Free Hand by Gentle Giant

Free Hand, Gentle Giant's seventh album, came out in 1975, their first for Chrysalis in the UK and most of the world, with Capitol handling it in the US and Canada. Cut at Advision Studios, it's the moment the band that made even prog fans scratch their heads decided to let a little daylight in: the dissonance of The Power and the Glory gets smoothed over, the hooks come forward, and the interlocking parts snap together with the precision of a Swiss watch.

Derek and Ray Shulman, Kerry Minnear, Gary Green and John Weathers, every one of them a multi-instrumentalist, still toss medieval, baroque and jazz ideas around like jugglers, but now you can hum along. It paid off: Free Hand reached number 48 on the Billboard 200, the highest any Gentle Giant album climbed in America.

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