Tusk by Fleetwood Mac

Tusk, Fleetwood Mac's twelfth studio album, arrived as a sprawling double album from Warner Bros. on 12 October 1979 in the US and a week later in the UK, and it's the sound of a band refusing to make Rumours again. Lindsey Buckingham's songs are the giveaway: sparse, jittery, bent by the pull of post-punk, they turn the whole record strange around them, even as Stevie Nicks, Christine McVie, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood keep the melodies rolling. The title track and "Sara" are the ones countdowns still reach for.

It came at a price, too: about $1.4 million by later accounts, the most expensive rock album made up to then. Next to the ten million Rumours had shifted, the four million copies Tusk sold looked like a flop to the label, and the band took it on the road for nine months anyway, sharing a bill with Bob Marley in Germany along the way.

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