A psychedelic epic fully fusing rock music with electronic sound.
The Dark Side of the Moon
Pink Floyd
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Even compared to other big rock albums of its time, Dark Side of the Moon was a shift, forgoing the boozy extroversion of stuff like The Rolling Stones for something more interior. As much as the album marked a breakthrough, it was also part of a progression in which Floyd managed to blend their most experimental phase with an emerging sense of clarity, 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.
And for one of the most prominent albums in rock history, Dark Side is pretty light on rocking. Even when the band opened up and let it rip—say, the ecstatic wail of unlikely TikTok sensation “The Great Gig in the Sky”—the emphasis was more on texture and feel. The album set a precedent for arty, post-psychedelic voyagers like OK Computer-era Radiohead and Tame Impala, but it also marked the moment when rock music fused fully with electronic sound, a hybrid still vibrant more than five decades on.
“Every time I listen to it, I feel like I’m being transported… It is just right for what it’s like to be weightless looking out the window of a spaceship.”
Chris Hadfield
astronaut