GuideConcept & Special

The Best Prog Rock Concept Albums of All Time

Prog did not invent the concept album, but it pushed the idea further than anyone else and has argued about the definition ever since. Two very different kinds of record end up under the same heading. One tells a story: a named character, a plot, a sequence meant to be followed from the first side to the last. The other holds together on a sustained theme and tells no story at all. Both belong here. What does not belong is a set of unrelated songs with an ambitious painting on the sleeve. The best prog concept albums commit to something across their whole running time, and each of the six below left a template later records worked from.

The Moody Blues — Days of Future Passed (1967)

Decca wanted a demonstration record for its new Deramic Sound stereo process and got the band’s own stage show instead, taped at Decca Studios in West Hampstead between 18 and 27 October 1967 and issued on the Deram imprint that November. It follows one ordinary day from dawn to night across four sections — The Day Begins, The Afternoon, Evening and The Night — with the London Festival Orchestra playing the passages that join them, cut in a single three-hour session on 3 November. It runs 41:34 on the original LP, reached number 27 on both the UK Albums Chart and the US Billboard 200, and climbed to number 3 in America after a 1972 reissue. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame lists it among rock’s first concept albums.

Jethro Tull — Thick as a Brick (1972)

Thick as a Brick is one continuous piece of music, divided only because an LP has two sides: 22:40 on the first, 21:06 on the second. Recorded at Morgan Studios in London in December 1971, it reached shops on Chrysalis on 3 March 1972, pushed back from 25 February because the UK miners’ strike held up production. The framing is the joke: the album presents itself as a setting of an epic poem by Gerald Bostock, a fictional eight-year-old prodigy, and the sleeve was a twelve-page mock newspaper, The St. Cleve Chronicle and Linwell Advertiser, dated 7 January 1972. It went to number one on the US Billboard 200 and also topped the charts in Australia, Canada and the Netherlands, and readers of Prog magazine placed it fifth in their 2014 hundred-greatest poll.

Pink Floyd — The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)

This is the theme-not-story side of the category, and the best-selling record on this page: ten tracks running roughly forty-three minutes on the original LP, recorded at EMI Studios in London — now Abbey Road — between 31 May 1972 and 9 February 1973, and released on Capitol in the United States on 1 March 1973 and on Harvest in Britain a fortnight later. Each side plays as one continuous stretch, opened and closed by a heartbeat, and the connective tissue is spoken word: the band wrote questions on flashcards, put them to road crew and studio staff, and cut the answers into the record. It reached number one on the US Billboard 200 and number two in the UK, and has sold somewhere near 45 million copies worldwide.

Rush — 2112 (1976)

Side one of 2112 is a single suite of 20:28 in seven titled sections, from Overture to Grand Finale; side two holds five separate songs, the compromise that let a young band gamble a whole LP side on a science-fiction premise about a future where the arts are run from above. Recorded at Toronto Sound Studios in January 1976 and released on Mercury later that year, it paid off slowly: number 5 in Canada, number 61 on the US Billboard 200, and a triple platinum RIAA certification that did not arrive until November 1995. Rolling Stone readers later voted it second in a poll of their favorite progressive rock albums.

Marillion — Misplaced Childhood (1985)

By 1985 the concept album was supposed to be finished, which is what makes this one worth noting. Recorded at Hansa Tonstudio in Berlin between March and May and released by EMI on 17 June, it reached number one on the UK Albums Chart. The music runs continuously across each side, 41:17 on the original LP, a first-person cycle about a lost childhood, sudden success and a love affair that ended. A single was lifted out of a record built not to have any: Kayleigh reached number two on the UK singles chart. Classic Rock placed the album fourth in a 2003 ranking of rock’s greatest concept albums.

Dream Theater — Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory (1999)

The odd thing about Scenes from a Memory is what it continues: not an album, but a single song from 1992’s Images and Words, expanded seven years later into twelve tracks across two acts. It was recorded at BearTracks Studios in Suffern, New York, the same room that produced that earlier record, and released on Elektra on 26 October 1999, the band’s first album with a new keyboard player. The story runs on a device rather than a setting — a man is placed under hypnosis and follows what surfaces back to 1928 — and it reached number 73 on the US Billboard 200, modest for a record Rolling Stone readers voted their favorite progressive rock album in a 2012 poll.

Where to start

At its most approachable, start with Days of Future Passed: its structure is clear inside a minute. The Dark Side of the Moon is the natural second stop and the best argument for the theme-driven kind. Leave 2112 and Scenes from a Memory until the format has convinced you: both are stories first, and assume a listener willing to keep track.