular Mood Whiplash, from slapstick comedy to creepy psychological horror, with the odd martial arts scene thrown in.
• Sucker Punch goes from Fantasy, to Thriller, to Action to Horror. The soundtrack also goes from industrial beats and screaming to acoustic ballads with a sole voice to heavy rock songs to rap. The various parts of the movie also experiment with many genres and throw the most interesting ideas together.
• Seen through Western eyes, this is one of the defining characteristics of Bollywood films.
• Cloud Atlas is composed of six interwoven stories, each taking place in a different time period and different genres: a 19th century Historical Fiction/sea story, a 1930's drama about a gifted but troubled composer, a 1970's mystery/political thriller, a dark comedy set in a present-day nursing home, a Dystopia in the future and a second Science Fiction story set After the End set further in the future.
• The Indiana Jones series has pivoted quite a bit over the course of just four movies. The first is an action-love story, the second is an occult thriller, the third is a buddy comedy with a father and son, and the fourth has supernatural and alien overtones reminiscent of Close Encounters of the Third Kind
• Troll can't decide whether it wants to be a horror film or a fantasy adventure. Troll 2 can't decide whether it wants to be a horror comedy or straight up horror.
• The Millennium Bug goes back and forth between a Hillbilly Horrors Slasher Movie and a Kaiju B-Movie. Most of the movie detailing a family surviving the former, until the title beast awakens.
• Detective Dee is a wuxia movie, historical drama, film noir detective story, political thriller, or absurdist comedy? Being that this is a Tsui Hark work, yes.
• Showing the negative effects of this trope, a common criticism of Joy2015 is that it switches back and forth between slapstick comedy and gritty biopic.
• In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, each installment is basically the superhero take on a given genre. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a conspiracy thriller, Ant-Man is a heist flick, Spider-Man: Homecoming is a Coming of Age Story, Thor: Ragnarok is an 80s-style Planetary Romance, etc.
• The Godzilla series does this frequently. Though every film is of course a Kaiju movie at heart, other genre elements are dropped into most installments both for the sake of variety and to cash in on current trends in the Japanese film industry. Many of them could be described as "X but with monsters."
  • Godzilla (1954) and Godzilla Raids Again are essentially black-and-white horror films where the monsters are played entirely for scares and great emphasis is put on the death toll caused by their rampages.
  • King Kong vs. Godzilla is a "salaryman comedy" and partially a spoof of the earlier Kong and Godzilla films, with the monsters presented more as annoyances than legitimate threats and more emphasis placed on humor.
  • Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster is a spy movie.
  • Invasion of Astro-Monster is half Space Opera and half Alien Invasion film.
  • Ebirah, Horror of the Deep and Son of Godzilla are Island of Mystery-based tropical adventure films.
  • All Monsters Attack is a Slice of Life Coming of Age story about a bullied child who looks up to Godzilla like a superhero. Godzilla only appears in dream scenes.
  • Destroy All Monsters, Godzilla vs. Gigan, and Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla are all alien invasion films.
  • Godzilla vs. Hedorah is a surreal horror film with hallucinogenic animated portions.
  • Terror of Mechagodzilla is a spy film and an alien invasion flick, pitting Interpol agents against the secretive invaders.
  • Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah is a Time Travel story and a World War II movie.
  • Godzilla and Mothra: The Battle for Earth is an Indiana Jones-esque adventure film.
  • Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla is a Yakuza film.
  • Godzilla: Final Wars is an almost unclassifiable fusion of futuristic sci-fi, alien invasion, superhero film, martial arts film, and self-parody.
  • Shin Godzilla is a dark political satire that uses Godzilla's attacks as a means of critiquing the modern Japanese government's ineffective responses to disasters like the Fukushima incident in 2011.
• Happy Death Day and its sequel Happy Death Day 2U are both supernatural murder mystery romcom slasher horror dramas, with the latter having a healthy dose of science fiction thrown in for good measure.

Literature

• 2666: The Part about Archimboldi is this. It has bildungsroman, war, science-fiction, romance, satire, picaresque, mythical landscape and horror.
• Gravity's Rainbow, Historical Fiction overall skips between Science Fiction, war, romance, pornography, family tragedy, horror and slapstick comedy. Pynchon does this a lot. It's even more blatant in Against the Day.
• Naked Lunch: Science Fiction, an undercover look at drug culture, raunchy porn, biting social satire, and some hard boiled noir thrown in for good measure.
• Haruhi Suzumiya is known for regularly switching between comedy, science fiction, romance, fantasy, mystery, and regular school life. As a whole though, you can probably put it into Magical Realism, though every piece has its own defined genre.
• House of Leaves is horror. No, wait, it's a satire on literary criticism. No, wait, it's incomprehensible True Art. No, wait, it's a love story...
• Cloud Atlas, which skips between genres with merry abandon.
• The Bible, when taken as a whole, is this. It contains at least 66 books of different genres, like history (e.g., the books of Samuel and books of Kings), poetry (e.g., the book of Job), legal codes (e.g., Leviticus), devotionals (e.g., the Psalms), or even letters (the Letters of St. Paul et al).
• Discworld: Is it a Deconstruction or a Reconstruction? An Affectionate Parody of Lawrence of Arabia or a Whodunnit? About a Bunny-Ears Lawyer trying to make the best out of being a Boxed Crook, or is the protagonist a Cosmic Plaything that falls from one Wacky Wayside Tribe into the other, or a Dirty Harry Determinator who must fight for his family's survival? Silly or played straight? Pratchett goes all over the board with his books.
• Hyperion, the first installment in Hyperion Cantos, does this with the pilgrims' tales, which include a gritty sci-fi war story, a Künstlerroman, an account of a trek up a River of Insanity, a tragic family drama, and a detective story.
• In A Song of Ice and Fire, the genre can vary depending upon the individual character's story. Although the series could loosely be described as Fantasy House Of Cards, there are many more genres. Ned's story in the first book is a dark noir detective genre. Anytime magic itself shows up in the series, it's usually supernatural horror. Euron's role in the story becomes eldritch horror, while his nephew Theon's story is more psychological horror. Jon Snow's fake defection to the Wildlings has the trappings of a spy genre struggling to play the part without Becoming the Mask. His oldest sister Sansa is living in a Prison Break story, except she's stuck at the mercy of an feudal tyrant, has no (real) allies, and is limited to the skills of a 12 year-old. Even when someone does "break her out", the reader knows that she has just traded her physical shackles for psychological ones. And there are more genres beyond this.
• The anthology series Tales from the Year Between is this on two counts. Not only is each of its volumes in a different genre (and a different world, created from scratch by the contributors of that volume), but the individual pieces within each volume bounce around wildly. The first volume alone includes (among other things) erotic pieces, comedic plays, academic essays, horror short stories, and recipes.
• In Ulysses, every section is in a different genre.
• Skulduggery Pleasant has, according to Word of God, a slightly different genre for each book:
  • Book 1: Adventure Story
  • Book 2: Monster Story
  • Book 3: Crime Story
  • Book 4: Vengeance Story
  • Book 5: Landy´s version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers
  • Book 6: Superhero Story
  • Book 7: Sci-Fi Story
  • Book 8: War Story
  • Book 9: Apocalypse Story
• Lord Dunsany's "Fifty-One Tales" takes a style suited to describing nature or fantasy settings, and uses it as a bitter satire on contemporary city life. For instance, religious creatures writing advertisements, or the rich woman who wishes to import the fantastic sphinx:
  "There was a woman in a steel-built city who had all that money could buy, she had gold and dividends and trains and houses, and she had pets to play with, but she had no sphinx."

Needless to say, the sphinx kills her by the end.

• Wildbow does this in all his works. Each work has a primary genre, but as serials published online, there's plenty of time for each story to switch genre for a few chapters before returning.
  • Worm and it's sequel Ward are both superhero stories, but frequently veer into Horror territory with plenty of Body Horror. Additional genres explored include Detective Drama, The Caper, High Fantasy, and by the end of Worm and into Ward, post-apocalyptic and Alien Invasion fiction.
  • Pact is an Urban Fantasy with frequent forays into horror, and heavy use of Mythology.
  • Twig is Bio Punk with frequent (you guessed it) horror moments, set in an Alternate History 1920s reminiscent of the turn of the 20th century, but it also occasionally works as a Psychological Thriller and has some Fantastic Comedy moments courtesy of the quirky Ensemble Cast.

Live-Action TV

• The Afterparty is a ''Rashomon style murder mystery where every story is told in the style of a different genre; one is a rom-com, one is a stylized action film, one is a musical, one is a horror film, one is a surreal animated story etc.
• While Twin Peaks started as a Detective Drama, it manages to alternate comedy, science-fiction and horror elements from one scene to another.
• One episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus keeps flipping between genres, as lampshaded by the captions:
  TODAY IN PARLIAMENT HAS NOW BECOME THE CLASSIC SERIAL
  THE CLASSIC SERIAL HAS NOW BECOME THE TUESDAY DOCUMENTARY
  THE TUESDAY DOCUMENTARY HAS BECOME "CHILDREN'S STORY"
  THE CHILDREN'S STORY HAS GONE BACK INTO THE TUESDAY DOCUMENTARY
  NO IT HASN'T
  NOW IT'S BECOME A PARTY POLITICAL BROADCAST
  NO, SORRY, "RELIGION TODAY"
• Doctor Who pushes the line between this trope and outright Genre-Busting. It did so even more in the era of William Hartnell, who played the First Doctor, before the series had quite settled into its format.
  • In Season 2, with William Hartnell, at a point after the writers had started experimenting but before they settled into a format, you get: a whimsical children's story with a Green Aesop with the cast trying to bring justice to a murder, a rather dark and violent Alien Invasion B-Movie-like story with Daleks set After the End, a claustrophobic Bottle Episode and Deconstruction of the modus operandi the series would eventually have, a goofy but morbid Black Comedy featuring Emperor Nero, an almost dreamlike Planetary Romance featuring four races of Insectoid Aliens with unique psychologies and cultures, a Shakespeare pastiche Costume Drama dealing with religious prejudice with Gratuitous Iambic Pentameter, a tongue-in-cheek story involving Just One Second Out of Sync time travel paradoxes, an extremely silly Dalek serial involving Wacky Wayside Tribe sequences and Dalek slapstick, and a Wham Episode featuring the first appearance of another member of the Doctor's race.
  • Season 3 - a Star Trek: The Original Series-like allegorical story about beautiful evil aliens and hideous good aliens trying to get off a dying planet, a Bottle Episode with no Doctor or companions about a couple of space cadets dying miserably in a Dalek-infested jungle, a Bathos-filled comedy about the Trojan War, a Space Opera featuring Daleks, recurring villains, multiple planets, ancient Egypt and the Family-Unfriendly Death of two companions, a historical deconstructing the companion's trust of the Doctor set amongst an unspeakable real-life atrocity, a whimsical children's horror with evil clowns and dolls, a comedy Musical Episode with cowboys, a Planet of Hats deconstructing the Doctor's modus operandi, and an evil computer trying to take over (then) modern-day London.
  • As showrunner Steven Moffat put it: "Sometimes it's comedy, sometimes thriller, sometimes horror, sometimes children's stories, the silliest stories you've ever seen. Sometimes it's all that in the same episode". In Series Five of the reboot alone we had a thriller, a dystopian rebellion, historical Science Fiction with Churchill, a horror-adventure, a comedy romp with vampires, a Dream Within a Dream mystery, a political intrigue with reptile people, A Very Special Episode about Vincent van Gogh and depression, a comedy, and a Wham Episode.
  • Series 6 had a conspiracy thriller, a madcap pirate romp, a fantasy laden with horrors, a sinister clone saga, a Deconstruction, an assassination plot, a horrifying episode about dolls, a romantic drama, a "What Do They Fear?" Episode, a buddy comedy, and a wedding.
  • Series 7 had the concept that 'every episode was a different genre of blockbuster movie' with movie posters for each story. In 7A, there's: a conspiracy thriller, an Anachronism Stew family sci-fi, a Spaghetti Western, a blockbuster alien invasion, a Noir Episode, and a Christmas Special. In 7B, there's a Hollywood Hacking plot, Planetary Romance with Lovecraftian elements, an old-school Second Doctor-style "Base Under Siege" story with one of Two's most iconic monsters, an old-school Fourth Doctor-style Gothic Horror (set during the time Four was the Doctor in real life), indie sci-fi horror with time paradoxes, and a Victorian Black Comedy. (And some Wham Episodes that don't fit this template.)
• Community: that is all. It's gone through just about everything on the Episodes page, along with plenty of more original ideas. Even the Paintball Episodes (yes, there's more than one) parody different genres.
• Super Sentai, and by association Power Rangers in its yearly theming, in addition to its Toku base genre. This also applies with the Kamen Rider series as well. Episodes can run this line in all these series.
• Despite the title implying a clear-cut Dom Com, Family Matters had this in spades. It really was more of a Dom Com, or at least a Sitcom than anything else; but Steve Urkel suddenly began inventing new forms of Applied Phlebotinum that would have been totally out of place in the show's original concept. Some episodes turn so serious in tone that they it's hard to see them as funny episodes of a comedy show. And a few, but only a few, episodes involved Carl's job as a police officer to such an extent that they seem unusually close to the genre of police or action shows.
• The [adult swim] short Too Many Cooks, which starts as a parody of Full House and other 90s sitcoms, then becomes (among other things) a gritty Cop Show, a Slasher Movie, a Space Opera pastiche of Star Wars and Star Trek, a G.I. Joe-like cartoon, a political thriller involving lots of assassinations, and a Medical Drama, as well as featuring a giant anthropomorphic cat that can shoot lasers out of its eyes (and is really a Terminator-like robot in disguise). It's so meta that at one point, there is what looks like a literal Reset Button.
• Star Trek: War movie, hospital drama, gumshoe noir, political thriller, gothic romance, wacky comedy. This franchise has done it all, and that's not even counting the holodeck episodes. (Star Trek: Strange New Worlds even contributes the franchise's first Musical Episode.)
• Stranger Things: Every group of characters (though some of those groups are only a single person) has its own genre. As the show progresses and their stories converge, some of these genres begin to bleed together, especially among the main characters.
  • The kids are in a Dark Fantasy Coming of Age Story. When their friend goes missing, they look for him, only to find a girl their age who seems completely socially unaware. They continue looking for their friend, fighting to keep the adults from getting involved, and dealing with the tension caused by their repeated failures on every front.
  • Joyce is in a Psychological Horror. Her son goes missing, and everyone initially assumes she lost track of him. She begins to believe that her son is talking to her by making lights blink, but they never do it when anyone else is around. Everyone in town—including the sheriff who lost a child of his own—assumes she is losing her mind due to stress. This gets worse when her son's body is discovered, and she still refuses to believe it.
  • Hopper is in a Conspiracy Thriller. He's living in a sleepy little town and a kid goes missing—the first major crime in decades. Then a local commits suicide after having been seen in the company of a kid. When he goes to investigate, the government gives him the runaround. When he investigates the body, he discovers it's a fake, and the government dump him at home surrounded by pills to make him think it was all a dream. His house even gets bugged. In the end, he makes a deal with the government to get them to leave the town alone.
  • Nancy and Jonathan are in a monster-based supernatural Horror, complete with friends getting picked off. They join forces to find the creature, one of them gets a face-to-face with the monster, and they barely survive. They then set a trap in order to finish it off once and for all, in a sequence reminiscent of the climax of Alien.
  • Steve is in a coming-of-age Teen Drama. He's known for one-night stands, but finally finds a nice, intelligent girl that he wants to spend time with. He gets her to come to a party, and they consummate their relationship, only for her to turn distant. He mistakenly believes she is cheating on him, and when he tells his friends, they start slut-shaming her around town. He eventually dumps his friends and starts making up for the things he let them do, then goes to apologize to his girlfriend... only to find that she's actually in the monster movie discussed above.
  • Mrs. Wheeler is in a Soap Opera. She's having a nice and normal life then one day, her son's friend goes missing and her daughter starts acting distant. Any attempts to connect with these family members backfire miserably, and the suspicion only increases when her son's friend's mom starts acting off as well and suddenly throws her out of the house. Then, her daughter reveals that she slept with her boyfriend, and she learns that her son is harboring a dangerous individual underneath her nose.
  • Mr. Wheeler is in a Sitcom. When everyone else storms out of the dinner table, he even looks at the little girl like he's expecting a cute one-liner.
  • The genres the characters find themselves in are shaken up in subsequent seasons. For example, in Season 2 Joyce and Hop participate in the sci-fi horror as they struggle to understand what's going on with Will; Steve and the kids gradually find themselves in the sequel to the monster movie, only unfortunately for them it's now become Aliens instead of "just" Alien; Jonathan and Nancy take over the Government Conspiracy plot-line with exposing Hawkins Lab; and Eleven goes on an epic quest to find out who she truly is and how to control her powers, similar to Luke in The Empire Strikes Back, but which plays out in practice more like an Urban Fantasy reinterpretation of a grim urban Teen Drama based around urban decay in the inner city a la The Warriors.
  • Switched up yet again in the third season. Nancy and Jonathan take on a more horror-ridden storyline once more. Steve and Dustin's group, and then Joyce and Hopper, handle different elements of the conspiracy surrounding Starcourt Mall. Mike, Eleven, Max, Will, and Lucas are thrust into a teen-drama, which begins to take the thriller/horror path after a few episodes.
  • Hopper, Joyce, and Murray remain in the conspiracy track in season 4. The conventional horror is handled by the Hawkins teens, while Eleven is dealing with sci-fi. Meanwhile Will, Mike, Jonathan, and Argyle find themselves in a road trip movie.
• Charmed tended to vary in the tone of its genre depending on what season it was on:
  • Season 1 was very gloomy and similar in tone to The Craft.
  • Season 2 heavily downplays the witchcraft and focuses mainly on the sisters' personal lives.
  • Seasons 3 and 4 are more action-packed, with darker arc-based storylines. These seasons best evoke Supernatural Soap Opera.
  • Seasons 5 and 6 go Lighter and Softer to veer into Heroic Fantasy.
  • Seasons 7 and 8 are something of a mixture of all the previous seasons, being darker in tone than 5 and 6 but still lighter than 3 and 4.
• Black Mirror. Although it is primarily speculative science-fiction with a dash of social commentary, every story is self-contained and the genre changes with each episode. Just taking Season 3 as an example, you have Road Trip Plot ("Nosedive"), Psychological Horror ("Playtest"), romance ("San Junipero"), war story ("Men Against Fire") and Nordic Noir Police Procedural ("Hated in the Nation").
• Riverdale can switch between genres within a single episode (partly due to having an Ensemble Cast in multiple simultaneous plotlines). It can go from being a Teen Drama Coming of Age Story to a Amateur Sleuth Detective Drama to a Criminal Procedural and back again, with an occasional dose of The Musical and all with a heavy Film Noir influence. It isn't surprising to learn one of its main inspirations was Twin Peaks, which is also on this list.
• Legends of Tomorrow has different focuses by season, and a number of episodes pay homage to different genres depending on their setting.
• Now and Again was ostensibly a sci-fi show, but no two episodes were the same. Superhuman Michael Wiseman was a miscellaneous man for hire when he wasn't a lab rat, countering threats ranging from spies to killer insects. Wiseman's wife and daughter provided some family dramedy as well as they tried to get on with their lives in the wake of Michael's apparent death.
• Search Party starts off as a Black Comedy with some drama and mystery elements in the first two seasons, before adding some Law Procedural elements in Season 3 and a Psychological Thriller in the fourth season. All of the seasons are highly satirical however.
• Shadow and Bone falls under the fantasy umbrella as a whole, but switches between different genres/sub-genres depending on whose storyline we're currently following. As mentioned in its Genre Mashup entry, the lines between them get increasingly blurred as the three main plotlines intersect more; by the end of the first season it's less Roulette and more Mashup.
  • The A-plot involving Alina and Mal is a more typical High Fantasy Coming of Age story; plucky orphan Alina finds out she's The Chosen One, attends magic school and uncovers the dark truth behind the evil that threatens her home, while Mal goes on a quest to find a magical creature and be reunited with Alina.
  • The B-plot about Kaz, Inej and Jesper is more of a Low Fantasy take on The Caper about a group of anti-hero criminal masterminds plotting to kidnap Alina and smuggle her over the border while avoiding the authorities and rival crims.
  • The C-plot about Nina and Mattias is a survival story combined with an "enemies to lovers" romance, with a dash of Paranormal Romance considering Nina's powers; the two start out as sworn enemies until they get shipwrecked and must rely on each other to get back to civilisation, developing feelings for each other along the way.

Music

• Franco De Vita: The album Simplemente la verdad (Simply The Truth) provides several songs that are played in a particular musical genre each; examples include "Cántame" (Sing For Me) which is strongly inspired in Joropo music, "Callo" (I'm Silent) which combines salsa with a tropical flavor, "Diez años y un día" (Ten Years And One Day) which is rock-based, and so on.
• John Zorn encompasses every possible musical genre you can imagine and he switches back and forth between styles almost as if someone was playing with a remote control. Name any music and he's performed it: Jazz, Avant-Garde Music, Classical Music, Rock, Punk Rock, Surf Rock, Progressive Rock, Electronic Music, Ambient, Klezmer, Improv, Hardcore, Grindcore, Death Metal, Reggae, movie soundtracks, ...
• Country music legend Ray Price did this within his own country music genre. He performed straight-ahead standard honky tonk in his earliest releases in the early 1950s, before adding his signature 4/4 shuffle and waltz sounds by the mid-1950s. By the early 1960s, his music began to evolve as he added strings and backing vocals to fully embrace the Nashville Sound. By the late 1960s, his style was pure country pop, and the best example of this was his top 15 pop crossover hit "For The Good Times" in 1970. He continued having success with a style and instrumentation that was not unlike pop crooner Perry Como through the mid 1970s. And then by the late 1970s, he began slowly folding traditional country back into his sound. Until his retirement shortly before his death in December 2013, the "Cherokee Cowboy" continued to perform music from all eras of his musical career, which spanned more than 60 amazing years.
• In Björk's 1995 album, Post, she switches from Industrial Rock, Dance, Jazz, Trip Hop, Chamber Pop, Ambient, and other genres. This is typical for her, really.
• Canadian indie band Islands' debut album Return to the Sea featured a ten minute epic, synthpop, catchy indie-pop and a rap interlude.
• JC Chasez's album Shizophrenic traversed the gamut from urban pop to techno to New Wave and reggae.
• Five Iron Frenzy's album All the Hype that Money Can Buy switches between ska-punk, ska-salsa, ska-hip-hop, ska-synth-rock, and ska-Hair Metal. They take it Up to Eleven the end of the Quantity is Job One EP, with These Are Not My Pants: The Rock Opera, where every one of 8 band members sings a part, each in a different musical style; Latin, Piano ballad, Country, Rock, Jazz, Reggae, Rap, and something only described as "Weird".
• The Dingees play Clash-inspired punk, roots reggae, and first-wave ska songs on their first three albums.
• The band WHY? switch between alternative hip-hop, indie rock, folk, R.E.M.-inspired jangle pop and bizarre combinations of these genres. Their 2008 album Alopecia for instance, wobbled in between the band's various genres. Compare the first single, alternative rap song "A Sky For Shoeing Horses Under" to the third single, indie rock song "Fatalist Palmistry". The second single from the album, "The Hollows", is somewhat of a meeting point between the band's two main genres.
• Peergynt Lobogris switches between ambient rock, new age and jazz music.
• Origin went this route on Entity; while it contains plenty of examples of their typical sound (Expulsion of Fury, Conceiving Death, Swarm, Saligia, Consequence of Solution), they toss in deathgrind (Purgatory, Fornever, Banishing Illusion), straightforward brutal death metal (Evolution of Extinction), and an incredibly bizarre and unsettling noise-grind track (Committed). Hell, even the songs done in their usual style on the album occasionally pull this; Expulsion of Fury, for example, starts with a frantic tapping riff more akin to Brain Drill or Anomalous before transitioning right into a thick groove right out of the Bolt Thrower playbook.
• The White Album by The Beatles switches from Surf Rock, to Acoustic, to Ska, to random banging on a piano, to Bluesy Doo-Wop Hard Rock to Pop to Folk to Country to Hard Rock to Proto-Metal to Blues to Avant-Garde to ballad. The Beatles in general did this a lot over the course of their career.
• Played with by Reel Big Fish on Our Live Album Is Better Than Your Live Album with "S.R. (The Many Versions Of)" where they played the entire song or parts thereof several times, picking new genres after each variation and commenting on the crowd's reaction as they included ska-punk, punk rock, blues, disco, death metal, a "sensitive and tender emo song", old school rap and more. The verdict was "play more country, the people love it!" Also their song "Party Down" contains ska, disco, death metal, dance, reggae, and country breakdowns, all over a basic garage rock and horns structure.
• Billy Joel has done this, from pop to Southwestern funk to soul to Aaron Copland-like ballads to a classical music album. He even emulated The Beatles in the B side of the Nylon Curtain album. He also stated that "We Didn't Start the Fire" was going to be a rap song, but thought better against it.
• Nobody quite knows what to call Boards of Canada genre-wise. Each album contains some consistency; their evolving discography can be referred to as ambient/ambient techno, "IDM", downtempo and yet the labels will be simultaneously close and miles away in terms of describing their sound. The closest anyone has come to naming their genre is probably "Boards of Canada".
• X Japan. Heavy metal and hard rock with more than a pinch of punk sensibility becomes symphonic metal becomes beautiful rock ballads AND progressive rock with a metal sound. They're all over the map and bring the same level of skill to all of it.
• Beck almost always, although he sometimes mixes them. Country, hip-hop, jazz, anti-folk, rock, experimental, tropicalia, electronic...
• Frank Zappa played numerous genres throughout his career: rock, progressive rock, jazz, fusion, classical, experimental... the list goes on and on. He even had a doo-wop album (Cruising with Ruben & the Jets).
• Pearl Jam's changed style on every album: arena rock/grunge —> straightforward rock —> experimental —> world/folk-rock —> garage rock/post-grunge —> space rock —> punk/folk/art-rock —> straightforward rock (again) —> New Wave —> punk (again) —> New Wave/post-punk
• The Black Crowes are most easily classified as a hard rock band, but their specific sub-genre shifts with each album. While their first two albums were pure hard rock, from there they did Garage Rock —> Psychedelic Rock —> soul-influenced rock —> Blues Rock —> Southern Rock —> folk/country rock. There's a reason they're nicknamed "the most rock n roll rock n roll band in the world."
• Amanda Palmer made a career out of this. Compare her songs Guitar Hero, A Campaign of Shock and Awe, Mandy Goes To Med School, Slide, and her cover of Creep. She's also covered songs by/from Black Sabbath, Kurt Weill (in German), Britney Spears, Sonny & Cher, The Sound Of Music, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Tchaikovsky and Rihanna.
• Linkin Park's album Minutes to Midnight switches from cathartic Alternative Metal to synth-tinged adult contemporary ballads with a Political Rap song in between.
• Scissor Shock. What makes this even more awesome is that all of those genres are Genre-Busting.
• S.C.I.E.N.C.E. album era Incubus not only varied genre from song to song, but sometimes from verse to bridge to chorus. Witness 'A Certain Shade of Green', with it's funk verse, metal chorus and disco bridge.
• This could be said of many of Radiohead's albums, but Amnesiac fits this trope particularly well. Its tracks include the gloomy jazz of "Life in a Glasshouse," the twitchy electronic "Like Spinning Plates," the relatively straightforward rock of "Knives Out," and the indescribable "Pyramid Song."
• Elton John was known for this at the height of his popularity; Goodbye Yellow Brick Road alone switches from Progressive Rock ("Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding") to melodic piano ballads (the title track) to minimalistic glam-rock ("Bennie And The Jets") to Stonesy rockers ("Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting") to Beatle-esque numbers ("Harmony") to soft rock ("Candle In The Wind") to reggae ("Jamaica Jerk-Off") to boogie blues-rock ("Dirty Little Girl") to proto-disco-soul ("Grey Seal") to pseudo-doo-wop ("Your Sister Can't Twist [But She Can Rock 'N Roll]") to country ("Roy Rogers"; "Social Disease") to '20's jazz ("Sweet Painted Lady") to cinematic pieces like "The Ballad Of Danny Bailey" and the aptly-named "I've Seen That Movie Too".
• Suicide Machines go back and forth from ska punk and ska-core (Destruction by Definition, Battle Hymns) to pop punk (Suicide Machines, Steal This Record) and back to a mix of hardcore and ska punk for their last two albums (A Match and some Gasoline, War Profiteering is Killing Us All), sometimes switching back and forth from ska to hardcore every other song.
• Gorillaz, with only three albums, have managed to present genres like Alternative, dub, hip hop, rock and electronic, and the last song ("M1 A1") features sounds and clips from Day of the Dead (1985) in the first album. Demon Days (Album), the following album, followed a similar pattern, but with a darker and somber sound, along some dance/synth (DARE), some acoustic dark tunes (El Mañana), and even a choral ("Demon Days"), along with another horror film sample, from the film Dawn of the Dead (1978) (Intro). The third album, Plastic Beach, can only be described as "crazy", what with mixing in one song the Lebanese National Orchestra for Oriental Arabic Music with hip hop, and all the album has all over sounds of soul, electro, rock, pop, and even seagulls and sea sounds and a breakfast commercial. Of course, Damon Albarn is clearly doing a good job, so it's not risky business.
• Melvins may be known for playing slow, but they never really stuck to one particular sound. Their music ranges from alternative metal, to sludge metal, to avant-garde rock, to just straight up hardcore punk.
• Yoko Kanno, goddess of anime soundtracks, can write anything. Compare the classic orchestral soundtrack for The Vision of Escaflowne to the power-ballad-laden Wolf's Rain to the techno epics of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex to the jazzy music in Darker than Black. Her work on Cowboy Bebop (paragon of the Cult Soundtrack that is) covers all of these by itself. And then she starts combining them…
• Dir en grey are especially fond of this, to the point that their sound is mostly unclassifiable apart from being some kind of metal. It's extremely uncommon for two songs on their recent albums (especially starting with Uroboros) to sound anything like each other, and there are often rapid stylistic shifts within the songs themselves (Kyo's penchant for throwing in all kinds of screams in songs where it wouldn't otherwise be expected is no doubt a major contributing factor to this). Styles the band has played or been influenced by include Power Metal, Noise Rock, Technical Death Metal, Deathcore, Alternative Rock, Alternative Metal, Nu Metal, and even Harsh Noise. They have managed to avoid the Scrappy status often associated with Nu Metal and Deathcore through the sheer variety of their music and their instrumental prowess. Two examples of the band using this trope can be found here and here.
• In contrast with Mr. Bungle's straight out Genre-Busting, Mike Patton's other 90's band Faith No More were a bit more into genre roulette, especially starting with Angeldust. For instance, King For A Day, Fool For A Lifetime had a few of their heaviest songs (e.g. "Cuckoo for Caca"), but also threw in country ("Take This Bottle"), seventies style funk/soul ("Evidence", "Star AD"), laidback bossanova ("Caralho Voador"), and even a gospel ballad ("Just A Man"). It also has the "The Gentle Art Of Making Enemies" which is a sort of theatrical thrash-goth song, which becomes very dramatic due to Patton using a different character voice for each section of the song (low crooner for first verse, Large Ham supervillain for first half of bridge, death growler for second half of bridge and operatic crooning for chorus).
  • Mr. Bungle actually did quite a bit of this too, but it was more noted by extreme stylistic shifts within each individual song, which oddly tended to have the effect of making the entire album's style seem a bit more unified, because it wasn't so much one song being followed by another song of a different genre as it was each song's genre being entirely unclassifiable.
  • Secret Chiefs 3, a project helmed by Mr. Bungle guitarist Trey Spruance, eventually started crediting songs on their albums to seven different "satellite bands", each with their own loosely defined style. So far two "satelite bands" have had spinoff albums of their own - Ishraqiyun's Perichoresis, a collection of songs influenced by various types of Afghani music, and Traditionalists' Le Mani Destri Recise Degli Ultimi Uomini, Goblin-inspired pieces presented as the soundtrack to a non-existent Giallo.
• Cursor Miner's styles are all over the map, jumping between breakbeat, techno, electro, synthpop, IDM, trip-hop, and industrial.
• The only genre that will definitely be on a "Weird Al" Yankovic album is polka, and it'll probably be a medley; the others can be just about anything. Given that he's a prolific parody artist, this shouldn't be too surprising, but his band can play any genre well.
  • If you want a non-medley that contains this trope, consider "Genius in France", his style parody of Frank Zappa (see above) from 2003's Poodle Hat.
• The Clash, especially the album Sandinista!, tend to switch between genres all the time. Sandinista! contains the first ever rap song released by a rock band, as well as songs influenced by dub, reggae, and funk, a song with a children's choir, and a song with elements of twee pop. To consider them just a punk band is hardly fair.
• Blind Guardian is ostensibly a Heavy Metal band, but their repertoire runs the gamut from Folk Songs to Heavy Mithril to Pop. Also Ayreon, in the same vein.
• Enter Shikari in general, but most notably on their second album Common Dreads. ''The Jester'' takes this Up to Eleven by switching between von Clownsticket solos, the band's standard synthesizer-heavy post hardcore and a trance instrumental.
• Japanese Black Metal band Sigh does this a lot, frequently within the same song. It's particularly blatant on Imaginary Sonicscape, where there are oddities like disco and dub reggae breaks thrown into the middle of almost every song. Not to mention the obligatory classical snippet (Fryderyk Chopin's Minute Waltz, if you're curious) overlaid with what appears to be several hundred samples of giggling babies that closes the album. Of course, Sigh frequently invoke Genre-Busting as well. It's difficult to define exactly where their use of one trope ends and the other begins.
• Queen went from hard glam rock to pop to funk to '30's swing to power ballads to skiffle-folk to Progressive Rock over the course of an album. Or over the course of one album side.
  • Queen's first few albums were fairly straightforward, fusing elements of Progressive Rock and Heavy Metal. But their fourth album, A Night at the Opera has virtually no two songs in the same genre (and some of the genres are quite atypical for pop bands - British Music Hall style, anyone? - and most of their subsequent albums up to their 1984 album The Works (nine songs, nine genres) continued this pattern. The only real exception in this era was their score to Flash Gordon.
  • Queen's most famous hit, "Bohemian Rhapsody" is a Genre Roulette all by itself. There are five very distinct portions, including at one point going from a slow ballad ("Mama...just killed a man") to an up-tempo operetta ("I see a little silhouetto of a man") to a powerful hard rock piece ("So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye!")
• Kyle Dennis: Harsh Noise, industrial, rock, tape music, experimental, drone, even mixtapes.
• GACKT is a rock artist, but what genre of music is going to be on his albums and singles is random at best. Some songs such as Cube, Oasis, Uncertain Memory and Secret Garden don't even resemble any discernible genre. Songs like these are simply referred to by fans as "Gackt rock".
• Christian Rock performer Carman did this constantly during his career. Pop, rock, rap, something vaguely like folk, adult contemporary, a pastiche of '50s rock and roll, and his famous rhyming sermons put to music. He often recorded with guest performers, and even then he might defy the genre they are typically known for; for example, "Our Turn Now" features then-metal band Petra but is the kind of rap-rock that dc Talk would eventually be known for.
• Drake does a mild version of this in his albums. He usually has typical Boastful Rap songs, but occasionally does pop/R&B ballad-type songs, such as "I Get Lonely Too" and "Find Your Love". In fact, one of the things he is praised (or criticized) for is his ability to switch from boastful raps to self-examining ballads. From Views on, he has started having more of a dancehall reggae influence on his songs, most obviously "One Dance" and "Controlla" (which even features dancehall artist Popcaan). His next album, More Life continues in this vein, even throwing in some afrobeat for good measure.
• Conor Oberst Bright Eyes exhibits this tendency with his Side Projects.
• Ulver IS this trope - They began as a mix of atmospheric black metal and folk metal and then went dark folk and then a harsher, more lo-fi black metal. On their 4th album they became practically industrial metal and on their 5th they became a mix of trip hop, ambient and breakcore. They now have gone towards a general experimental rock style.
• DJ Shadow's early works were heavily trip-hop influenced while his last album encompasses indie rock and 'hyphy' influences.
• Guniw Tools jump from jazz-rock to folk to punk to electronic music on several of their albums.
• The Veronicas went from single acoustic rock pop (Heavily Broken) to RNB-Eletronic-Faux-Rap (Cold) in three albums. Two albums in and have done pop, pop-rock, pop electronic, dance pop, classical pop, 80's inspired pop and RNB.
• Britney Spears and her album Circus is a mix tape as such and an example of this.
• Amorphis has run the gamut from straightforward Death Metal, to a more melancholy Death/Doom style, to Alternative Rock, to Gothic Metal, to vaguely Opeth-ish Progressive Death Metal, and even acoustic ballads.
• Skinny Puppy's hanDover runs the gamut from straight industrial(Vyrisus) to industrial metal(Village) to EBM(Icktums) to IDM(Ovirt) to breakcore(NoiseX).
• Amy Grant has recorded in MOR/Adult Contemporary Christian Pop (her early career), Southern and Bluegrass Gospel (her hymns albums), mainstream country-folk (Tennessee Christmas among others), folk-rock (her Lead Me On and Behind The Eyes albums), mainstream AC/top 40 pop (much of Unguarded, Heart In Motion, House of Love and Simple Things albums, the duet with Peter Cetera called "The Next Time I Fall" being the most notable) and Christian Rock (the In Concert albums and certain songs from her early career) among others.
• Nine Inch Nails' discography began with a synthpop-kinda-EBM-kinda-Gary Numan style new wave meets Depeche Mode meets Al Jourgensen on diazepam, and then the Ministry/Skinny Puppy influence led to Broken which....industrial ro...meta...no, rock/metal...Downward Sp...yeah, alt/industrial rock. The Fragile..........alt...ambient...I mean ~DARK~ ambient, which Still would......well, broadly the band is...broadly...post-industrial? Goddamn, just go listen to it.
• Sound Horizon is, in theory, a Symphonic Metal band. In theory. The fact that The Other Wiki has them listed under nine genres should tell you something about how they work.
• Vanessa Amorosi: "Somewhere In The Real World" was a jazz (Something Emotional), rock (Kiss Your Mama!), pop (Perfect), swing (My House) and contemporary (Who Am I?) album...to say the least.
• The Foo Fighters were usually alternative rock with a Surprisingly Gentle Song every now and then. Then with In Your Honor, a Distinct Double Album with an acoustic disc, it became more common.
  Dave Grohl: "I eventually want it to get to the point where when people ask me what kind of band I'm in, I say: 'I just play music'. It's not one specific genre of music, it's not one specific style. I'm just a musician. I can play all these different instruments, I can write a bossa nova, I can write a thrash tune."
• Vanilla Ice's music has elements of Nu Metal, Jazz, Country, Hip-Hop, Gangsta Rap, Funk, Alternative Rock, etc.
• Crotchduster embodies this to the max. They switch between Power Metal, Death Metal, Grindcore, Synth-Pop, Comedy, Electronic, self made audio samples, Classic Rock, Blues, Jazz, A Cappella, etc. etc. You name it, they've used it at some point. And they only have ONE. FUCKING. ALBUM.
• Steve Taylor liked to play around with a bunch of different genres, although he was nominally just a Christian Rock musician.
• The Smashing Pumpkins' Big Damn Double Album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was notorious for pushing this trope to the limit at a time when popular music was already cashing in on it. In addition to the fuzzy Alternative Rock from the previous record, you had: Grunge ("Jelly Belly", "Bullet With Butterfly Wings"), Heavy Metal ("Zero", "Bodies", "X.Y.U."), Symphonic ("Tonight, Tonight"), Progressive Rock ("Porcelina of the Vast Oceans", "Thru the Eyes of Ruby"), Thrash/Hardcore ("Tales of a Scorched Earth"), Industrial ("Love"), Pop ("1979"), Synth-Pop ("We Only Come Out at Night, "Beautiful"), Classic Folk ("Cupid de Lock", "Take Me Down", "Lily"), and... whatever the hell some of those other songs were.
  
  Their follow-up, Adore, was similar in this respect, though mostly shuffling between Pop, Electronic and Folk, as opposed to Mellon Collie's dozen plus genres.
• Kelly Clarkson likes to record different styles of songs for her albums and sing different styles for her shows.
• Kanye West's trademark is incorporating many genres (usually, but not always by sampling) into hip-hop. He genereally changes which genre every album or two, going from neo-soul and 50s/60s/70s R'n'B on his debut and sophomore, to electro and dance music on his third. His fourth album, 808s and Heartbreak was a straight-up synthpop record, whilst My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, as well as his albums with Jay-Z and GOOD Music are this trope to a T. This was praised by many as the defining strength of MBDTF, with influences ranging from classical music to dance-pop to rock'n'roll.
• The Witcher: Music Inspired By the Game, one of two soundtracks packaged with the Enhanced Edition of the game, runs the gamut from Celtic-style folk music (e.g., "Skellige" by Duan) to folk-rock ("Sapphire Waters" by Village Kollektive) to rock ("Running Away" by Skowyt) to heavy metal ("Sword of the Witcher" by Vader) to just plain damn weird ("They Want to Suck" by LAL).
• The Bee Gees get in on this too. They employed many musical styles through their whole career, but of particular note is their last ever album as a group, This Is Where I Came In. Witness the understated acoustic rock of the title track, the 90s-tinged Eurodance of "Embrace", the legitimate rock-out session of "Voice in the Wilderness", the Award-Bait Song-esque "The Extra Mile", and weirdest of all, "Technicolor Dreams" - a Tin Pan Alley ditty that seems lifted straight out of The '30s...
• Christian Rock group Thousand Foot Krutch certainly qualifies. They perform everything ranging from metal, alt-rock, hard rock, contemporary Christian, acoustic rock, pop, and even hip-hop.
• Leonard Bernstein's Mass: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers recklessly mixes together various styles of classical and popular music. In less than half-hour, it goes from an experimental quadraphonic piece to a smooth ballad to cool jazz (with Scatting) to marching band music to a round to a folk instrumental to an a capella hymn in neoclassical style to an atonal oboe solo followed by pounding hexachords which segues to blues rock.
• The Monkees, in the Don Kirshner era, spun between bubblegum pop, proto-punk, Mike Nesmith's country-rock, and novelty songs. After overthrowing Kirshner, they added folk rock, psychedelic rock, Broadway-flavored tunes, Latin influences, and hints of R&B to the roulette wheel, removing some of the bubblegum and almost all of the novelty stuff in the process. Michael Nesmith's solo career incorporated at various times: country-rock, big band, straight country, straight rock, samba and tango, new wave, tropical music,....
• Volume One by Fear Of Pop, a side project of Ben Folds: Among other things, the album features Big Beat ("Root To This"), jazz-funk ("Kops"), William Shatner doing spoken word over lounge music ("In Love"), and an apparent Talking Heads style-parody ("I Paid My Money")... Basically everything but the piano pop he's known for (although the intro to "Rubber Sled" features a comically sped up sample of Ben Folds Five's Signature Song "Brick").
• Cirque du Soleil's Amaluna soundtrack is a mix of contemporary genres, including pop ballads ("Hope" and "Run"), ska-punk("Burn Me Up"), trip-hop (middle of "Enchanted Reunion"), drum & bass ("Fly Around" and last part of "Enchanted Reunion"), tribal (first half of "Creature of Light"), R&B ("Elma Om Mi Lize" and "O Ma Ley"), dark ambient ("Whisper"), breakbeat ("Running on the Edge" and "Mutation"), and even industrial metal ("Tempest").
• Long-running American experimental group Controlled Bleeding ran the gamut of punk, progressive rock, harsh noise, dark ambient, dub, industrial, modern classical music, folk, free jazz, and pretty much everything in between. Generally they had the decency to limit themselves to a few genres per album, but the results can still be incredibly jarring, particularly on early albums like Knees & Bones where the music will suddenly shift from shrieking power electronics to trippy yet soothing guitar instrumentals to strange pieces halfway between the two at the drop of a hat.
• Einstürzende Neubauten gradually calmed down from the metallic percussion and noisy intensity of Kollaps in exchange for increasingly quiet conventional styles while maintaining the usage of custom musical instruments built out of found objects. Nonetheless, they still showcase a wide range of textures.
• Alex Skolnick, along with playing lead guitar for Testament, leads a jazz trio.
• Jim Steinman's Bad for Good album. Wagnerian orchestra, country & western, spoken word, rock ballad, goth, bubblegum... you name it. In particular, "Dance In My Pants" shifts from country rock to something rather occultish.
• The Avalanches' debut album Since I Left You switches between Trip-Hop, Ambient, and House Music, and even then these songs can't easily be identified as a single genre. Hell, even before their first album, they dabbled in experimental Rap Rock and Trip-Hop. Their follow-up Wildflower adds on to this with some heavy influence from soul, rap, and children's music.
• The Blue Öyster Cult's first album wobbled between country music with a hard rock edge, to "pure "heavy rock. The Mirrors album revisited the country music theme with In Thee, a track that would not be out of place in the Eagles' soft country-rock repertoire, and for good measure even added the disco-influenced Dr Music.
• Van Morrison generally stays within the bounds of blues/jazz fusion, but has at one time or another dabbled in just about every musical genre imaginable, with the exception of heavy rock and reggae.
• Irish band the Horslips practically invented Celtic Rock, fusing traditional themes, rhythms and Irish instruments with hard guitar-edged rock music: they even set a traditional song, An Bratach Ban, to a reggae beat.
• The Cherry Poppin Daddies attempt to do this with each of their albums. While most of their albums feature a primary focus on swing and ska with a small handful of odd-genred tracks, the roulette is most prominent on Rapid City Muscle Car (1994) and Susquehanna (2008), in which the band has stated the intention was to make each track a different genre.
  • Rapid City Muscle Car includes, in order, rockabilly, ska punk, psychedelic rock, swing, funk, swing, baroque pop, jazz, hard rock, an accordion ballad, alt-rock, country, hard rock, big band and lounge.
  • Susquehanna features, in order, Latin rock, rockabilly, ska punk, reggae, punk swing, glam rock, flamenco, ska, calypso, swing jazz, bossa nova and acoustic soft rock.
• Beastie Boys' discography defines this as well as anyone.
  • They abruptly dropped hardcore punk in the early 80s and jumped to hip-hop, becoming one of the most controversial, and commercially successful, bands of their time with Licensed to Ill.
  • In the 90s, they picked up their instruments again and played hip-hop alongside alternative rock, funk, jazz and hardcore punk, making two albums (Check Your Head, Ill Communication) that went back and forth between each genre almost at random.
  • They then returned to hip-hop by teaming with Mixmaster Mike for 1998's Hello Nasty, which sported a new, futuristic sound.
  • In 2007 they put out an instrumental album, The Mix-Up, filled with funk/soul/jazz workouts.
• Any of the Vocaloid voice synthesizers can and will sing songs of any genre their owners have a mind to producing.
• The Donna Summer song "Queen For a Day"" from 1977's Once Upon a Time starts out as proto-electronica, then halfway through the song, abruptly switches to all-acoustic disco. Milder forms of this would become a recurring theme in composer Giorgio Moroder's later recordings.
  • Summer more explicitly covered this trope on the 1977 concept album I Remember Yesterday, and her 1981^note unreleased until 1996 double-album, I'm a Rainbow.
• Santana's 2002 album Shaman is one of popular music's best examples of this trope. Over the course of the album's 16 songs you not only get the band's signature Latin rock style, but you also get influences from contemporary R&B ("Nothing at All"), neo-soul ("You Are My Kind"), teen pop/rock ("The Game of Love"), instrumental hard rock ("Victory Is Won"), hip hop soul ("Since Supernatural"), nu metal ("America"), blues/folk ("Sideways"), post-grunge ("Why Don't You & I"), borderline britpop ("Feels Like Fire"), jam ("One of These Days"), and even opera ("Novus").
• Information Society have experimented with countless electronic genres over the years, including freestyle, house, Eurodance, darkwave, EBM, electro, and most recently, dubstep.
• Zac Brown Band is equally capable of doing mainstream country ("Chicken Fried"), smooth country-pop ballads ("Goodbye in Her Eyes"), bluegrass ("The Wind"), jam band ("Keep Me in Mind"), Jimmy Buffett-esque beachy tunes ("Knee Deep", which even features a guest vocal from Buffett), and Southern rock ("All Alright"). Turned Up to Eleven on Jekyll + Hyde, which has electro-pop ("Beautiful Drug"), jazz ("Mango Tree"), hard rock ("Heavy Is the Head", "Junkyard"), reggae ("Castaway"), and soul ("One Day") in addition to the above.
  • Not to mention, the multiple genres of music and artists they cover live regularly, ranging from The Who, to Queen, and even Metallica and Nine Inch Nails. Among many others.
• Poland's Black Metal band Lux Occulta have been prone to this in later years. The Mother and the Enemy contains several detours into trip-hop. Kołysanki largely sees them abandoning metal altogether.
• Japanese band Puffy AmiYumi has this as their signature style. They have flirted with many genres, from Pop Punk, Shibuya Kei, Electropop, Alternative Rock, Soft Rock, Disco, Teen Pop, to Pop Rock, Country Music, Rumba, Bossa Nova and even Doom Metal. They have collaborated with a wide range of songwriters, and their constant jumping from genre to genre is part of their appeal.
• While this trope is expected in Progressive Rock to begin with, Gentle Giant really took things above and beyond the call of duty on their first eight albums. It doesn't hurt that nearly every member of the band was a classically-trained multi-instrumentalist, and they wanted to show this off to the fullest extent possible, so a given Gentle Giant song may display influence from modernism, hard rock, jazz, medieval music, baroque counterpoints, or any given other style that they felt like. They have a reputation as being one of the most "difficult" prog bands for this reason, but in truth their music is generally quite catchy and they also tend to have shorter songs than most other prog groups, with only a handful of songs passing the six-minute mark and none of their studio compositions exceeding ten (though live, they often tended to group them together in lengthy medleys which were often even more impressive examples of this trope; an example of this can be heard on their Playing the Fool album). They dialed down these tendencies for their last three albums, which are almost universally considered weaker for this reason and others.
• Aphex Twin loves this trope, and he's known for having possibly the most inhumanely diverse discography in electronic music history. He's done ambient pieces (Selected Ambient Works Volume II, "Fingerbib"), piano pieces (most of which are on drukQs), generic dance music (SAW 85-92, which only sounds generic since it's been copied and mirrored the world over), straightforward IDM (his main forte), extremely aggressive, beat-sliced techno ("Come to Daddy", "Ventolin"), and even cartoony-sounding music ("Goon Gumpas", "Logan Rock Witch"). For the most pristine example of this trope on one of his albums, check out the Richard D. James Album.
• Diablo Swing Orchestra is a frequent user of this trope, with several of their songs shifting genres several times over the course of the song. Even more generally, most of their songs fall into completely different genres.
• Rihanna is supposedly an R&B singer but has done everything from electronic (including techno, house, EDM, trap, and dubstep), reggae, folk, dance-pop, new wave, hip-hop, synthpop, latin music...
• The central gimmick of Optiganally Yours is their use of the Optigan and Talentmaker, toy keyboards from The '70s that held discs of prerecorded riffs that could be controlled using the chord buttons. The discs available spanned a fairly wide variety of genres, from blues to country to Latin to Polynesian and even big-band swing. Each song they've written uses a different disc. You do the math.
• The music on MilkCan's Make It Sweet! runs the gamut of different styles of rock music, from basic Rock & Roll ("BABY BABY!!") to country rock ("CASINO IN MY HAIR") to J-pop ("TASTE OF TERIYAKI") to ska ("KEEP YOUR HEAD UP!!") to even thrash metal ("FRIGHT FLIGHT!!").
• The Turtles' 1968 album The Turtles Present: The Battle of the Bands is a one-album example of this trope. In here, the Turtles pretend to be 11 separate competing bands, and cover as many genres as possible, including surf rock ("Surfer Dan"), sunshine pop (Top 10 hit "Elenore"), and even faux-Hawaiian novelty with suggestive lyrics. ("I'm Chief Kamanawanalea" - try saying that slowly!)
• Michael Jackson is mostly known as a pop singer, but he liked to make songs from several different genres for every album. So he could make rock songs ("Beat It", "Dirty Diana", "Give In to Me") as well as gospel-flavored songs ("Man in the Mirror", "Will You Be There?", "Keep the Faith"). And he also did experiments like "Liberian Girl" (which is done in a very "tropical" style) and "Money" (where he does his own rapping).
• The second half of Outkast's Speakerboxx The Love Below is Andre 3000 playing around with this trope. One cut from this project, the 60's-esque "Hey Ya", became a Black Sheep Hit for the group.
• Finnish Alternative Rock band Poets of the Fall can play a wide variety of styles, ranging from metal to hard rock to symphonic, and make note in interviews that they Invoke this to keep their music fresh.
• David Bowie practically built his entire career on this trope. While commonly classified as a rock singer, Bowie's dabbled in a surprisingly wide variety of genres over the years, with at least two new sound albums per decade. Among other things, the man's discography has explored novelty rock, psychadelic folk rock, very early heavy metal, glam rock, proto-punk, blue-eyed soul, electronic proto-post punk krautrock, post punk with Gothic new wave flare, dance rock, synthpop, hard rock, acid jazz, industrial electronica, drum & bass, art rock, alt-rock, and jazz fusion. A Greatest Hits Album alone can make listeners question whether all of these songs are by the same guy.
• Whenever members of 4chan's /mu/ board get together to make an album, the results are usually as eclectic as the board's highly opinionated tastes. Songs and titles are often chosen by post numbers ending in double digits. An album could contain folk songs right next to chiptunes and harsh noise, all with deliberately strange and vulgar titles. When bothered to actually put their work in a genre, /mu/tants give their albums pretentious and obscure-sounding categories like "Post-Avant Jazzcore" and "Progressive Dreamfunk".
• The Aquabats!: Their album Charge!! has an In-Universe example, in the form of the movie (movies?) from the song "Stuck in a Movie!". The narrator, i.e. the guy stuck in a movie, describes it as a mish-mash of action, horror, and fantasy where none of the pieces seem to be connected to each other. It gives the impression of a montage.
  Comin' after you, and it's getting dark
  You're fumbling your keys and your car won't start
  There's a kid talking backwards, drawing crazy words
  There's a kindly old wizard on the wings of a bird
• Soularflair's discography spans an incredible variety of disparate genres, including ambient, art rock, chillwave, dream pop, IDM, industrial metal, neoclassical, tech-house, and trance.
• While BTS' early work is mainly Hip-Hop and R&B, the range of genres they've covered has gotten wider and wider over the years. So far, they've also done Neo Soul, moombathon, Latin-inspired pop, Electronic Music, ballads, Rock, Electronic Dance Music, Trap Music, Jazz, among others. LOVE YOURSELF: Tear alone has half of the genres previously mentioned and more.
  • The LOVE YOURSELF series (being most noticeable in the compilation album LOVE YOURSELF: Answer) makes use of this versatility to tell a self-contained story of falling in love, becoming a Stepford Smiler in order to retain that love, the relationship collapsing after the mask falls apart, and slowly learning that you need to accept yourself to truly be happy. This musically goes from genres such as electro-pop, EDM and neo-disco (Her) to dark Neo Soul, a mix of Trap and Rock, ballad, and Hip-Hop with a symphonic track (Tear), to a Power Ballad and a mix of gcom and samul nori (the additional final tracks in Answer).
  • BTS member RM defies the notion of being a one-genre-only group; one of the reasons he gave for changing his Stage Name from "Rap Monster" to "RM" is that the old name limited him in the kind of music he wanted to make. He has even said through the lyrics of "Do You" (from his RM mixtape) that genre is "a trap", refusing to stick to one label:
    I'm not pop, I'm not rock, I'm not funk, I'm not R&B or hip hop
• Helix, the supergroup of Tom Shear (Assemblage 23) and Mari Kattman, explores, in addition to A23's signature Futurepop, Dark Wave, Chillwave, Synthwave, old-school EBM, House Music, and Trip Hop.
• 100 gecs have reached notoriety on the internet for their extremely unorthodox style of experimental pop that slices and dices many genres into a chaotic maelstrom of sounds. Their debut album, 1000 gecs, is a display of this trope in full force and a half as it is influenced from popular genres from the 'noughties and new tens like hip hop, nightcore, drum and bass, bubblegum pop, crunkcore, emo, synthpop, EDM and even third-wave ska, all layered on top of Laura Les's heavily autotuned vocals.
• Xenomania's production style involves composing short musical snippets, then stitching them together to create larger songs. Thus, many of the songs they've produced over the years embrace this trope. For just one example, Girls Aloud's debut single, "Sound of the Underground", seamlessly switches between Drum and Bass, Contemporary R&B and Surf Rock. Tropes Are Not Bad, as this style has been praised for helping to elevate what could have otherwise been throwaway pop music.
• Gerard Joling's styles range from Doo Wop to Latin Jazz to Power Pop to Italo Disco to Contemporary R&B to EDM.
• Russian singer Elvira T's music style ranges from pop to hip hop to genres that can't easily be defined, with the themes and feels of her songs ranging from a cute pop song about being in love to an emotional ballad about being in a toxic relationship.
• The trope is present in most of Regurgitator's albums. They've tackled indie rock, hardcore punk, rap-rock, Spaghetti Western, musak and dub, and that's just their debut.
• Victoria Celestine's core style is Synth-Pop with hints of New Wave and Country Music, but she has also dabbled in Big Room ("Let Go"), Trip Hop ("Favorite Daydream"), Power Ballads ("Here I Am"), Drum and Bass ("It's OK"), R&B ("Moontan"), Tropical House ("Pending"), and Dubstep ("Your Subconscious Mind").
• Aika Kobayashi of Love Live! idol group Aqours has gone on record stating that the group's genre is "Aqours". At one point the group released an Arabian electro song, a rock song, a tokusatsu opening, an EDM song, a marching band-style song, and a eurobeat song, in that order, in the span of four singles.
• One of Cartoon Network's "Groovies" was this rendition of the Josie and the Pussycats theme in disco, punk rock, country, metal, and techno.
• Ween have been know to do several genres of music (eg. hard rock, pop, country, etc.) with NSFW lyrics.
• A.G. Cook of PC Music's debut album, 7G, has 49 full-length tracks and manages to cover a lot of ground. Broadly an Electronic album, it's split into 7 discs and each predominantly overtaken by an instrument, with genres including straightforward Pop, Drum and Bass, Glitch, IDM, Ambient, and Techno. It also includes a few oddities like acoustic guitar ballads, neoclassical piano pieces, and Spoken Word passages.
• The Chalkeaters are a trio known for making songs about video games and gaming memes, with many of them having completely different genres from each other. Notable entries include "Bowsette" (chiptune rock with rap), "It Just Works" (big band jazz), and "Count to Three" (electro swing).
• Living Colour's debut album Vivid saw them switching between Hair Metal, Funk Rock, Funk Metal, Hip-Hop, Funk, Soul, Pop and Jazz at random.
• The band Dog Police had an album of mostly very weird pop songs with unconventional topics such as discovering your date is a dog, mail order products and butch women, only to indulge into other genres - a bossa nova about middle-class people! A church-like tune about burgers! A prog rock about recording music!
• Floor Jansen is best known as a Symphonic Metal singer (mainly for After Forever and Nightwish), but she also loves Hard Rock and is trained in classical singing and musical theatre. Her collaboration Northward with Jørn Viggo Lofstad ranges from Power Pop to Traditional Heavy Metal depending on the song, and in her appearance on the Dutch music competition show Beste Zangers she performed everything from "The Phantom of the Opera" to "Shallow".
• 311 has covered a wide array of styles of rock music, including rap rock, funk rock, reggae rock, hard rock, nu metal, ska punk, pop punk, progressive rock, jazz rock and more. Most of these can be found on the 21-track Transistor.
• Kirsty Mac Coll: Even her small number of hit singles are all quite diferent in style, encompassing rockabilly, pop, balladry and hip-hop. That's before getting into the rock and Cuban influences evident on her albums.
• Paolo Nutini's biggest hit is "Pencil Full of Lead", which is a fast, jazzy, humorous piece. His other best-known songs include "Candy", a much slower song which is practically Scottish folk, "Last Request", a melancholy love song, and "New Shoes", an upbeat pop track.
• Limp Bizkit's Results May Vary was made with the very intention of experimenting with several different genres. Among them are shoegaze, dream pop, trip hop, pop rap and post-grunge. Their usual nu metal and rap metal styles are still present in some songs.
• American rock band Faith And The Muse's music encompasses a wide variety of genres from folk music to dark wave and even punk rock. Their influences include dark alternative, gothic rock, Celtic, and other folk influences. Additionally, Welsh and Irish mythology have often served as inspiration to many of their songs.
• Tengger Cavalry's discography is mostly Folk Metal but includes a significant number of acoustic songs as well, and on live tours they sometimes opened with an acoustic set and then followed it with a metal set.
• TWICE has tried a lot of styles, more noticeable in their post-"Fancy" releases. These include synthwave ("I Can't Stop Me"), Latin pop ("Hell in Heaven", "1,3,2"), EDM ("Do What We Like", most of &Twice), disco ("Set Me Free", much of Formula of Love), Bossanova ("Alcohol-Free"), piano ballad ("Promise"), rock ballad ("Cactus"), orchestral ("Cry for Me"), city pop ("Say Something"), hip hop ("Hello"), and even pop-punk ("Queen of Hearts").
• While NMIXX mostly sticks to realms of pop, hip-hop, and R&B, the group's "Mixxpop" concept allows them to dabble in a wide variety of genres, such as house, UK garage, pop-rock, pop-punk, and much more.

Radio

• This is the central concept of The BBC radio comedy-drama The Attendant. Each episode has late night petrol station attendant Alex have to deal with something weird that interferes with his attempts to get to know regular customer Ella, and the episodes are all titled after the genre of said weirdness: "Frankenstein", "The Western", "Zombies", "Sci-Fi" and "The Action".

Tabletop Games

• Rifts was designed to blend as many genres as humanly possible, with new books/settings adding/combining genres not previously covered. Not many other games allow you to play a medieval knight on a robotic horse alongside an alien cyborg cowboy toting a BFG and a wizard with a magical jetpack and literal Lightning Gun.

Theatre

• Exit, Pursued by a Bear: It's billed as a comedy, but there's a plenty of psychological trauma to go round, and much of it is Played for Drama.

Toys

• BIONICLE's exact genre depends on which comic/book/online serial you read or which animation/movie you watch. Its tone also shifts from kid-friendly fables that teach An Aesop at the end to highly violent, messed up, borderline-horror stories that make you wonder how in the world they could possibly have gotten LEGO to approve them.

Video Games

• Because the story is being generated on the fly by an AI, AI Dungeon 2 tends have a single story cycle through multiple genres in a playthrough. One moment you could be a hard-boiled detective in 1920s New York on a case and the next you could find yourself fighting a Dracolich with a laser gun.
• All of StarCraft is made of this, dependent on which races are shown interacting.
  • When only Terrans are present, it's a heavily character-focused Used Future Space Western.
  • All Zerg interaction with the other races is the Horror genre, from monsters bursting out of the ground, to the grotesque infested Terrans, to a monstrous alien queen stalking through a spaceship and slowly consuming the crew.
  • The minute the Protoss enter the picture, it's High Fantasy (In Space), with visions, ancient prophecies, psychic links and the like.
• The Fallout series constantly plays with different genres, both in terms of gameplay and story/tone. Overall, the series is a Science Fiction Wide-Open Sandbox Western RPG series set After the End in an Alternate History that heavily satirizes Cold War-era Americana.
  • The first few games created under Interplay Entertainment/Black Isle Studios feature turn-based combat and 2D graphics through an isometric perspective. Starting with the series being bought by Bethesda, the series has undergone a Genre Shift to now being 3D first/third-person shooters with real-time combat (making them Action RPG hybrids by consequence).
• Every game in the Far Cry series is a First-Person Shooter, but the setting and genre changes each game.
  • Far Cry is an action/science fiction game.
  • Far Cry 2 is a grim, realistic shooter with no unnatural elements.
  • Far Cry 3 is another action movie style shooter like Far Cry, more serious than Far Cry but less serious than Far Cry 2, with several hallucinogenic-laced Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane moments.
    • Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is an Affectionate Parody of After the End Science Fiction action films of the 1980s, and 80s pop culture in general.
  • Far Cry 4 is the least different Far Cry game, compared to Far Cry 3. It is also an action movie style shooter like Far Cry 3, though perhaps less serious than Far Cry 3, and with a ton of Tibetan Buddhist inspired Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane moments that are possibly hallucinogenic-laced.. but are so overtly magical that it is hard to believe that they aren't really magic (well, unless the hallucinogenics are just that strong and are everywhere).
  • Far Cry Primal takes place in prehistoric times, and as such probably has the least amount of action and is the closest to having real magic. Also while it is probably the second most serious game after Far Cry 2, it is also the most optimistic game in the series.
• Undertale starts out looking like a kid friendly game where you try to get "friendliness" pellets, but moves within five seconds to a dark, definitely not kid-friendly bullet hell. Then, it's tone shifts from standard, light-hearted puzzle game, to quirky RPG parody, straight to tear jerking deconstruction of said RPG. And that's all in the first Area!
  • Additionally, depending on how many enemies you kill, the game can shift between a once-more quirky character comedy, to a bittersweet story about a lone child in a harsh world, to Spec Ops: The Line: The RPG, to "Genocide Simulator 2015".
• Marathon and its sequels are as much a novella as they are shooters and much of the player's time is spent reading in-game.
• The Persona series are all Urban Fantasy games, but each game has a distinct style of store.
  • The original Persona and Persona 2 are mainly Urban Fantasy.
  • Persona 3 is an Urban Fantasy Cosmic Horror Story.
  • Persona 4 is an Urban Fantasy Whodunit.
  • Persona 5 is an Urban Fantasy Phantom Thief story.
• The Hex switches game genre constantly, even mixing them together at points.
• Machi features seven routes, each in a wildly different genre (Keima's route is a humorous Detective Drama, Ichikawa's route is pretty much horror, Yoshiko's route is slapstick, etc). Notably there's no overarching plot at all, and compared to Kamaitachi no Yoru (where the player could at least choose a route and play that until the end), in Machi the player has no choice but to jump between routes all the time in order to make progress, so the genre shifts become all the more noticeable.
• Bugsnax is a helluva thing to describe. It's not for nothing that Yahtzee Croshaw described the game in his Zero Punctuation review as "Fraggle Rock as directed by David Cronenberg". While taking place from a strict first-person perspective (as "The Journalist"), the game manages to be:
  • A Mons Series, thanks to the Bugsnax collecting element.
  • A puzzle game, as you have to come up with creative ways to capture Bugsnax.
  • A first person action-adventure game, in the various sidequests and challenges.
  • A suspense horror game, which develops into Cronenburg-esque Body Horror as you learn more about the island.
  • And finally, relationship counselor training, because of how much of the game's content is intertwined with you figuring out the neuroses and emotional baggage of the deeply damaged cast of NPCs and helping them deal with their issues.
  • And just to top it all off, the game's cast consists of fuzzy Muppet-like monsters eating insect-creatures made of snack foods, making the game come across as a parody of something that would normally be fairly inoffensive.
• Live A Live is essentially a Vignette Game featuring seven relatively short chapters that each take place in wildly different settings, with different genres (and sometimes gameplay) to match:
  • The Prehistoric chapter is a comedy featuring cavemen and irreverant humor.
  • The Imperial China chapter is a classic sendup of martial arts movies and stories.
  • The Twilight of Edo Japan chapter is a historical drama featuring ninjas, a clear Oda Nobunaga Expy, and a potential Stealth-Based Mission.
  • The Wild West chapter is, naturally, a Spaghetti Western.
  • The Present Day chapter is a massive sendup to Fighting Games which were popular at the time of the game's release.
  • The Near Future chapter is an amalgamation of Cyberpunk and Mecha anime tropes.
  • The Distant Future chapter is a science fiction story, though later in the chapter it turns into a Survival Horror game.
  • Completing all seven chapters unlocks the Middle Ages chapter, which harkens to classic Eastern RPGs and High Fantasy. That is, before swerving hard into Dark Fantasy territory in the leadup to its Twist Ending.
• While every season of Criminal Case has the basic premise of solving murders to advance levels and continue with the story, each installment brings a different theme to the overall plot and setting where the player has to solve the underlying mystery surrounding the narrative.
  • Criminal Case: Grimsborough is a standard Police Procedural set in a Vice City with mostly self-contained stories in each district, though the last few cases shift the plot to a Conspiracy Thriller focused on an Ancient Conspiracy.
  • Criminal Case: Pacific Bay is another Police Procedural set in a coastal city and with a Darker and Edgier approach, as a good chunk of the main characters are either Hardboiled Detectives, Anti Heroes, or both. In addition, the last few arcs shift focus to a full-blown Science Fiction Thriller.
  • Criminal Case: World Edition is a World Tour with Spy Fiction elements.
  • Criminal Case: Mysteries of the Past is a Historical Detective Fiction.
  • Criminal Case: The Conspiracy is a Conspiracy Thriller with heavy emphasis on sci-fi.
  • Criminal Case: Travel in Time is a Time Travel story focused on the Set Right What Once Went Wrong category. In addition, the different eras and time periods visited during the journey basically makes the main characters Tour Guide Detectives.
  • Criminal Case: Supernatural Investigations has the primary premise of Paranormal Investigations where the main characters are also Amateur Sleuths, and spices things up with the theme of Family of Choice.
  • Criminal Case: City of Romance goes backs to the series' roots and becomes another standard Police Procedural as a way to conclude it with a Grand Finale.

Visual Novels

• Choices: Stories You Play is a collection of multiple visual novels that all have rather different genres, themes, settings and tones.
• Higurashi: When They Cry: It starts out looking like a generic story about some youths (potentially a Coming of Age Story or part of the Harem Genre) before abruptly switching into Psychological Horror. Then the second arc begins, repeating the cycle. Over the course of the series, it becomes clear that the story is actually a Mystery as well, and the last arcs add a dose of action.

Web Animation

• The CPU Championship Series. With rulesets changing every season, you never know what to expect.
  • Season 1 featured 4 Stocks, and all stages with hazzards off.
  • Season 2 featured 5 Stocks, items, and casual stages with hazzards on, and stage morph on.
  • Season 3 featured 3 Stocks, no items, and competitive stages with hazzards off.
• Red vs. Blue: The in-universe movie trilogy starring Sarge (as featured in the non-canon PSAs) gets this during its second installment, thanks to Sarge and Donut trying to reach a broader audience. It starts out as the same kind of dramatic action movie as the first, before becoming a buddy cop movie when Tucker is introduced, then a romantic movie (Sarge ships himself with Lopez), then Sarge and Tucker have to go about Saving Christmas from the terminal disease that is the Zombie Apocalypse... and there's a musical in there somewhere.

Webcomics

• Dinosaur Comics parodies this. After T-Rex comes up with the ultimate disaster movie, he realizes how he can make a nigh-infinite number of sequels: By showing the same series of events from different perspectives, he can shoehorn his story into any genre imaginable.
• The Dreamer jumps from historical fiction to YA lit in a matter of pages.
• Housepets!: The comic switches genres often depending on which characters are the subject. Tarot, King or the Celestials will be a Supernatural Soap Opera, the K9PD will be a Police Procedural or Paranormal Investigation, Tarot and Peanut or King and Bailey will be a Romantic Comedy, the forest will contain Woodland Creatures stories, Imaginates will be adaptations of classic fiction, and Spot (Superdog) will be Stylistic Suck comic book parodies.
• Sluggy Freelance tends to change its genre with every Story Arc. Compare the fantasy epic shown in these strips from 2004, to this Sitcom-style Broke Episode from 2005, to this crime thriller from 2006, to this Fantastic Comedy from 2007. The only consistent trait is that most strips have some sort of joke in them, but even that's not always the case.
• Rusty and Co. The Belt of Genre Changing does this.
• A SrGrafo in Time starts out as a gag series with no continuity, then starts developing continuity while still being mostly comedic, then takes a turn for the dramatic with the arc about the main character and his mother, then becomes a zombie apocalypse story, then a sci-fi time travel story.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent: The story can easily move from Zombie Apocalypse induced After the End, to comedic character interaction, to horror, to pulling on the reader's heartstrings, to (intentionally) Sadly Mythtaken fantasy, to "here's a page almost entirely dedicated to the Team Pet".

Web Original

• Given the nature of the SCP Foundation, a catalogue of all sorts of detained paranormal phenomena, it's bound to end up as this. The website started towards it being more orientated towards horror, which is the common way to describe the site, but SCP entries are very varied in tone to reflect that the weird isn't always traditionally scary. The variation of the site includes SCP entities that are:
  • Conventional horror SCP entities (as in the ones that are scary via a shock image or Wham Line) are what the site is mainly known for and are present in the likes of SCP-173, 087, and 106.
  • Lovecraftian SCP entities that are scary via Nothing Is Scarier or through sheer ideas would include 093 (a universe gone horribly wrong due to the return of either God or an Eldritch Abomination posing as God) and 055 (an entity that makes you forget what it is and when you think of it).
  • Straight up weird SCP entities that leave you more confused than anything, like 500 (pills that have miraculous healing properties) or 447 (an otherwise seemingly useful substance with minty-fresh properties, but will have potentially world-ending consequences if it somehow ever physically interacts with a dead body).
  • Then there are the comedic SCP entities like 1171 (an Eldritch Abomination that hates humans in a not Nazish way, but rather Racist Grandpa way) or his friend 2662 (a parody of Cthulhu that wants to be contained because he can't stand his own cults). Let's not forget 261, a vending machine that can dispose anything with silent passive aggressive Deadpan Snarker tendencies.
  • The site also has heartwarming SCP entities like 999 (an insanely friendly and harmless Blob Monster that loves to tickle people) and 2295 (a healing teddy bear made by a benevolent witch for her dying grandson).
  • Finally, we have SCP creatures that are pretty much everything at once like the infamous hard to destroy lizard that is 682. It's straight up scary visually, scary in a Lovecraftian sense due to its invulnerable nature and murderous hatred... and pretty darkly funny since its testing logs just reek of Foundation desperation and bad ideas.

Web Videos

• In his videos on Christopher Hitchens and the comedian Bill Maher, Bishop Barron notes that The Bible, when taken as a whole, is an example of this trope. After all, there's histories like the Books of Samuel, poems like the Book of Job, and legal codes like Leviticus.
  "The Bible is not a book, the Bible is a library. So the question is 'Do you take the library literally?' Well, it depends on what section you're in!"
• A Running Gag in the Those Aren't Muskets skit, "The Drama Queen". The titular drama queen keeps changing the genre of the clips she's in. One moment she's in the Victorian era, the next she's a rocker chick. This causes her boyfriend to break up with her.
• Due to the random nature in which events occur in Twitch Plays Pokémon and the fact that its plot comes from trying to interpret those events into something coherent, it has run the gamut of genres. Some things that it has been:
  • Religious story
  • Police drama
  • Nature documentary
  • Soap opera
  • Reality show
  • Cosmic Horror Story
  • Spy thriller
  • Political drama
• Each episode of The Hire has a different tone, genre, and style, due to each episode being helmed by wildly different directors infusing their unique Signature Style into the episode they're writing and directing. As such, the series has run the gamut from serious dramas to lighthearted slapstick to sci-fi. The only consistent elements that all the episodes share are the Driver and his BMW.

Western Animation

• Samurai Jack switches between a samurai movie, a spaghetti western, then a buddy comedy, silent movie slapstick, horror, crime drama, Indiana Jones-esque pulp adventure, a gladiator flick — sometimes all in the same episode!
• Gargoyles can be any genre it wants, at any time. Is it a fantasy story full of magic today? Yes! Is it a science fiction story with a man being resurrected from the dead as a cyborg? Yes! Is it a cop show with mob drama? Yes!
• The Amazing World of Gumball: Its default genre is a kids-in-school/family animated sitcom (a la seasons one and two of The Simpsons or Diary of a Wimpy Kid), but it constantly slips into other genres:
  • "The Pizza" is a post-apocalyptic adventure.
  • "The Mirror," "The Joy," and "Halloween" are horror.
  • "The Tape" and "The Sweaters" are cheesy sitcoms.
  • "The Kids" and "The Shell" are coming-of-age stories.
  • "The Lesson" is a prison drama.
  • "The Countdown" is a time travel story.
  • "The Routine" is a high fantasy.
  • "The Comic" parodies a superhero origin story.
  • "The Bus" is a high-octane crime adventure, parodying Speed.
  • "The Detective" is a mystery/noir.
  • "The Others" is a 90s teen dramedy.
  • "The Agent" is a Bond-style secret agent story.
• While Star Wars: The Clone Wars primarily remained true to the Science Fantasy Space Opera-genre of the movie saga, it also weaved dosens of other genres in. Just a few examples:
  • The large battle-centric episodes/arcs are often straight-up mini-Military and Warfare Films, most notable of which is the Umbara-arc.
  • The Mortis-trilogy, "Nomad Droids", a large portion of the Darth Maul-storyline, and the Yoda-arc are pure Fantasy stories set in space.
  • "Senate Spy", "Duchess of Mandalore", "Pursuit Of Peace", "Senate Murders", the Season 4 Obi-Wan undercover-arc, the Season 5 Fugitive Ahsoka-arc, and the Season 6 Fives-arc are Conspiracy Thrillers.
  • The Zillo-duology is a Monster movie.
  • "Legacy of Terror", "Brain Invaders" and "Massacre" edge on being Horror episodes.
• Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero is about three kids who travel to other dimensions, each one a different genre (and some of them a mix of genres). One episode could be The Western where people ride dinosaurs, another a fairy-tale musical, and another a Silence of the Lambs parody with cereal mascots.
• The Scooby-Doo franchise has never been shy about dipping its fingers (paws?) in multiple genres, which may be why it's managed to last so long. The 1969 original was a rather capricious blend of kid-friendly horror, comedy and mystery, with even the occasional science-fiction episode. ^note  Most notably "Foul Play in Funland", which cast a robot as the Monster of the Week. Following in its footsteps, later shows and movies tend to emphasize just one of those genres per story, depending on where the Mystery Machine ends up. For example, any story with a costumed crook tends to emphasize the mystery, while stories with real monsters (like Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island) emphasize the horror, stories with more overtly mystical elements (like Scooby-Doo! and the Witch's Ghost) emphasize the fantasy, stories with tech-savvy villains (like Scooby-Doo and the Alien Invaders and Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase) emphasize the sci-fi, and stories that play up Scooby and Shaggy's antics (like Scooby-Doo! and the Reluctant Werewolf and Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School) are pure comedy.
• Love, Death & Robots is comprised of several animated shorts that vary wildly in genre and mood, although as the title suggests, the most common themes are science fiction (sometimes verging into Science Fantasy), horror and romance.
  • Sonnie's Edge" is a gritty action-heavy Cyberpunk Rape and Revenge story served with a side of Feminist Fantasy. A tough-as-nails rape survivor gets revenge on powerful and dangerous men in a grim future Britain where Beastly Bloodsports using genetically engineered Kaiju is entertainment.
  • "Three Robots" is a lighthearted comedy where a trio of very snarky robots comment and speculate about humans by travelling through a ruined city after the humans are long gone.
  • "The Witness" is a trippy and surrealist thriller that combines live-action and animation, where a man and a woman are trapped in a "Groundhog Day" Loop, taking turns to murder each other.
  • "Suits" is an action packed mix of country scenery and Mecha Anime, where tough, determined space hicks take on alien devourers a la Starcraft.
  • "Sucker of Souls" ditches Sci-Fi elements in favour of a Dark Fantasy action-horror tinged episode about a team of modern mercenaries who have to deal with Dracula after their expedition stumbles onto his resting place.
  • "When The Yogurt Took Over" is a lighthearted and odd Sci-Fi comedy that is also a commentary on the dangers of artificial intelligence and how it could quietly make humanity irrelevant.
  • "Beyond The Aquila Rift" starts out as a strange thriller set in outer space that eventually turns into a Cosmic Horror Story.
  • "Good Hunting" is a Miyazaki-esque Steampunk romance story set in an alternate Qing-era China ("Silk Punk" if you will), with themes of Chinese identity and anti-imperialism. Liang, a Chinese Gadgeteer Genius and Yan, a huli ying, both have to adapt in a rapidly-changing world.
  • "The Dump" flips the switch often between Black Comedy and horror elements, with a lot of Fan Disservice.
  • "Shape-Shifters" is an action-oriented military story with werewolves and little to no comedy.
  • "Helping Hand" is a Life-or-Limb Decision, done by a space janitor as she's busy fixing a satellite.
  • "Fish Night" is a trippy animation about a Ghost Story, or depending on who you ask, an Urban Fantasy retelling of the story of Icarus.
  • "Lucky 13" is a Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane sci-fi story about an "unlucky" dropship, its new Space Marine pilot and their bond.
  • "Blind Spot" is an action-packed Heist Episode featuring slick Cyborg thieves and a Traintop Battle.
  • "Ice Age" is a comedy featuring live-action actors, a young couple who are stunned to find a tiny developing civilization in their freezer.
  • "Alternate Histories" is about progressively more ridiculous alt-history predictions made by a phone app.
  • "The Secret War" is a brutal Dark Fantasy action-horror short about brave Soviet soldiers in 1943 defending their motherland from flesh-eating ghouls summoned in Siberia.
  • "Automated Customer Service" is a futuristic Dark Comedy about a malfunctioning robot vacuum cleaner that tries to kill an old woman and her dog.
  • "Ice" is a teen drama that takes place in a distant mining colony on an arctic exoplanet, where nearly everyone is heavily bio-augmented, the protagonist is derided as an "Extro", an unaugmented human with baseline abilities, competing for the respect of his older brother's friends.
  • "Pop Squad" is a somber story set in a dystopian future where humans learned the secret to Immortality and came up with a terrible solution to the Immortal Procreation Clause - having unauthorized children is a crime, and police track them down and kill them to keep the population in check.
  • "Snow in the Desert" is an action-packed sci-fi story about an albino immortal on a desert planet, hunted by alien bounty hunters.
  • "The Tall Grass" is a supernatural thriller where a train passenger (with an uncanny resemblance to H. P. Lovecraft) is mesmerized by dazzling lights in the grass and nearly dragged into the hereafter by ravenous pale monsters.
  • "All Through The House" is a Christmas Episode, where two children meet Santa... and quickly wish they never did.
  • "Life Hutch" is a Military Science Fiction piece about a downed space fighter pilot trapped in a confined space with a Killer Robot.
  • "The Drowned Giant" is a sad Urban Fantasy about a small seaside community that finds a giant has washed ashore, and how the giant initially causes a buzz around town, but is soon desecrated and forgotten.
  • "Three Robots: Exit Strategies" is a Sequel Episode, the first of the series, seeing the snarky robot trio return to speculate further on how the humans came up with strategies to survive the apocalypse.
  • "Bad Travelling" is a Gothic Horror set in a Sunless Sea-esque Ocean Punk world, where an Unscrupulous Hero sea captain must use all his guile and cunning to deal with a titanic crab monster and his own treacherous crewmates.
  • "The Very Pulse of the Machine" is a Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane trippy thriller about a female astronaut stranded on an alien moon with a declining oxygen supply.
  • "Night of the Mini Dead" is a comical diaroma-esque playout of a Zombie Apocalypse, with squeaky-voiced miniatures.
  • "Kill Team Kill" is a Military Science Fiction romp in the same vein as G.I. Joe, where foul-mouthed, gung-ho soldiers are pitted against a Cyborg bear.
  • "Swarm" is an introspective Cosmic Horror Story about human scientists discovering an alien colony, confident they can exploit the Swarm, they soon learn their true place in the universe.
  • "Mason's Rats" is a Black Comedy about a Scottish farmer who finds out that rats, granted sapience through GMO wheat, are developing a medieval-level civilization in his barn. He orders a Killer Robot to destroy the rats, but the machines' brutal efficiency leaves him questioning his motives...
  • "In Vaulted Halls Emtombed" is a Military Science Fiction that quickly turns into a Delta Green adventure, where a squad of American soldiers uncover a vault where a Cthulhu-esque Eldritch Abomination awaits the chance to be free...
  • "Jibaro" is a mindbending trip where a sultry Enthralling Siren covered in gold and jewels meets her match in a deaf knight, and he meets his match in her.
• Though Codename: Kids Next Door is at its core a show about groups of kids adventuring or fighting bad guys, nearby every episode is written as an Affectionate Parody of some genre of some media. One episode might be about finding a missing child in a pile of his own clothes and is depicted like a dangerous climb up a snowy mountain (complete with "blizzards" of socks), while another episode might be about homework thieves on the school bus and is depicted like a train robbery in the Old West.
• The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh does this. The series is just as likely to be adventure as it is slice of life, and while a lot of episodes are straight comedy, others get pretty dark or dramatic. Specific episodes dip into all kinds of genres, including:
  • Horror, with its many subgenres, including parodies of B-Movies ("Pooh Oughta Be in Pictures"), Ghost Stories ("Things That Go Piglet in the Night"), Gothic Horror ("The Monster Frankenpooh"), and Slasher Movies ("Sorry, Wrong Slusher").
  • Trapped in Another World fantasy, whether it's an Eldritch Location ("Cleanliness is Next to Impossible"), a Magical Land ("All's Well That Ends Wishing Well"), a World in the Sky ("Pooh Skies"), or a Medieval European Fantasy ("A Knight to Remember").
  • Crime fiction (The episodes featuring the Pack Rats or Stan and Heff).
  • Mysteries ("Tigger, Private Ear", "Eeyore's Tail Tale", and "Sham Pooh").
  • Westerns ("Paw and Order" and "The Good, The Bad, and the Tigger").
  • Sports Stories ("Prize Piglet" and "What's the Score, Pooh?").
  • Pirate Stories ("Rabbit Marks the Spot").
  • Superhero Stories ("The Masked Offender").
  • War stories ("To Bee or Not to Bee").
  • Fractured Fairy Tale ("Three Little Piglets").
  • Coming-of-age/family drama ("Find Her, Keep Her").
  • Sometimes, an episode can't even make up its mind what it wants to be. In "Pooh Moon", some characters think they're in a ghost story and others think they're in an outer space sci-fi, while "To Catch a Hiccup" starts as a lighthearted slapstick comedy but shifts partway into horror.
• Hazbin Hotel: Not the show itself, which is mostly just a Black Comedy horror musical but rather its soundtrack, which constantly switches style in almost every song.
  • "Inside of Every Demon is a Rainbow" is Pop Punk.
  • "Happy Day in Hell", "You Didn't Know", and "Finale" are Disney-esque musical numbers.
  • "Hell is Forever" is Hard Rock.
  • "Stayed Gone" is swing with a dash of Horrorcore.
  • "Respectless" is Pop Rap reminiscent to Six: The Musical.
  • "Whatever it Takes" is a Power Ballad with the instrumentation of early 2000s Alternative Rock.
  • "ADDICT" is electro dance pop.
  • "Poison" is Synth-Pop
  • "Loser, Baby" is jazz rock.
  • "Hell's Greatest Dad" is electro swing.
  • "It Starts With Sorry", "More Than Anything", and "More Than Anything (Reprise)" are acoustic ballads.
  • "Welcome to Heaven" is Baroque Pop.
  • "Out for Love" is Latin dance pop.
  • "Ready for This" is a Les Misérables-style rallying song mixed with Vaudeville.

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