Pink Floyd Album Recommendations

The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Pink Floyd

[#] The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)

The dark side is actually the first side.

Reviewed October 27, 2025

Sometimes, being sheltered is cool. I came into this album with such a wealth of musical knowledge that, from the first listen, I could hear all the ideas other bands stole from Pink Floyd. The interludes, the seamless transitions between songs, the spoken word samples—The Dark Side of the Moon codified the concept album, which also means that its worst ideas were the genesis for the worst ideas of most concept albums. Maybe it's odd to refer to it like that. It's odd to cover the fourth best-selling album of all time like there's much I can add to it, and regardless of which bits I think are style and which bits are substance, bands and listeners for decades have mined it all like it's substance, and maybe that's good enough.

On the strong end of things, these guys are masters at waxing and waning moods, the anxiously self-soothing vocals of "Breathe" juxtaposed with "Time"'s agonized yelps about death, the suitably skanky bassline and saxophone crashouts on "Money" slowly melting into the resigned, slow motion mope of "Us and Them". "Brain Damage" proves especially eerie, as Roger Waters first puts his ghostly baritone to good use on a Pink Floyd record. It's the one about the lunatics on the grass; that you know proves my point. It's definitely a cracking listen, and I'm taken plenty with the songs, but for my purely pleasure listening, The Dark Side feels a lot longer than 42 minutes. Seriously, your second song probably shouldn't start nine and a half minutes into the record.

(Thank you brainrot23 for the request, apologies that it took so long.)