The Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd

The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd's eighth studio album, came out on 1 March 1973 through Capitol in America, with Harvest issuing it in Britain a couple of weeks later, and it is as close as rock gets to a total environment. The band worked the material out on stage, then cut it in two stretches across 1972 and 1973 at EMI Studios in London, producing it themselves: Roger Waters on bass, David Gilmour on guitar, Richard Wright on keyboards, Nick Mason on drums.

It was built as a concept piece about the grind of the life they were leading and about the mental health troubles of their old bandmate Syd Barrett, and it rolls through conflict, greed, time, death and madness. The long instrumental wanderings of earlier Floyd are cut back; instead there are tape loops, multitrack trickery and early synthesizers like the EMS VCS 3 and a Synthi A, with engineer Alan Parsons shaping much of the sound. Scraps of interviews with the road crew and others float in and out. "Money" lurches along on a lopsided groove, "Time" ticks with dread, and on "The Great Gig In The Sky" session singer Clare Torry, brought in by Parsons, lets loose a gut-wrenching wail.

Storm Thorgerson designed the prism sleeve after Wright asked for something simple and bold. The record made all four of them famous and rich, spent 996 weeks on the US album chart, and by 2013 had sold more than 45 million copies, the biggest album of the 1970s. It went into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999 and the National Recording Registry in 2012.

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