Pink Floyd

Pink Floyd were the epitome of the kind of psychedelic rock that emerged in 1967 in Britain from the ashes of San Francisco’s acid rock. The work of Pink Floyd was essential in giving the genre a unified structure. Their early albums in fact fused the three American strands of psychedelia: the melodic one (the “eccentric” song in the style of White Rabbit by the Jefferson Airplane), the improvised one (the jam style of the Velvet Underground) and the abstract one (the “freak-out” style of the Red Crayola).
In this way the Pink Floyd of 1967–69 coined the canon of psychedelic rock that subsequent generations would draw inspiration from.

For better or worse Pink Floyd also understood the limits and implications of the genre and went on reinventing themselves, gradually transforming psychedelic rock (born for the hippies banished by the Establishment) into a genre for meditation and relaxation (to the benefit of yuppies perfectly integrated into the Establishment). As their career progressed Pink Floyd did not hesitate to change psychedelic sound from harsh and cacophonous to smooth and velvety.
In this way Pink Floyd elevated psychedelic sound to a universal koinè, regardless of the demands or pretensions of one public or another — somewhat as jazz-rock in those same years was “selling” the anguish of the African-American people to the audience of white conformists.

Pink Floyd were formed in London in 1966 by two groups of students, one made up of Cambridge high-schoolers and one of London architecture students. The first included Syd Barrett and David Gilmour, both singers and guitarists who since 1964 had occasionally performed as a folk duo; while the second was composed of Nick Mason (percussionist) and Richard Wright (keyboardist).
Wright had taken classical piano lessons and was a fan of both Miles Davis and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Roger Waters (bass and vocals), who had studied both in Cambridge and in London, acted as a link between the two groups. After forming several beat combos with Mason and Wright in 1965, in 1966 Waters also brought Barrett into the fold.

Barrett, a fan of Bo Diddley (he had already written Double O Bo in 1965), was a mind open to every experience: he had gone from painting to oriental mysticism, and from chemistry to music. When he decided to tackle music, he did so by distorting his partners’ blues-rock with the illuminations of his lysergic imagination. The quartet, nicknamed Pink Floyd in honor of two obscure American bluesmen, began to perform regularly in underground venues, from the Marquee to the Roundhouse, showing great interest for electronic effects and “light shows” (they were the first to use them in Britain).
They took part in various alternative events, distinguishing themselves for their long electronic blues-rock jams, until they became the resident attraction of the newly born UFO club and consequently one of the legendary reference points of London’s underground.

At that time Barrett was perhaps the strongest personality in the group, although he was also the youngest. He composed most of the music and all the lyrics; he played guitar alternating tonal phrases with dissonant swerves.

The 45s of the first two years (1967 and 1968) are deeply marked by his caustic and dazed ego, recognizable in the taste for disturbing effects, the penchant for witty aphorisms, and the always acidic morality of his lines.
Arnold Layne, the story of a perverse adolescent, opened the way using typical melodic progressions of psychedelia (mischievous singing, spacey keyboards, sobbing guitar; martial cadence, epic surge and dilated freakout) and its B-side, Candy And A Currant Bun, with an anomalous contrast of voices — the narrating one, slimy and wicked, and the sinister scream accompanying it in the background — with a collective run that anticipates cosmic escapes and a noisist finale.
The salient feature of these first naïve attempts lies in the subversion of long-standing conventions on the use of instruments, voices, and studio: genre aesthetics (folk? blues? jazz? classical?) lose their meaning in the overall commotion; the vocal harmonies vaguely recall folk-rock, surf, and beat, but are bent to surreal or gothic purposes; sound effects are no longer mere fillers.

See Emily Play deepened the research especially with regard to the colorful dives and flights of the keyboards, the hysterical guitar distortions, and the harmonic blend: melody becomes secondary, a beat legacy submerged by an arrangement overflowing with ideas (the street organ launched at supersonic speed, the insistent dissonances and reverbs of the guitars, the vaudeville rhythms). Scarecrow, the B-side, is a Dadaist prank, a voiceless refrain. In Apple And Oranges, the third manifesto, a shrill guitar, a rhythm of rattles, and a workers’-choir chorus lead into a sequence of cosmic falsetto over church organs.

The other 45s, no longer signed by Barrett, reveal the growing importance of keyboards over vocals and guitar and show a return, albeit more refined, to beat melodicism. Julia Dream, in particular, was signed by Waters, the first tender, velvety, and moving watercolor of the new emerging leader: a Renaissance ballad for acoustic guitar and mellotron whistle, adapted to the lysergic trip, and perhaps still his masterpiece.
Other songs show debts to the Kinks’ vaudeville (It Would Be So Nice) and to the arrangements of the Beatles’ album Sgt Pepper (Paint Box).

The trick is always the same: to disturb an innocuous melody in crescendo with hallucinogenic substances. These evanescent embryos of the cosmic conflagrations to come — chromatic arabesques for the fresco of a universal sabbath — still explore the dark side of tonal music, without daring to venture into the vast open spaces of abstract psychedelia.

I singoli verranno raccolti su Relics (Harvest, 1971), che contiene anche la versione in studio di Careful with that Axe Eugene (first performed live in April 1968, then released as the B-side of a single, then included in the Zabriskie Point soundtrack as Come In Number 51, Your Time Is Up).

The first long-playing record, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn (Tower, 1967), released in the summer of 1967, had a colossal impact on the British music scene. In this album was summarized a new musical grammar, a new way for young people to understand music.
The album is still dominated by the brilliant personality of Barrett, a superb storyteller and intrepid navigator of the stars, paradisiacal voice and demonic guitar.
The intermittent radio signal of Astronomy Domine is the greatest invention of English rock of those years: the climaxing ecstasy, the interlude of hisses and that chilling pulsation of guitars, that voice distorted by astronomical distances, are the manifesto of a blatant extension of the current meaning of psychedelia: expansion and liberation have the sky as their limit, and beyond that limit runs Barrett. Wright, with his long-held notes, and especially Mason, stormy and titanic, invent a new style of accompaniment.
Half of the record is occupied by short surreal songs, emancipated from the lysergic stance of See Emily Play, in which eccentric lyricism and instrumental space-rock coexist. They are further miniatures of fantasy and harmonic synthesis, full of sonic gaffes and arcane texts. It is still the guitars that create panicked atmospheres, as in Lucifer Sam, a cross between the soundtrack of a thriller, a Native American dance, and a black-magic exorcism.
The ballad is another form used with disorienting effects: Matilda Mother, martial and fatalistic, soars into a celestial refrain, and The Gnome, one of his most catchy refrains, is a classicizing fairy tale.
The most serious aspect of “Barrettian” psychedelia is instead documented by Chapter 24, which adapts raga-rock to “cosmic” arrangements (multi-form gags, suspense, expanded organ tones), and by Power R Toc H, the sabbath that announces the group’s warm instrumental vein (the classical tradition of the piano raped by the war cries of a pack of lysergic Native Americans, sudden accelerations of tempo, celestial openings of organ, the enchanted undergrowth of noises).
Finally, vaudeville is the inspiration for Flaming (a collage of sound effects) and The Bike, the most surreal sketch, a drunken prank of casual noise (sirens, cuckoo clocks, bells, bass drums, rusty chains, animal sounds), revealing Barrett’s mad goliardic spirit.
Introduced by one of the most terrifying guitar riffs in the history of rock, Interstellar Overdrive (the long instrumental track) is the masterpiece within the masterpiece.
A subliminal synthesis of Indian gurus and acid priests, of Joyce-like stream of consciousness and science fiction, of surrealism and Freudian psychoanalysis, the suite is a chameleonic delirium in which the most violent Barrett abandons the figure of the dissonant minstrel (psych-folksinger variant), the metaphysical jester, the child-guru, and dons the vestments of the cosmic musician. The scaffolding of tonal music then crashes into the deafening chaos of free improvisation. Having abandoned melody—the old pretext for tricks and instrumental acrobatics— the tricks and acrobatics now live on their own, renewing themselves continuously at a vertiginous pace. Each instrument vibrates free and organic, possessed and deformed by the intensity of the performance. The cosmic sense is conveyed by the guitar’s galactic “bee-beep,” the sidereal pulsation of the bass, the luminous explosions of the drums, the magnetic shocks of the cymbals, and above all the astronautical noise-making of the keyboards; the instruments exchange roles, chase each other, overlap, yet there is always at least one that pulses while the others simulate spatial noises: radio signals, spaceships darting, hisses and rumbles coming and going along stellar orbits, the primordial chaos that fuels everything.

Syd Barrett withdrew in the spring of 1968 and his place was taken by David Gilmour, who is therefore predominant on the second album, A Saucerful Of Secrets (Tower, 1968).
At first the music showed little sign of the change; only the most surreal ideas disappeared, but the “cosmic” evolution continued. In reality cosmic music needs to be fed by human fire, and without Barrett it survives only through assiduous experimentation. Doing so, however, it acquires a coldness it previously lacked.
The record is titled after the long suite on side two, one of the greatest masterpieces of psychedelic rock: A Saucerful Of Secrets. The structure follows that of the debut: the melodic delights, however, have lost Barrett’s typical Dadaism, and one senses a greater monotony in the execution, due to a lack of imagination in the arrangements and excessive cleanliness in the guitar work. Waters, who has taken command, and Gilmour, who supports him, are lovers of soft, refined, and relaxing music. Thus the vocal parts have become sweeter and the keyboards accustom themselves to a more bourgeois decorum. Gilmour’s guitar style is slow and rarefied, dreamy rather than nightmarish, as if wanting to slow down and stop time, descend into consciousness, and open paradisiacal whirlpools. It has nothing of Barrett’s agitated titanism.
Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun, celebrated hit of cosmic music, is actually a pale remake in an oriental-oneiric key of Barrett’s astronautical nightmares; the effect is nonetheless remarkable, because the sound insinuates itself sweetly, driven by frenetic and deafening percussion, by a monotonous litany whispered beneath the obsessive notes of the bass.
If Let There Be More Light is a raga-rock that follows the progressions of the psychedelic song (cosmic tribalism, solemn melody, dissonant chaos), if the drunken, bandstand-like vaudeville of Corporal Clegg (the most comical gag) and Jugband Blues, Barrett’s last grimace—not much in tune with the seriousness of the other tracks (but how much more penetrating and communicative that voice, how much more calibrated the rustic horns, the mountain choirs, the intermittent guitar phrases, the dissolves, the melancholy muted coda!)— still bear the traces of Barrettian surrealism, See Saw, with string section, and Remember A Day, in softer and more melodic versions, announce an atmospheric music entirely played on timbres and colors.
The title-track lasts nearly twelve minutes and is a more substantial attempt to trespass into the avant-garde. The hallucinogenic trip sublimates into a total religiosity, imposing and frightening, which fuses Christian and Oriental liturgies into a single cosmic aspiration. The pianistic clusters of notes, the noises clattering in the background, the electronic voices filling the empty spaces, the dense organ textures, the apocalyptic drums and the piercing timbre of the guitar, the dissonant games, the random harmonic hailstorms— this is as daring as psychedelia ever attempted. The ascensional movement establishes a rigorous, tonal order out of the spontaneous disorder flaunted by the individual instruments. The full cathedral organ and Gregorian choir that close in crescendo, on lugubrious and celestial tones, this concerto in three movements (the first noise-oriented, the second percussive, the third keyboard-choral) seal the most masterful intervention of rock in the territory of the contemporary. The final choir opens onto immense, seductive, and terrible chasms.

After this record, the career and sound of Pink Floyd changed drastically. Their psychedelic rock genre had already been interpreted as atmospheric music, and the three soundtracks they produced in just a few months accentuated that aspect.

More (1968), the most successful of these soundtracks, is a simple and charming record, without the experimental ambitions of A Saucerful Of Secrets and without the irreverent genius of The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn.
This is where the dominance of Waters began, who wrote eleven tracks out of thirteen and directed the group's sound with pieces like Cirrus Minor (delicate sylvan impressionism with cathedral organ and background twittering), The Nile Song (a werewolf hard rock), Cymbaline (a fragile serenade for flute, guitar, piano, and subdued vocals), Main Theme (a brief parlor instrumental), Quicksilver (the experimental, dark, and rarefied piece), sophisticated songs enriched by a space-psychedelic timbre. More exposes Waters' uncertainties, unable to follow in Barrett's footsteps and still undecided between avant-garde libidinousness and light music.

In 1969, however, their most ambitious work saw the light, the double album Ummagumma (Harvest, 1969), consisting of a live album, which includes four extended versions of cosmic-lysergic anthems, and a studio album, divided into four parts, one for each musician.
The live tracks are Astronomy Domine, Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun (in a much more ceremonial, esoteric, oriental, and cosmic version), A Saucerful Of Secrets (in a romantic version, with the heart-wrenching final anthem only shouted by Gilmour, over religious organ chords), and a thriller version of Careful With That Axe Eugene. The latter is a new classic, a thriller track that slowly drags itself along hypnotic orientalisms and supernatural whispers in an atmosphere of looming tragedy, and is suddenly torn apart by a piercing scream, with blocks of music flying everywhere; disintegrated, it rewinds on itself and resumes softly and innocently, waiting for another victim, half sexual encounter, half trip, half nightmare, half delirium.
The studio album is an austere and somewhat pretentious theorization of the musical ideology of the four, each "interviewed" from the perspective of their own instrument. The four parts of the work are each an harmonic experiment executed in perfect freedom.
David Gilmour, in the three parts of Narrow Way, is the most uncertain, close to a concept of parlor music, intelligent and refined, but above all relaxing. His guitar repeats itself endlessly (now folk, now heavy, now Hawaiian, now acid), like a series of minimalist variations, leaving electronics the task of enlivening the atmosphere with small dissonant vortices, but when the electronics are missing, the piece degenerates into a melodic soft rock for the family, lulled by a slow lysergic refrain (the melody was borrowed from Embryonic Journey by Jefferson Airplane).
Nick Mason, in the fascinating The Grand Vizier's Garden Party, influenced by Kontakte by Karlheinz Stockhausen, carries out an experiment that is both fascinating and self-indulgent, behaving like a child wanting to discover all the hidden sonic secrets of his toy instruments. The multitude of sounds and their electronic treatment are, however, of prime importance: from this exercise, the “noisy” arrangement practice will originate, which will become a hallmark of the band.
Richard Wright attempts the symphonic route, and in the imposing Sysyphus (in four movements), for the first time the band measures itself with classical music. Wright extracts with ease the desired effects from the keyboards, distributing touches of both a clumsy amateur and a sophisticated concert pianist. A threatening symphonic opening is followed by a brief romantic piano sonata. A storm of dissonant piano chords and a chamber piece for percussion only introduce the final suspended and metaphysical crescendo, from country quietude to cosmic hurricane.
Roger Waters contributes two of his typical ballads: Granchester Meadows, a delicate acoustic confession for folk guitar and electronic birds; and Several Species Of Small Furry Animals, a demoniac rhapsody for electronic voices and percussion simulating a frenzy of woodland creatures. Waters, more human than Wright, less banal than Gilmour, and more gifted than Mason, finds the sought-after balance between experimentation and soft rock, which will be, for better or worse, the fundamental invention for the band’s future.
The quantity of experiments is immense, but with this monumental work, which should have consecrated them at the forefront of avant-garde rock, Pink Floyd sow the seeds of a consumeristic psychedelic music.

The great psychedelic season is over. Pink Floyd are under pressure from the record label to deliver a more "pop" album, whose sales justify the investment. Pink Floyd obeyed and began the "commercial" phase of their career with Atom Heart Mother (Harvest, 1970). By collaborating with Ron Geesin, the band managed to produce a high-class work, where all the elements that would lead to their best-sellers are already present in embryo.
The eponymous symphonic suite is a summa of the new compromise style: in rapid sequence, baroque church organ, romantic violin à la Brahms, Gregorian choral à la Saucerful, funk-jazz pianisms, cosmic dissonances, and the pompous theme of the overture that returns repeatedly, all at a pace that is more sleepy than martial.
The pop songs on the second side of More exalt Waters' matured tender delicate melodicism (If), and Gilmour's sugary dreamy psychedelia (Fat Old Sun).
At the bottom of the record is the hidden "concrete" concert for everyday sounds of Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast, with sequences of romantic kitsch, sound truth, and acoustic folk. Summer 68, the humble folk-rock song with classical piano and psychedelic trumpets written by Wright, is perhaps the true gem of the album.
The album has both merits and flaws, but it remains perhaps the greatest achievement in the field of classical-style rock, far surpassing the attempts of Nice and Moody Blues.

The same pattern of Atom Heart Mother was followed for the next album, Meddle (1971), which was also centered around a long suite and a series of pop songs. The songs are even more traditional, and the suite is even less experimental. One of the songs, One Of These Days, was the prototype of the meticulous and sparkling production technique that would make them rich and famous: in practice, music for studio effects, transforming a heavy bass riff into a massive rhythmic locomotive, wrapping it in distorted keyboard sounds, contrasting it with tribal pulsations, and then pairing it with a long Hendrix-style guitar solo.
The long suite Echoes distills transcendental stasis from a medley of past styles: a slowed-down "bip-bip" from Barrett (but played by Wright on the piano), the growing pulse of Interstellar Overdrive, the Babel of Ummagumma, the funk movement of Atom Heart Mother, the pathos of A Saucerful Of Secrets. Echoes delivers the final blow: cleaned and disinfected, polished and anesthetized, the "cosmic" sound of the past now settles into supermarket muzak. Undoubtedly, it is a studio production marvel, where countless tiny details were glued together and layered to achieve an elegant flow of pleasing sounds. It is the track where Roger Waters emerges as the band's principal songwriter.

The soundtrack for Obscured By Clouds (1972) was the lowest point reached by Pink Floyd.

The band found international success with the album Dark Side Of The Moon (Harvest, 1973), which completely abandoned the suite form in favor of sophisticated atmospheric songs, superbly produced and arranged, and it would become one of the best-selling albums of all time (remaining on the "Billboard" charts for over 600 weeks).
Producer Alan Parsons was phenomenal in transforming the experiments of Ummagumma into effective ideas for refined light music, and Waters, author of all the lyrics, hit upon the winning theme: alienation. From this union, the sound of the classic era was born. Mason's imaginative drumming is reduced to the effect gags experimented with on Ummagumma, and Wright's cosmic keyboards are limited to atmospheric accompaniments: the entire monumental symphonic apparatus of Ummagumma is compressed and downsized into the song format with modest formal balances.

Waters' tragic epic unfolds from song to song with flowing and colorful rhetoric, in a collage of melodies with very high sonic cohesion. The standout tracks are the instrumental On The Run (helicopter, running steps, heavy breathing, and a synth whirlwind), and the refrains of Time (symphony of clocks, martial bass riffs, polyphonic percussion, sweet music box, syncopated funk narration, ethereal acid refrain like a prayer, with female vocal support, psychedelic Hendrixian guitar solo, and an almost psychotic operatic vocal solo, like Ennio Morricone on steroids), and Money (cash register, desolate litany, pneumatic funk rhythm, vibrating sax solo, hard rock guitar solo), two white funk classics for the disco.
Waters' ballads are sublimated in Breathe, a dreamy and pretentious prototype for what would become one of their favorite formats (languid guitar wails and dreamy vocals), Us And Them, a slow waltz, a psychedelic lullaby whispered and reverberated, soaring triumphantly, as if completing what was left unfinished by A Saucerful of Secrets, with a lounge-jazz saxophone solo, and Brain Damage, an ideal continuation and completion of that gospel theme.
Although carefully crafted, this sound only repeats the same refrain and the same tempo. The best track is perhaps the humblest, The Great Gig In The Sky, a visceral "flight" without words by the singer Clare Torry, who once again evokes the finale of A Saucerful of Secrets with sweet piano notes.

The peak of this new direction is perhaps represented by Wish You Were Here (Harvest, 1975), an album that sold less but actually offers an even more futuristic production, entirely focused on synthesizers. Frequent blasts of electronics create a tragic and oppressive Weltanschauung, focused more on the shattered psyche of the narrator (Waters himself) than on the metaphysics of the cosmos. The music now explores abnormal mental states: madness in Shine On You Crazy Diamond and the omnipotence of the System in Welcome To The Machine (perhaps an allegory for the music industry that devours art).
The former, opened by a sleepy guitar wail against a wall of droning, tinkling keyboards, shifts from an agonizing blues guitar lament to an epic horn refrain. The latter, entirely built on layers of electronic keyboards and guitar, is one of their classic fear tracks, opening the doors to "industrial" music, which, over the hypnotic rhythms of mechanical equipment, creates symphonic poems of apocalyptic pathos. Its pulsing synthesizers continue the epic begun in Germany by Kraftwerk, but add several "voices" to the repertoire: organic gurgles, simulations of neoclassical strings, languid cosmic glissandi.
It is also the only moment when the album loses its languid, sleepy rhythm (but alas, not the lamenting vocals).
Suggestive and atmospheric, the long nine-part suite dedicated to Barrett (the "diamond" referenced in the title Shine On You Crazy Diamond) mixes dance funk rhythms, menacing symphonism, aching riffs, gospel crescendos, and funeral stasis, although it suffers from verbosity and redundancy. It takes four minutes before Gilmour's famous guitar arpeggio sets the tone for the piece and almost ten minutes before Waters starts his lullaby. This track is essentially a long "pause," filled with artificial sounds (the advantage of spending six weeks in the world’s most expensive studios). Shine On You Crazy Diamond has a nine-minute instrumental overture (with two Gilmour solos) before the vocals begin.
Above all, the album brings the meticulous technique of The Dark Side of the Moon to its greatest perfection.

The vulgarization of psychedelic music is a parallel phenomenon to the degeneration of the underground, but in the case of Pink Floyd (who converted to funk and disco), it feels like a full-blown betrayal.
The sound of Pink Floyd drifts towards a calm, high-class melodicism: a heavy guitar tinkering over a soft and colorful texture, stylized vocals, aseptic cleanliness, aesthetic rarefaction, slow sinuous progressions so as not to strain the mind, the music dissolving into long whirlpools. Parlor psychedelia.
Gilmour’s guitar solos, Wright's subconscious electronics, Waters' melancholic, slow, and elongated melodies are the culmination of a long pursuit of a new genre of consumer music that began with their second album.

Pink Floyd thus became an institution of consumer music, even though in reality, they no longer produced music: they merely applied their trademark, the unmistakable perfection and timbral composure.

The only mitigating factor for the concept albums of this period, the interim layered soundtracks, and their progressive decadent degeneration, is a vague and ambiguous dedication to social ills: while Dark Side investigated the causes of alienation (money, time), Wish You Were Here sought remedies for loneliness (madness, technology), Animals (1977), largely composed using discarded tracks from previous albums and already known live, is an allegorical revisiting of Orwell's farm, a bestiary of the industrial man (the 17 neurotic minutes of Dogs, the space-funk suite Sheep). In general, Waters' lyrics are gloomy, paranoid, and pessimistic; but the times are ripe for also profiting from the fears of modern man. Waters and Gilmour have mainly discovered a way to stretch a song's theme to absurd lengths, letting the melody float on dense clouds of electronics, percussion, and guitar melodic drones, a format that would become a reference standard for '80s producers.

The band was so dominated by Waters and his personal traumas that Gilmour and Wright recorded solo albums, respectively David Gilmour (Columbia, 1978) and Wet Dream (Harvest, 1978), and Mason collaborated with Robert Wyatt and Gong.

If the albums of the existential humanism trilogy only churn out stereotypes, the double album The Wall (1979) condenses the meditations and commercializations of a decade into a rather unoriginal philosophy of the "wall" that separates any two things.
This album, so quick to absorb the new trends of the musical world, from disco rhythms to Brian Eno's discreet ambient music, is a faithful mirror of Pink Floyd, always skilled interpreters of the trends. The Wall also marks the peak of cohesion reached by the academic-commercial sound of the band: everyday background noises carefully dosed and restored, soundscapes that intertwine mantras and Ligeti, chromatic descriptivism, monolithic sugar-spun architectures. Significant are the three parts of the funky melodrama Another Brick In The Wall (with Comfortably Numb as the fourth), with school choir vocals. The ecstatic ballad Comfortably Numb also contains Gilmour's best guitar solo.
This is also Waters’ self-celebratory album, who, since 1973, has been so much in control of the band’s music that he is the only credited author in the liner notes. The songs, mostly soft and dreamlike, sung in a dramatic and solemn register that blends Broadway-style crooning with the metaphysical ballads of Genesis, rehash the psychological turmoil of the previous two albums, also showing that Barrett’s madness still tormented the minds of the bandmates.
Alienation, paranoia, and neurosis, which plagued the "diamond's" solo nightmares, also permeate the emphatic personal story of Waters, immersed in a series of devastating nightmares that echo into the void. The interludes between the main tracks are short instrumental pieces or semi-acoustic lullabies, often with noise inserts, which heighten the drama and pomp of the work, at times excessively funereal, if not apocalyptic.
Redundant, hazy, effect-laden, narcissistic, the music has no other meaning than to showcase Waters’ paranoia, with a peak of despair in the soft ballad Hey You, and it fares best in the expressionist psychodramas of the finale: In The Flesh, Waiting, Trial, gradually moving closer to Brechtian cabaret.

The Wall is also the album where, in fact, the band falls apart. Session musicians were brought in to replace Wright and Mason, who seemed increasingly uninterested in playing Waters' music.

In 1982, The Wall would become a film directed by Alan Parker and would later become the anthem for the fall of the Berlin Wall. In its first ten years, it would sell twenty million copies.

Nick Mason also recorded an album with Robert Wyatt and, notably, jazz composer Carla Bley, Fictitious Sports (EMI, 1981), released just two years after recording, which sometimes sounds like a continuation of Wyatt’s Rock Bottom and at other times like a tribute to Frank Zappa's small orchestra jazz-rock (Siam, Do Ya, and especially Wervin').

The Final Cut (1983), effectively a solo album by Roger Waters though still credited to Pink Floyd, is the requiem-oratorio where Waters' nervous breakdown culminates. Technically, it’s an album overflowing with special effects and three-dimensional sound presence (holophony), which enhance the otherwise banal folk-tune motifs and military marches. Lyrically, the sonic arsenal serves an anti-war dialectic with an autobiographical background (of course, Waters'), blending soft and epic tones. Replacing Wright's synthesizers with harmonium and real string instruments, Waters delves into a post-industrial reincarnation of Dylan’s Masters Of War, railing against the evil powers and the treacherous human nature.

The band was increasingly less of a band: Gilmour released his second solo album, About Face (Columbia, 1984), Wright did the same with Identity (Harvest, 1984), and Mason with Profiles (Columbia, 1985), and Waters himself released the poor The Pros And Cons Of Hitch Hiking (Columbia, 1984).

Waters continued to preach his tragic yet velveted music, militant in his own way, even though his sterile falsetto had turned it into a regular chart fixture. His solo albums are: Radio KAOS (1987), another apocalyptic concept album, and Amused To Death (1992), another anti-war concept.

After the schism, Gilmour effectively became the master of the band and pushed it toward a more human and aggressive guitar sound. Learning To Fly is the hit from A Momentary Lapse Of Reason (1987), the first Pink Floyd album without Waters (Wright contributes to some parts but not as a member of the band, so the group is simply Gilmour-Mason).
It is no coincidence that the hit is also the quintessence of their languid and disoriented style.

The instrumental Marooned is the standout track of The Division Bell (1994), the album marking Wright's return. The Pink Floyd of this period was primarily a massive live show machine, as immortalized by the live albums Delicate Sound of Thunder (1988) and Pulse (1995).

By 2000, they had surpassed 180 million albums sold.

Pink Floyd reunited for the first time since 1981 for a charity concert for Africa in the summer of 2005.

David Gilmour returned with the soporific On An Island (2006), his first solo album in over 20 years, featuring Robert Wyatt and David Crosby. Rattle That Lock (2015) was Gilmour's worst album of his career.

Richard Wright still recorded the concept album Broken China (1996). He died in 2008 at the age of 65.

Endless River (2014), Pink Floyd's first album since 1994 was ambient new-age music, mostly instrumental, a sound collage constructed from outtakes of decades-old recording sessions.

In his old age Roger Waters became more famous for his anti-Western political opinions than for his shows or compositions. The only albums since 1992 were the opera Ca Ira (2005) about the French revolution, with a libretto written by French songwriters Etienne and Nadine Roda-Gil, and the collection Is This the Life We Really Want? (2020), whose songs sound like clones of old Pink Floyd hits sung by an old man.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Mason and Gilmour recorded Hey Hey Rise Up (Parlophone, 2022), a Ukrainian folk song, with Ukrainian vocalist Andrij Chlyvnjuk.

David Gilmour embarrassed himself with Luck and Strange (Sony, 2024).

In 2024 Pink Floyd sold their entire recorded music catalog for $400M to Sony.