“La Villa Strang Iato” by Rush

Rush brought Hemispheres, their 1978 album, to a close with "La Villa Strangiato": close to ten minutes of instrumental, just the band hurling itself through one hairpin turn after another. They made the record at Rockfield Studios in Wales with their long-time co-producer Terry Brown, who shares the arranging credit with the band here, while Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart split the writing. Rush themselves rated it the most technically demanding thing they had tried to get on tape up to then.

The whole album came hard. Instead of walking in with finished songs, they spent weeks writing and arranging in the studio, and the grind wiped them out. Hemispheres is often heard as a high point of their prog years, and this is where it ends up, going for broke before the leaner, radio-ready songs of Permanent Waves.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz.