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即使同时期有众多重要的摇滚乐专辑，《The Dark Side of the Moon》仍是一个意义深远的转折点。它舍弃了 The Rolling Stones 式的肆意外放，转向内在的探索。这种专辑是一种突破，也昭示了乐队未来的发展走向。Pink Floyd 也成功地在最具前卫、实验色彩的音乐中，简单清晰地传达了对宏大命题的想法：贪婪（《Money》）、疯狂（《Brain Damage》《Eclipse》）、战争和社会分裂（《Us and Them》）。

作为摇滚音乐史上最著名的专辑之一，《The Dark Side of the Moon》的摇滚色彩其实并不浓重。哪怕歌曲有着最狂放的嘶吼（比如在 TikTok 上意外爆红的《The Great Gig In the Sky》），音乐的重点也始终在质地和感觉。专辑为《OK Computer》时期的 Radiohead 和 Tame Impala 等艺术与后迷幻摇滚团体提供了灵感，同时也标志着摇滚乐和电子音乐的全面结合，在 50 多年后仍然散发着无穷活力。

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 synthesizer 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.

Based on performances from late keyboardist Richard Wright during the recording of Pink Floyd’s last album (1994’s The Division Bell) and pulled into shape by guitarist David Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason, The Endless River is a nearly instrumental album that’s intended as the group’s last. Textures often revisit previous Floyd terrain. “Anisina” is reminiscent of “Us and Them.” “Allons-y” 1 and 2 quote ’70s Floyd. Additional contributors—Youth, Andy Jackson, and Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera (but no Roger Waters)—augment the ambient beauty. Only “Louder Than Words” features Gilmour’s vocals as a final wave. The deluxe edition adds three bonus tracks and six videos.

At the dawn of the Internet Age, personal communication became the touchstone of Pink Floyd’s second post-Roger Waters album. With Rick Wright and Nick Mason fully reintegrated into the band, the songs are full of spacious, Floydian textures beneath deeply personal, introspective lyrics. David Gilmour shouts to be heard on “What Do You Want from Me”—one of Floyd’s toughest rockers. On “Keep Talking,” his pleading vocals become nearly drowned out by ominous funk beats and the synthetic voice of Stephen Hawking.

David Gilmour took some criticism for carrying on Pink Floyd without Roger Waters—not least from Waters himself. Begun as a solo album, this became the relaunch of Pink Floyd when cofounders Rick Wright and Nick Mason joined in. Gilmour’s less-acidic worldview means A Momentary Lapse of Reason lacks the pointed lyrical edge of the last handful of Floyd albums. But the lush, richly detailed arrangements of tracks like the dreamy “Learning to Fly” give Gilmour’s liquid guitar solos room to evolve.

Roger Waters dominated Pink Floyd on The Wall, but the follow-up was nearly his first solo album. Rick Wright had been fired, studio musicians supplant the band, and even David Gilmour only sings lead on the scabrous rocker “Not Now John.” Recorded during the build-up to the Falklands War, Waters’ lyrics reflect his personal demons: corruption, societal breakdown, and—looming over everything—his father’s death in World War II. But there’s compassion in Waters’ worldview and a few glimpses of hope amidst the bitterness.

在巡演期间，Pink Floyd 与观众的隔阂愈加凸显，并开始想象在舞台和观众之间筑造一堵墙。贝斯手 Roger Waters 由此进行联想，构思出《The Wall》的概念，长达四十页的剧本成为专辑的初稿。这部“摇滚歌剧”以 Roger Waters 的儿时经历作为原型——第二次世界大战、父亲的死亡、校园欺凌等沉重过往，砌成了一睹令自己饱受折磨的精神之墙，Pink Floyd 试图从中逃脱。与纽约的数个乐队与合唱团的合作，令专辑更添华彩，在《Another Brick In the Wall, Pt. 2》中，乐队以贝斯把控平稳的低音线条，简单的鼓点与和音吉他将人声烘托得更赋力量感，而令人动容的童声合唱，以及歌曲末端意味深远的训斥话语更是点睛之笔。这张承载着高度隐喻的专辑，紧密结合当时的社会背景，以哲学性的思索诉说着大环境下每个人心中都建起了一堵墙，而他们也都是社会这堵大墙中的一块砖头，如何走出墙外，便成为所有人的课题。专辑的原创概念还催生出电影《Pink Floyd - The Wall》，将乐符的笔触转变为视觉效果，延续 Pink Floyd 所带来的深思。

You could say The Wall started taking shape the night Roger Waters leaned over the edge of the stage and spit in a fan’s face. This was July 1977: The band was finishing out their lengthy In the Flesh tour to stadium-size crowds, working at scales unfamiliar and uncomfortable to everyone involved. Risky investments had put them under major financial pressure; audiences seemed more interested in the party than the show; band rapport had gotten so strained that Waters started referring to the rest of the members as “the muffins.”
And so, alone in a crowd of about 80,000 people, standing under the 40-foot-long inflatable pig that had become a central prop of the band’s set, Waters spit. Later that night, he told the producer Bob Ezrin and a psychiatrist friend of Ezrin’s that he sometimes fantasized about building a wall between himself and the audience—an embodiment of how isolated he already felt, and a device by which he could protect what little of himself he thought he had left.
What emerged from that mental image was one of the last, and one of the greatest, gasps of the concept album—that naively romantic idea that music could somehow reach out of the confines of the recorded medium and tell a story that would resonate with the metaphoric heft of a novel. At 80 minutes, The Wall didn’t spare listeners any of Waters’ creative largesse. If anything, it laid bare his inner turmoil (and outer critique) with almost forensic precision: The album traces the long arc of a fictional rock star named Pink Floyd, who evolves from lonely boy to maniacal fascist. Pink starts pointing fingers at everyone from Mom (“Mother”) to the education system (“The Happiest Days of Our Lives,” “Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2”) to blacks, gays, and Jews (“In the Flesh”) to modern life in general (“The Thin Ice”) before realizing that maybe the problem was him all along (“Stop,” “The Trial”)—an arc even more resonant in light of our societal reckoning with the evil men do.
Yeah, it’s a lot, especially as a morality play put on by the rich and famous. But despite their popularity, Pink Floyd was never exactly a friendly band. If anything, The Wall holds up in part because of how profoundly ugly it is, the externalization of feelings so cruel and noxious that people hate to admit even having them, let alone mining them for art. (In that respect, they had more in common with punk than the punks would probably admit.) What had once felt expansive (take the long song-suites of Animals or The Dark Side of the Moon) now felt claustrophobic and fragmented, a picture rendered in shrapnel. In nudging Waters toward his most theatrical impulses, producer Ezrin—famous in part for helping create Alice Cooper—gave the album a narrative through line as comforting and familiar as an old myth (the traumatic rise and tragic fall, the superhero rendered human once again), but gave the impression of wholeness where Waters’ collage-like vision didn’t necessarily imply one. At one point, Ezrin suggested that guitarist David Gilmour go to a club to hear the then-new sound of disco. Gilmour hated it, but got the point: Listen to the rigid pacing of “Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2” and “Run Like Hell”—this wasn’t music about freedom, but about being martially locked in place. By the time you get to “Comfortably Numb,” a life without feeling doesn’t sound half bad.
In addition to elevating them to implausibly greater levels of fame, The Wall marked the last time Waters and the rest of the band would work together in a meaningful way. During the album’s sessions, Waters effectively forced keyboardist Rick Wright out; shortly after 1983’s The Final Cut, Waters quit. In between, they managed to take The Wall on tour. Waters got his wish: During the first half of the show, roadies constructed a wall, brick by cardboard brick, approximately 40 feet in the middle and 130 feet across the top—an embodiment not just of Waters’ concept, but of the band’s general ability to strong-arm reality to suit their dreams. Ezrin, who had run afoul of Waters after unwittingly telling a journalist friend what the conceit of the show was going to be, was forced to buy his own ticket.

Most of the British rock superstars of Pink Floyd’s generation took little notice of the late-‘70s punk revolution. While the three extended epics that make up the bulk of Animals couldn’t sound less like the Sex Pistols, Roger Waters’ venomous, Orwellian lyrics viciously dismiss the whole of modern British society as dogs, pigs, and sheep. That sense of seething contempt and anger makes Animals a spiritual cousin to the punks, though the hopeful two-part bookend “Pigs on the Wing” offers a welcoming sense of compassion.

继 1973 年的突破之作《The Dark Side of the Moon》后，Pink Floyd 延续概念专辑的制作方式，由贝斯手 Roger Waters 一手包办专辑创作，将《Wish You Were Here》献给乐队创始成员之一，因饱受精神疾病困扰而离队的 Syd Barrett，以他为灵感，满怀着思念、致敬、告别。相较于前一张专辑乐曲之间散落着质地相异的声响，《Wish You Were Here》在音乐主题上更加一致，更加地富有音乐性，吉他更加地乡村蓝调，声响的使用更加具有目的性而不突兀。其中《Shine On You Crazy Diamond，Pt.1-5》不但奠定了专辑的主题，乐曲优美的吉他独奏更是令人惊艳，接着 Waters 感伤地唱着：“记得你仍年轻的时候吗？如太阳般灿烂，钻石般灿烂！”冷静而伤怀。这张专辑制作时，身为专辑“概念缪思”的前成员 Syd Barrett 在混音阶段曾见到乐队成员最后一面，但当时的他已经无法正常与人对话，而成员再一次与 Syd 相见时，已经是 2006 年的丧礼了。尽管刚推出这张专辑时，由于前一张专辑的震撼与成功，乐评给予正负两极的评价，专辑仍然销售一空，唱片公司甚至称太多人订购，导致首次出版的数量完全不足以应付。主唱兼吉他手 Dave Gilmour 以及 Richard Wright 曾公开表示这是他们最喜欢的 Pink Floyd 专辑，随着时间过去，人们逐渐认同并赞赏这张仅有 5 首曲子的专辑，将它视为不可错过的经典前卫摇滚之作。

By the time Pink Floyd released their ninth studio album, Wish You Were Here, in the fall of 1975, only eight years had passed since their debut. But in many ways, the five-track suite suggested a band that had endured far more than a decade of turmoil and triumph and, against expectations, thrived in the face of it. In the early days of their ascent, they’d lost Syd Barrett, the madcap leader whose fragile mental state quickly withered beneath the spotlight. And with 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd had become such commercial juggernauts that some of their most audacious peers, including Genesis, wondered if they could ever again construct the kind of cosmic wonders that had once flowed from Barrett’s brain. A moving memorial to their lost brotherhood with Barrett, Wish You Were Here doubles as a melancholic yes and a moving masterwork of mainstream rock introspection. Earlier that year, after Pink Floyd had already taken their new songs on tour in the States, Barrett famously dropped in on his old mates at Abbey Road. With his head shaved, his eyes distant, and his frame wide, Barrett first went unrecognized by the band. When Roger Waters ultimately played him “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”—the 25-minute psychedelic fantasy that went on to bookend the album—Barrett barely responded. But the song and record were about him, or, more broadly, the way the world and especially fame can dull the glow of someone who once “shone like the sun.” His visit reaffirmed the album’s bittersweet gist. Wish You Were Here famously has just five tracks, but each offers an entire universe of feeling, again belying a band that was still so young. Sung by Roy Harper, “Have a Cigar” is an unflinching account of music industry cynicism, the band riding a cool electronic strut to scorn the business’s shameless artistic exploitation. And the title track has become an ageless lament of joyous days that will never return, a country-western standard rendered by Englishmen so curious about audio frontiers they sampled the radio static of David Gilmour’s BMW in the parking lot for the intro. “We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fishbowl, year after year,” Gilmour sings at the climax, a line that so perfectly encapsulates the grind of whatever life you may lead that it has become one of music’s great slogans, as familiar as The Beatles or Shakespeare. Wish You Were Here is perhaps the saddest love letter any major band has ever sent itself—about what was, what is, and, tragically, what could never be.

Working again with director Barbet Schroeder, Pink Floyd created this soundtrack for the film La Vallée over a two-week period in early 1972. It was a relatively quick session for the group, which was also recording The Dark Side of the Moon back in London. To compare it to the soundtrack they had recorded just three years earlier (More) is remarkable—just listen to the tightly arranged, pastoral wonder of “Wot’s … Uh the Deal” or the nearly glam, folk sing-along “Free Four.” With the dark, paranoia-and-synthesizer-tinged “Childhood’s End,” you can hear the seeds of the music that come to fruition on The Dark Side … . At this point in their career, Pink Floyd had developed into a distinct and powerful group—veering between stately rock ’n’ roll and wide-eyed wonder at the drop of a dime. All the pieces of the band were in place on this album—lyrical introspection, Gilmour’s soaring guitar work, and the loping gait of the rhythm section.

For their sixth album, Pink Floyd kept experimenting with space and time, but with far greater confidence in their abilities than before. “One of These Days” is a rolling juggernaut of echoed bass, with organ and guitar hawkishly swooping about. In “Fearless” they play unvarnished folk rock; “Seamus” is straightforward blues with a howling dog solo. The opus “Echoes” is a stately 23-minute trip through what would become classic Floyd whisper-rock, taking in a greasy funk breakdown and wailing ghost noises.

1970 found Pink Floyd at their wildly experimental peak. Covering the first side of the original LP, the 23-minute instrumental title track is wonderfully grandiose, featuring some killer David Gilmour guitar solos and the band’s first (and last) extensive use of orchestra and choir. Before the album ends with the quirky tape-loop-enhanced epic “Alan’s Psychedelic Breakfast,” a trio of remarkably lovely acoustic songs—highlighted by Roger Waters’ delicately philosophical “If”—showcases the band’s growing lyrical sophistication.

Ummagumma is Floyd at their most cosmically adventurous—and one of the most joyously freaky records ever released by a major label. On the live half, the band attacks already-trippy material like the swirling “Astronomy Domine” with an even more ominous, otherworldly feel. The studio recordings are solo efforts by all four band members, crafting heady prog-rock suites and mind-blowing avant-garde sound collages. In the middle sits Roger Waters’ chiming “Grantchester Meadows,” pointing the way to the delicate, atmospheric tunes that would become Floyd mainstays.

Though it was officially a soundtrack for a rarely seen Barbet Schroeder film, More is a hugely important transitional album for Pink Floyd. Here the post-Syd Barrett lineup moves away from freeform psychedelia and masters song structure, while keeping their experimental edge. There’s a lost classic in Roger Waters’ soaring, spooky “Cymbaline,” while “The Nile Song” is one of their heaviest rockers. But More mostly features the band’s lyrical side: “Green Is the Colour” has to be the only Floyd song featuring a pennywhistle.

On their second album, Pink Floyd shifted from quirky psych-pop to a full-on space-rock assault. A Saucerful of Secrets was a giant step towards the kind of cosmic exploits they’d soon be famous for. Syd Barrett ceded the spotlight to new guitarist David Gilmour, but the trippy intensity of extended tracks like the hypnotic, Eastern-tinged “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” and the brain-melting avant-garde title track left no doubt that Floyd were the rulers of the acid-rock realm.

在 60 年代后期的伦敦地下音乐圈积攒不少人气后，传奇前卫摇滚乐队 Pink Floyd 发行了首张专辑《The Piper at the Gates of Dawn》，这一段属于他们的传奇正式拉开帷幕。这张由早期阶段乐队灵魂人物 Syd Barrett 领导的专辑，迷幻摇滚的基底上又见前卫摇滚萌芽，大段即兴演奏和哲学性的歌词是其主打招牌。Syd Barrett 脑海大多是天马行空的想象，他为摇滚注入颇多迷幻色彩，《Pow R. Toc H.》中古怪的噩梦之声、《Lucifer Sam》中电吉他的阴险声效……共同构建出一个光怪陆离的世界。可惜精神状态每况愈下的 Syd Barrett 在专辑发行不到一年后即离开了乐队，成为摇滚时代的一大悲惨损失，不过他的天才成就已为迷幻摇滚掀开新的篇章，并长久地影响着未来摇滚乐的发展。

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