2023-08-18 09:10:02

Every Pink Floyd Album Ranked Worst to Best

Introduction

Few bands from the last 60 years have made as big of an imprint on music as Pink Floyd. There’s the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and then the prog-rock and psychedelic quartet from London with that famous album brandishing a triangle on the cover. Started by Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, Nick Mason and Richard Wright in 1965, Pink Floyd awed and experimented their way through numerous intervals—each chapter propelling them even further into rock ‘n’ roll immortality. When Barrett’s declining health led to him leaving the band in 1968 and guitarist David Gilmour was brought into the fold, the lineup would become solidified and remain tight for the next 11 years—until Waters fired Wright while making The Wall.

The Ranking

This year, the band’s most famous record—The Dark Side of the Moon—turns 50 years old. In those five decades, the album has transcended its own legacy, becoming one of the most recognizable music projects in human history. In Paste‘s 21-year history, we’ve never ranked Pink Floyd’s catalog—until now. With 15 albums to sort through, doing so is no small feat. We’re going to give it our best go nonetheless. So, without further ado, here is every Pink Floyd album, ranked from worst to best.

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15. Ummagumma (1969)

Ummagumma is a less promising rehash of A Saucerful of Secrets. I’d argue no all-time great band has ever had such a disgraceful, uninteresting period in their career quite like Pink Floyd did in 1968 and 1969. With More brandished smack-dab in the middle, Ummagumma caps off a rough three-album run for the group—and much of that has to do with it being inconsistent and unforgivingly rough around the edges. It’s two records smashed into one release, and neither are that good. Side one features a live rendition of Barrett’s “Astronomy Domine” without him (a horrible sin, as Gilmour, Waters and company cannot resurrect their former bandleader’s brilliance) and much-too-long, overwrought attempt at “Careful with That Axe, Eugene.” As for the studio album section, Richard Wright’s “Sysyphus” suite is unlistenable, industrial noise vomit without any sort of ambition or heart. Even Gilmour’s three-part “The Narrow Way” and Mason’s three-part “The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party” are just putrid and relentless misses.

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14. More (1969)

More had a place on this list. I mean, it is a soundtrack album more than it’s a studio record that properly reflects who Pink Floyd were becoming as a unit. Barbet Schroeder’s film was panned by critics for romanticizing how drugs can destroy the lives of young people, and the director insisted that the soundtrack not actually fit with what was happening on-screen, according to Waters some years later. The idea was to construct a cycle of songs that could be on the radio or the television or street noise. I think that’s what makes it worthy of this list, since you can listen to it without a single clue as to what More is even about. The record itself is rowdy and jumbled, comprising mostly instrumentals that are damn near the antithesis of Pink Floyd instrumentals. Waters helmed the writing for all but two of the tracks, but “Green Is the Colour” is actually a really brilliant folk tune from him. “The Nile Song” and “Cymbaline” are nice, too, but the majority of this album is fluff unworthy of being revisited. Perhaps we can put an asterisk next to it, since it’s a studio album that’s not really a studio album. Then again, it’s a soundtrack album that’s not really a soundtrack album, either, so what’s the point?

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13. The Endless River (2014)

The Endless River isn’t much of a final album at all—given that it is instrumental music that was recorded during The Division Bell sessions 20 years prior. What made it new, however, was that some of the material was re-worked and finished in 2013 and 2014 on the houseboat Gilmour owns. Given that it is very much a collection of Division Bell leftovers, it’s hard to consider The Endless River as anything but meaningless. The record lives up to its name, too, as the 53-minute runtime never seems to end, as Gilmour, Mason and Wright seem to let every track bleed into the next. More of an exercise in white-noise machine-quality work than a grand, final statement from one of the greatest rock bands of all-time, The Endless River turns still nearly from the jump. Its lead single, “Louder than Words” is, likely, the only standout on Pink Floyd’s last hurrah—an aimless, wandering, unambitious and dull coda.

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12. A Saucerful of Secrets (1968)

A Saucerful of Secrets is messy, all over the place and downright puzzling at times. The record is definitely not their worst, given that songs like “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun” and “Jugband Blues” exist on it—the latter of which being Barrett’s swan song with the band, and a rather exciting one at that. The four-part, 11-minute “A Saucerful of Secrets” suite that kicks off side two is ambitious but mostly chaotic noise, as if Pink Floyd were trying to make field recordings of the inner-mechanisms of a black hole. Knowing that the next two releases would be More and Ummagumma, however, A Saucerful of Secrets sounds like a revelation in the company of those lackluster entries.

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