For all that the 1970s offered in the realm of bleak music, many of those sociocultural reflections were hardwired to a cursory disenchantment with nearly every generic brand of Westernized domesticity. In music, misanthropy and societal rejection could be heard on many releases over a range of genres, but the unhinged rancor and vitriol of Pink Floyd’s Animals stands wholly and distantly unmatched. Released in 1977, the band’s tenth studio album is at once their bleakest and most thematically fractured, with the music itself boiling out of the instruments with a near -renzied urgency.

Containing five tracks at a running time of just over forty minutes, Animals is the absolute apex for Waters as a lyricist, with his affinity for metaphor taking a decidedly darker, more vicious turn throughout the album’s narrative. Coming just two years after the band’s most achingly personal work in 1975’s Wish You Were Here, Animals serves as a sort of primal contrast to its predecessor’s more somber and mournfully reflective tone. A bastardization of Orwell’s anti-Stalinism in Animal Farm, the album’s thematic plotline is as nihilistic as the then-fetal punk-rock movement it supposedly critiques.

In retrospect, the five songs of Animals play less like the arbitrary ravings of an egocentric band and more like the genuinely honest protestations of band utterly exhausted with the world around them and perhaps even with the status they’d achieved within it. Though Waters would further explore his own personal disillusionment over the course of Pink Floyd’s next two releases, Animals is categorically distinctive both in its premise and in its overall compositional manifestation. Waters’ lyrical obsession with lunacy, patriarchy, government, and the inextricable futility of the pursuit of identity amongst those things works in the music here with a sinister machination.

Bookending the album and providing its sole (and appropriately brief) ode to hope and positivity are the two “Pigs On The Wing” tracks. The song’s overarching question of “What If” plays contradictorily to the remainder of the album’s sardonic tone. The inclusion and clever placement of the song in its divided form offers a reprieving prelude of sorts for the terrible reality that exists between its parts. Exuding a hopeful fragility, the decision by Waters to separate the tracks to ensure the album would conclude on a question of hope rather than a declaration of utter antipathy suggests that for all its unbridled indignation, Animals is not entirely dismissive of its subject matter.

Originally written three years prior to the album’s release, the harrowingly pessimistic “Dogs” is arguably Gilmour’s finest achievement in Pink Floyd, leading the song down its elongated narrative pathway with a vocal and guitar delivery as mercilessly bleak as any put to tape in the post-’60s world. At seventeen minutes, the song was a return for the band to the more improvisational style, yet it remains distinctive both for the inclusion of Wright’s vital synth work and what’s easily the most chillingly delivered vocal performance by Gilmour. Though Waters lends his vocals to the song as well, the rare showing of urgency and worry from Gilmour alongside his equally as rare and frenetic guitar work underscores the track with his signature.

The song is the conceptual cornerstone of the album’s entirety, exploring the social depravity and deception that Waters seemed utterly haunted by as a result of the band’s lucrative success. Continuing the socio-political theme of Animals is the politically charged “Pigs (Three Different Ones)” — a song featuring what would be Waters’ most skewering lyrical attack on the government and political system he saw as hopelessly corrupt and tyrannical. Along with “Sheep,” both songs are more lyrically pointed with the music itself taking a definitively contrasting turn, varying from the former’s use of a talkbox and Gilmour’s rare turn as a bassist and in the latter’s churning style with Waters in one of his most effectively unnerving vocal performances.

Musically speaking, the world surrounding the group had become vastly different in the ten years since their debut. Despite their relatively short existence as a band, Pink Floyd were already being dismissed by the burgeoning punk scene for what was seen as their overly complex and needlessly intricate music that showed more but meant less. The paradox of that youth culture aversion to their music was likely not lost on the band members as their own counter-culture identity had itself been a resistance of sorts to the restrictions of the pop rock formula’s simplicity.

That Animals would be released with its unabated prog-rock wrath to a listening audience likely still reeling from the one-two punch of the album’s two predecessors would be daring enough, but alongside the historical context of its release in a time period of pop music known primarily for its near disposable creative homogenization and the five songs of Animals undoubtedly dropped with a near atomic force upon its release. For the band, the album represented an appropriately ominous turn of creative fortunes as Waters’ weariness with society was matched only by Gilmour’s weariness with Waters.

The growing tensions for both would approach critical mass throughout the recording of the album which also saw meager contributions from both Wright and Mason, the former of which would see Animals as the first Pink Floyd record to be released and not feature him as a credited writer. Additionally, Gilmour’s own personal life as well as that of Waters provided an invariably fractured backdrop for any creativity the band could hope to capture. Despite circumstances that would have unquestionably crippled the creative force of most other bands, the fragmented and exhausted members would create their penultimate work in Animals, despite of and, strangely, due in part to the resistances both within and without their creative circle.

Though often and to a great extent justifiably viewed from the critical perspective that it was a pointed statement at the ills of society, government, and even religion, Animals is an inadvertent but no less effective confessional of the group’s cynicism toward an identity that though they had managed to establish through their own creative vision, felt entirely foreign and invasive to their existence. Beginning with its predecessor, Pink Floyd’s deliberate creative shift in the aftermath of Dark Side’s immense commercial success was one that found the group exploring the veritable space created by pairing melodic minimalism to a bare compositional fluidity borrowing as much from their earliest psychedelic rock ventures as it does the progressive rock digressions of their most recent work at the time.

Looking at what would eventually prove to be their most fully realized material reveals a fascinating pattern of creative precision through resistance for Pink Floyd. Seemingly plagued by adversity both personal and professional throughout the entirety of their career, the group held themselves to the creative impetus that such situations afforded its individual members, pouring every bit of the resulting contempt and resentment into what would almost always develop into their most powerfully evocative songs. From the focused resilience of carrying the band in a new direction in the wake of Barrett’s departure as evidenced by the atmospheric command and focus of Meddle or in the brilliantly pared electronic grandeur of The Dark Side Of The Moon and its fundamental turning point for the band, Pink Floyd’s musicianship found the group reaping its greatest rewards at the cost of its greatest struggles.