Have you ever come across a particular artist that caught your interest but you decide to put them on hold for a (looooooong) while, and then when you do get around to finally listening to their stuff, you say to yourself, "I wish I had listened to these guys sooner"?

The first artist that I recall doing this to was Jack or Jive. I found out about them around X-Mas 2008, and I only downloaded their song "Dryad" to put on my faerie playlist. Then I came back to them for some reason a few months later, and I really enjoyed their material so much that I ended up buying two albums in that same month.

Other artists/bands that I've done this to include In Extremo, recently Shiva in Exile, The Mediaeval Baebes (whom I found out about a few years ago), Niyaz, Goethes Erben, Cindergarden, Deine Lakaien, and surprisingly enough, Nightwish (I actually accidentally downloaded their song "Beauty of the Beast" when I was trying to download songs from the Disney movie soundtrack back in high school, and I just deleted it ).

For me it would be (To name a few) :

Abney Park
Emilie Autumn
Danzig
Sopor Aeternus

And Most of the Goth bands that I listen to because of knew of them long before I ever heard their music.

I'll echo what you're saying about Sopor, Midi; as time goes by and I discover more material the more I get drawn into Anna Varney's musical universe.

Sopor as well here. I think that I should have paid more attention to that bands that were around and gigging locally as well (~1983 onwards).

Skinny Puppy - for the longest time I kept seeing that name around, and during that time never listened to one song. Finally one day I was looking around on their myspace page and listened to "second tooth" and still it remains one of my favorite songs from them.

.45 Grave - Same case as Skinny Puppy, first song I heard was "Evil" and immediately liked the band.

Since those two experiences I started investigating bands mroe quickly, because you never know...

The Cranes:
saw some guy at a goth club in New Orleans wearing one of their shirts 9 years ago, saw their records around multiple goth mailorder sites, heard other artists compared to them more times than I can imagine, then suddenly found one of their CDs laying around a used record shop last year.
Decided to pick it up and was blown away!!!

Zoviet France:
One of my British friends who's into the same sort of old school industrial I'm into told me time and time again they were one of his favorite bands and anyone who's into Nurse With Wound or early Current 93 NEEDS to listen to Zoviet France!!
Sadly I ignored his advice until last year when I picked up one of their CDs and now MUST hunt them all down!!

Portion Control:
The name always threw me off. I don't know why, but it has that typical "club EBM" ring to it, but they were actually a heavy influence on both Skinny Puppy and Depeche Mode!!

Blood Axis:
Shame on me for denying this great innovator of the neofolk/martial industrial scene for so long!! Only bought one of their CDs last year....

Nosferatu:
Always heard these guys on goth rock compilations, and never really peaked my interest, as the songs selected for te mix I always found stale, boring, and generic for the genre.
It wasn't until picking up and listening to their first full-length all the way through I realized what I've been missing!!

......and strangely enough: OLD Carcass!!!
Back in junior high school, when I first got into death metal, I had only heard their last three albums(starting from Necroticism....) and later on decided I "outgrew" them. I unwisely put them in the same category as Metallica or Megadeth as "metal bands I listened to in high school before moving onto better things".
This year, I was invited to DJ a friend's metal night event, so I decided to put together an old school death metal playlist, and did my research, picking up all the essential/influential albums. Among them were Reek of Putrefaction and Symphonies of Sickness.
These two ended up being two of the nastiest, most vicious, dirty extreme metal albums that make most black metal sound like futurepop!! I realized i had done Carcass a great and terrible wrong by binning them.....

Joy Division ~ One of those bands I just couldn't get into because I felt like they were being shoved down my throat for a long time.

The Cramps ~ There's really no excuse not to have started listening to them sooner except for laziness. ^_^;

Lacrimosa ~ They are much better than I first gave them credit for a few years ago.

Also Lacrimosa, yes...... i had always thought of them as hit or miss until I heard their first album!!!

One band I'm discovering as if for the first time that I wished I'd been FAR more into is 'Christian Death'.

This week, I've been listening to 'Only Theatre of Pain' and 'Catastrophe Ballet' over and over again.


If you're interested in absolutely fascinating guitar work, the former album is ESPECIALLY unforgettable! NEVER heard a guitar used quite like that!

Amazing!

on Lacrimosa: Ah yes. Like Centurion has mentioned several times before, I did the wrong thing by listening to their recent works (which is just "meh" to me). Their earlier neoclassical darkwave stuff is stunning.

I read about Oneiroid Psychosis at least two years ago on this very forum, and I even listened to one or two of their songs, but that was it, I wasn't all that impressed by the music.
Then, a few weeks ago I stumbled upon the OP myspace randomly, listened to their music again I was crazy about it immediately. Since then I got my hands on the discography and I loooove it. I don't get why I didn't realize earlier that OP is seriously awesome. *sigh*

Sad as it is to say, I'm only just now beginning to understand why 'Mission UK' is such a first rate band....wish I'd known at the time.

Faith and the Muse. Only really heard of them recently. Now I can't get enough of them!

Butterfly Messiah. I listened to them once and never got into them. Then recently, while I was looking up suggestions for more faerie music, Butterfly Messiah popped up. So I listened to them again, and now I love "For Today"!

Just recently (like within the last 2 days) got into Voltaire. He's pretty great.