When Pink Floyd released Animals in January 1977 amid the burgeoning punk movement. The band's 10th album is often described as the group's response to punk, but — intentionally or not — the atypically dark and aggressive album also lit the fuse for the eventual rise of melodic metal.
Musically and lyrically, Animals represented Pink Floyd at its most forceful and ambitious; the dreamy space-rock textures that characterized their breakthrough album The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) and its followup, 1975's Wish You Were Here, were scaled back in favor of a harsher approach. Animals featured lyricist/bassist Roger Waters' most focused lyrics to date. Inspired in part by George Orwell's dystopian 1945 novel Animal Farm, the album presented an allegory in which all of humanity is characterized as pigs, dogs and sheep.
As a result, many saw Animals as the British group's take on the contemporary punk scene, a movement spearheaded in the U.K. by the Sex Pistols, the Damned, the Clash and others.
With some reluctance and caveats, Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason allows that punk did have some influence on the album. The group's previous albums had been created at EMI's Abbey Road Studios in London — the same world-class studio used by the Beatles to record most of their work — which was populated with skilled engineers who followed strict rules; Mason chuckles as he describes them as wearing "smart white coats."
But by 1976, Pink Floyd had converted part of their equipment storage/rehearsal facility, Britannia Row, into a recording studio. There the band could work at its own pace, making its own rules. The Britannia Row studio was smaller and less sophisticated than Abbey Road, and that would be reflected in the sound of Animals. "Everyone was sort of looking at punk and thinking about doing things faster," Mason recalls. "Rather than settling into a two- or three-year project, it was, ‘Let's get on with it. Let's do it.'"
Yet Mason emphasizes that the punk rock that was happening all around the band didn't exert direct influence on the barbed character of Animals. "Were we particularly excited by [punk]?" he asks rhetorically. "No. Every now and again, there'd be something that would be interesting, but an awful lot of punk really wasn't of that great interest to us." He chuckles and adds, "It was all a bit too fast and noisy." (Mason was later tapped to produce Music for Pleasure, the second album by punk heroes the Damned, but emphasizes that "I learned far more from them than they did from me.")
Still, the tone and approach of Pink Floyd's late '70s release would inspire future artists, especially among the style that would come to be known as melodic metal. In the 1990s and beyond, Steven Wilson created a body of work that drew upon Pink Floyd as a primary influence. Working first as a solo project and later as a band, Wilson released 10 albums under the Porcupine Tree banner. While early Porcupine Tree explored sonic dreamscapes, by the time of 2005's Deadwing and its followup Fear of a Blank Planet (2007), the band had moved decidedly in the direction of melodic metal.
And while Wilson has always been inspired by a widely eclectic range of influences, his metal-leaning work bore the influence of Animals. He admitted as much in "Animals and Me," a 2020 essay for Prog Magazine. While Pink Floyd is often described as progressive rock, Wilson asserted that with Animals, the band moved beyond that genre. "There's nothing about it that's stereotypically progressive rock," he wrote.
Animals is often viewed as the beginning of the dominance of Roger Waters within Pink Floyd — he composed all of the record's lyrics and is credited with most of the music — though Wilson hears something else. "For me, it's [David] Gilmour's part; the guitar work on the album is the greatest of all, which is saying something." Throughout the record, Gilmour's always inventive and lyrical lead guitar work takes on an uncharacteristically angry tone, one in keeping with the album's dark, often pessimistic themes.
And such serious, weighty themes would become a foundational part of music by later melodic metal bands including Nine Inch Nails, Dream Theater and Tool. Maynard James Keenan is vocalist and songwriter for metal bands Tool and Puscifer, and credits Animals as an inspiration for both groups. "Pink Floyd, [and] specifically Animals, has had a huge influence on Puscifer and Tool," Keenan tells GRAMMY.com. "Not just because of the compositions, but also the approach to production and instrumentation."
That influence endures some 45 years after Animals' release. Keenan's more recent work continues to find inspiration not only from Waters' lyrics, but from the distinctive keyboard textures of Pink Floyd's Richard Wright. Keenan notes that like Animals, Puscifer's most recent release, 2020's Existential Reckoning "has the Arp Solina [String Ensemble] all over it."
When a who's who of progressive and metal artists collaborated on the 2021 album Animals Reimagined: A Tribute to Pink Floyd, two members of Dream Theater enthusiastically participated, underscoring their appreciation for the influential ‘77 album. Singer James LaBrie took the lead vocal on a reading of "Pigs (Three Different Ones)," and Jordan Rudess provided extensive keyboard work on "Dogs."
"The driving and hypnotic – while still rocking – nature of Animals made it a very unique album and source of inspiration to me," says Rudess. "That pulsing sound opened the door for so many; in our music we have proudly tipped our hats to the mighty Floyd many times."
Nick Mason agrees that there are some through lines connecting Pink Floyd's 1977 album with the more tuneful side of modern heavy metal. While taking mild issue with the term melodic metal ("I'm opposed to putting labels on anything," he emphasizes), he allows that Animals can be thought to fit that description. "If I was going to put a label on it," Mason says with a smile, "there's something quite nice about that one."
While Animals is neither punk nor metal, four and a half decades after its release the album can be seen as a kind of link between the two rock subgenres. In 1977, Pink Floyd was sometimes viewed as among the "dinosaurs" that punk hoped to sweep away. "I think the big thing that punk did that was really useful was [to take] the wind out of the sails of prog rock that had become so bombastic," Mason says.
The comparatively stripped-down aesthetic of Animals was in line with that kind of approach, and in the process it provided some musical cues for metal players to come. In his Prog essay, Steven Wilson made a similar point when writing specifically about Animals: "At their very heart, [Pink Floyd] have very simple songs, without unnecessary complexity, and I think that's given them a timeless quality," he wrote. And he – among many others – took those values to heart in much of his own work. "It wouldn't be overstating to say that Animals is responsible in many ways for the path that my career took," Wilson wrote.
And it continues to influence artists who make today's melodic metal. "Animals carved new ground for music production," agrees Dream Theater's Rudess. "And it has played an important part of all the rock that has followed."
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