Pink Floyd - Animals

The Pink Floyd catalog, back on vinyl, 180-gram pressing

The 10th album, originally released in 1977

Pink Floyd Records — along with Sony Music and Warner Music Group —is reintroducing the band's classic catalog on vinyl, with release dates at regular intervals. Special care has been taken to replicate the original packaging.

It's hard to call anything of Pink Floyd's underrated. The band has two entries in the Top 20 Best Selling Albums of All Time list, matching the Eagles and the Beatles for two albums in the list. Their best-known album, Dark Side of the Moon, spent 741 consecutive weeks (14+ years) in the Billboard 200 Album charts. Their devoted fan base includes millions. And that's not even half of their achievements. So to call anything of theirs underrated is rather unbelievable, but in the case of Animals, some fans say it's true.

In many instances, Animals is fairly stripped-down, with Gilmour's soothing voice missing, and Richard Wright making little if any contribution. Roger Waters writes all lyrics, and the concept of Animals is entirely his. In his harshest manner, Waters rips apart late-1970s society through the use of three types of animals: dogs, the materialistic and glib "yuppies" of a decade later, concerned only with wealth, good times, power and their own well-being; "Pigs" are no less flattering, high-positioned and self-righteous, they preach and dispense their high-minded, moralist views from atop the world's ranks; "Sheep" are the aimless and docile masses who get used and abused by the more powerful Dogs and Pigs in society.

Animals, released in 1977, reached No. 2 in the U.K., and No. 3 in the U.S.. Thanks to the album and the band's back catalogue, noted The Guinness Book of British Hit Albums, "Pink Floyd bested Abba for most weeks on chart (in 1977), 108 to 106."

NME called Animals "one of the most extreme, relentless, harrowing and downright iconoclastic hunks of music to have been made available this side of the sun," and Melody Maker's Karl Dallas described it as "(an) uncomfortable taste of reality in a medium that has become in recent years, increasingly soporific."