Led Zeppelin II by Led Zeppelin

The Dark Side of the Moon

Pink Floyd

A psychedelic epic fully fusing rock music with electronic sound.

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

Led Zeppelin II

Led Zeppelin

Rising rock gods find their footing by taking bigger, weirder chances.

What had sometimes felt clunky the first time around on their 1969 debut—British blues rock rendered slower, heavier, louder—felt seamless just eight months later on Led Zeppelin II. Their time on the road showed: A couple songs either originated or evolved live, while others (especially “Whole Lotta Love”) reflected a relationship between the band members that made the music much more direct, but also enabled them to take bigger, weirder chances.

While much has been made of Led Zeppelin’s liberal quotation of Black American blues, the reality—and legacy—was more complicated. Listen to Led Zeppelin II and you hear young British men absorbing blues not as a progressive pose but arcane knowledge, as gnarled and misty as the Celtic touches of “Thank You” or the Tolkien-inspired visions Jimmy Page leveraged into “Ramble On.” Led Zeppelin II marked the moment the band figured out how to make blues-based rock sound like something harder to recognize.

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The Dark Side of the Moon

Led Zeppelin II