Latest Release
- 24 MAR 2023
- 10 Songs
- The Wall · 1979
- The Wall · 1979
- Wish You Were Here · 1975
- A Momentary Lapse Of Reason (2019 Remix) · 2021
- The Dark Side of the Moon (2011 Remastered) · 1973
- The Dark Side of the Moon (2011 Remastered) · 1973
- The Dark Side of the Moon (2011 Remastered) · 1973
- The Dark Side of the Moon (2011 Remastered) · 1973
- The Dark Side of the Moon (2011 Remastered) · 1973
- The Wall · 1979
Essential Albums
- Sweeping and epic, Roger Waters’ visionary rock opera tells the story of Pink, a rock star whose power has corrupted him. Pink Floyd told this partially autobiographical, partially metaphorical story with some of the most exhilarating art rock ever created. Powerhouse basslines, drumming both thunderous and restrained, and dreamy synth fills are matched with an orchestra, sound effects, song fragments, and Dave Gilmour’s guitar solos.
- As sprawling as their earlier epic The Dark Side of the Moon yet more focused, this 1975 jewel featured lengthy, left-of-centre excursions (“Shine on You Crazy Diamond”) that were both majestic and reverent—along with a couple barbs thrown at the music industry ("Have a Cigar", "Welcome to the Machine"). It's also partly Pink Floyd’s anguished and glorious tribute to the gifted Syd Barrett—whose career with the band ended seven years earlier—and a moving set from top to bottom.
- The Dark Side of the Moon is a little like puberty: Feel how you want about it, but you’re gonna have to encounter it one way or another. Developed as a suite-like journey through the nature of human experience, the album not only set a new bar for rock music’s ambitions, but it also proved that suite-like journeys through the nature of human experience could actually make their way to the marketplace—a turn that helped reshape our understanding of what commercial music was and could be. If pop—even in the post-Beatles era—tended toward lightness and salability, Dark Side was dense and boldfaced; if pop was telescoped into bite sizes, Dark Side was shaped more like a novel or an opera, each track flowing into the next, bookended by that most nature-of-human-experience sounds, the heartbeat. Even compared to other rock albums of the time, Dark Side was a shift, forgoing the boozy extroversion of stuff like The Rolling Stones for something more interior, private, less fun but arguably more significant. In other words, if Led Zeppelin IV was something you could take out, Dark Side was strictly for going in. That the sound was even bigger and more dramatic than Zeppelin’s only bolstered the band’s philosophical point: What topography could be bigger and more dramatic than the human spirit? As much as the album marked a breakthrough, it was also part of a progression in which Floyd managed to join their shaggiest, most experimental phase (Atom Heart Mother, Meddle) with an emerging sense of clarity and critical edge, exploring big themes—greed (“Money”), madness (“Brain Damage”, “Eclipse”), war and societal fraction (“Us and Them”)—with a concision that made the message easy to understand no matter how far out the music got. Drummer Nick Mason later noted that it was the first time they’d felt good enough about their lyrics—written this time entirely by Roger Waters—to print them on the album sleeve. For one of the most prominent albums in rock history, Dark Side is interestingly light on rocking. The cool jazz of Rick Wright’s electric piano, the well-documented collages of synthesiser and spoken word, the tactility of ambient music and dub—even when the band opened up and let it rip (say, “Any Colour You Like” or the ecstatic wail of “The Great Gig in the Sky”), the emphasis was more on texture and feel than the alchemy of musicians in a room. Yes, the album set a precedent for arty, post-psychedelic voyagers like OK Computer-era Radiohead and Tame Impala, but it also marked a moment when rock music fused fully with electronic sound, a hybrid still vibrant more than five decades on. The journey here was ancient, but the sound was from the future.
- Even though Pink Floyd's debut album followed Sgt. Pepper's by a couple of months, nothing could have prepared the world for the magical blend of genius and LSD-induced madness that drove Floyd frontman Syd Barrett's dazzling psychedelic vision. Barrett's cubist guitar riffs collide magnificently with Rick Wright's hypnotic, snake-charmer organ lines amid a dizzying merry-go-round of sound effects. All the while, Syd's equally abstract lyrical approach freely mixes fairytale imagery with cosmic explorations—the ideal soundtrack for journeys through both outer and inner space.
- 2022
- 2021
- 2014
- 1994
- 1983
Artist Playlists
- A journey with rock's metaphysical cartographers of the collective unconscious.
- Lean back and relax with some of their mellowest cuts.
- The legendary prog rockers' concerts are fully immersive events.
- Their spacey visions have shaped both rock and electronic music.
- Tracing acoustic rock forms into vast psychedelic expanses.
- A black light and Dark Side of the Moon are all you need.
More To Hear
- The 1973 Pink Floyd song went viral, and she’s a big reason why.
- Side 1: Strombo celebrates 50 years of Pink Floyd’s album.
- Side 2: Strombo continues his exploration of the iconic record.
- Bricks, billboards, and boulevards: Pink Floyd made music history.
- Superorganism picks the 5 Best Songs on Apple Music.
About Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd are notable not only for what they popularised (immaculate hi-fi production, elaborate concept albums, planetarium laser shows) but for what they negated: With their carefully cultivated sense of mystique, they proved you needn’t play the role of camera-mugging pop stars to become one of the world’s most famous rock bands. Which is ironic, given that they were initially led by the irrepressibly charismatic Syd Barrett, whose madcap genius spawned the brain-scrambling psychedelia of 1967’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. But after Barrett’s erratic behaviour prompted his dismissal from the group a year later, Floyd transitioned into a more enigmatic cosmic-rock collective powered by Roger Waters’ propulsive basslines, Richard Wright’s ethereal keyboard drones, drummer Nick Mason’s tense time-keeping and the deeply emotive guitar squeals of Barrett’s replacement, David Gilmour. Albums like Ummagumma and Meddle ushered in the progressive-rock era with their sprawling, side-long compositions (and, decades later, proved foundational to indie movements like post-rock and doom metal). But with 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd were no longer strictly the domain of underground-music heads. Harnessing their exploratory aesthetic into a taut, seamless song cycle, the album would spend 14 consecutive years on the Billboard charts, and it remains the benchmark for studio-crafted art-rock excellence that bands like Tame Impala continue to chase, while its pioneering use of electronics inspired adventurous dance acts like Daft Punk. Dark Side was also the record where Waters’ lyrical voice came to the fore, through critiques of British society that were as cutting as anything coming from the punks who purported to hate the band. Waters’ vision became evermore paramount on a string of classic LPs that explored personal loss (1975’s Barrett-inspired elegy Wish You Were Here) and political power structures (1977’s Orwellian parable Animals), culminating in 1979’s colossal arena-rock opera The Wall (though the fact that the latter release yielded Pink Floyd’s only No. 1 single, ”Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2”, affirmed the band’s knack for providing accessible gateways into dense, demanding works). Waters continued to exert outsized creative control over the band until his 1985 departure, after which the remaining members carried on under the Floyd name into the ‘90s. Following a one-night-only reunion with Waters in 2005 for Live 8, and Wright’s death from cancer in 2008, Gilmour and Mason released the final Pink Floyd album, The Endless River, in 2014, bringing one of the most transformative and tumultuous bands in rock history to a peaceful rest.
- ORIGIN
- London, England
- FORMED
- 1965
- GENRE
- Rock