Secret Treaties by Blue Oyster Cult

Secret Treaties, Blue Öyster Cult's third studio album, came out on Columbia on April 5, 1974, and it's the Long Island band at their most sinister and sly. Same lineup and same production crew as last time, with Sandy Pearlman at the helm: Eric Bloom out front, Buck Dharma's guitar slicing through, Allen Lanier on keyboards and rhythm guitar, Joe Bouchard on bass and Albert Bouchard on drums.

The oddity is that the band wrote none of the words. Pearlman, rock critic Richard Meltzer and Patti Smith handled the lyrics, which suits the record's shadowy, cryptic mood, and it's the only BÖC album where Dharma doesn't sing lead on a single track. It never climbed higher than number 53 in the US, but Melody Maker's readers voted it the top rock album of all time in 1975, it went gold in 1992, and Rhapsody later filed it among the great proto-metal records.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.