Animals

Animals is Pink Floyd's tenth studio album, released on January 21, 1977, and recorded through 1976 at Britannia Row Studios, a facility the band had recently built for themselves in Islington^[1]. Conceived largely by bassist Roger Waters, the record loosely reworks George Orwell's Animal Farm into a portrait of mid-1970s Britain, sorting society into predatory dogs, authoritarian pigs, and a complacent herd of sheep, and aiming its satire at capitalism rather than Orwell's original target of Stalinism^[1].

Unlike Orwell's fable, in which the pigs entrench their rule permanently, Animals ends with the sheep rising up against the dogs, a small note of rebellion tucked inside an otherwise bleak record^[1]. The album is bookended by the two halves of "Pigs on the Wing," a tender, plainly personal love song drawn from Waters' own life that stands in deliberate contrast to the harsher material it frames^[1].

The album's cover, designed by Storm Thorgerson and conceived by Waters, shows a giant inflatable pig floating between the chimneys of Battersea Power Station. During the photo shoot, the 30-foot pig, nicknamed Algie, broke free of its moorings and drifted off into commercial airspace, so the image that became the actual sleeve was assembled as a composite rather than captured in a single shot^[2].

Musically, Animals marked a harder, more stripped-down turn for the band, a shift some critics have connected to punk rock's contemporaneous rise and its open hostility toward established progressive rock acts^[1]. Keyboardist Richard Wright's role in the songwriting diminished sharply on this record, making it the first Pink Floyd album with no composing credit for him at all^[1]. Reviews were mixed on release, with some critics praising its unrelenting intensity and others dismissing it as tedious, but its standing has grown steadily since, and it is now regarded as one of the band's most focused and politically pointed works^[1].

The album's entire second side is given over to "Dogs," a seventeen-minute character study of a ruthless businessman that stands as the record's most musically expansive piece and the only track co-written with guitarist David Gilmour^[1][3].