Who’s Next by The Who

Who's Next, the Who's fifth studio album, came out in August 1971 on Track in Britain and Decca in America, and it's what Pete Townshend salvaged from the wreckage of Lifehouse, the sprawling multimedia rock opera he'd dreamed up to follow Tommy. The project buckled under its own ambitions and a running battle with manager Kit Lambert, so the band threw out the plot and kept the tunes: eight of the nine songs here were Lifehouse material, with John Entwistle's "My Wife" the lone outsider.

Roger Daltrey, Townshend, Entwistle and Keith Moon cut "Won't Get Fooled Again" in the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio, then decamped to Olympic Studios for most of the rest, with Glyn Johns at the controls. The synthesizers are the shock of the thing. Those burbling, cycling patterns open "Baba O'Riley" and hum under "Won't Get Fooled Again" until Moon comes crashing through like a runaway freight train and Daltrey tears the roof off. "Behind Blue Eyes" starts as a lonesome ballad before the band kicks the door down, and "Bargain" and "Going Mobile" prove Townshend could still write a plain, grinning rocker when he felt like it.

The cover, shot by Ethan Russell, has the four of them standing around a concrete pillar jutting out of a slag heap, a wink at the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it looks very much as if they've just relieved themselves against it. The record was an instant hit with critics and buyers alike, plenty of critics still call it the Who's finest hour, and in 2020 Rolling Stone put it at number 77 on its list of the 500 greatest albums.

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