Animals is Pink Floyd at their darkest and angriest: a bleak, sprawling concept album that looks at modern society and sees only predators, hypocrites and sheep. Released in 1977, and loosely inspired by George Orwell, it divides humanity into three kinds of animal and turns Roger Waters’s growing disgust with the world into some of the band’s heaviest, most guitar-driven music. Crowned by one of rock’s most famous images — a giant inflatable pig drifting over Battersea Power Station — it is a savage, powerful record, and a favourite of many longtime fans.

The short version

Animals (1977) is Pink Floyd’s tenth album, a concept record loosely modelled on George Orwell’s Animal Farm — though where Orwell attacked totalitarian politics, Roger Waters aimed at what he saw as the greed and conformity of modern capitalist society. It sorts people into three types: Dogs, Pigs and Sheep. The album has just five tracks: two brief, gentle acoustic pieces called Pigs on the Wing bookend three long, dark epics. Recorded at the band’s own new Britannia Row studio in London, it is dominated by Waters and built around David Gilmour’s guitar, and it reached number two in the UK and number three in America. There were no singles — the songs were far too long.

Dogs, pigs and sheep

The album’s concept is entirely Waters’s. Borrowing Orwell’s idea of using animals to stand for human types, he built a bitter portrait of 1970s Britain as he saw it, sorting society into three groups. The Dogs are the ruthless, cut-throat businessmen who claw their way to the top and end up alone; the Pigs are the powerful and self-righteous, the moralists and figures of authority he held in contempt; and the Sheep are the passive masses, following blindly wherever they are led. It is a cynical, unforgiving vision, and a deeply personal one — Waters was pouring his own alienation into it. Only the two fragments of Pigs on the Wing, a pair of tender little love songs, offer any warmth, framing the bleakness with a hint of human tenderness.

The sound

Musically, Animals is harder and rawer than the lush Pink Floyd of Dark Side of the Moon or Wish You Were Here. The three long tracks are dominated by David Gilmour’s guitar — snarling, bluesy and extended — and by Waters’s sneering, impassioned vocals, with the keyboards pushed further into the background than before. The music sprawls and builds hypnotically, full of menace and momentum, broken up by odd, unsettling touches like the barking, treated dog sounds and synthesised grunts. It is bleak and abrasive by design, yet never dull; and the two soft acoustic bookends make the darkness in between hit all the harder.

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The songs

The album opens and closes with the two halves of Pigs on the Wing, short and gentle. In between come the three great slabs. Dogs, running to some seventeen minutes and largely Gilmour’s, is the centrepiece: a long, shifting piece about a life of ruthless ambition curdling into loneliness, and home to some of his finest guitar playing. Pigs (Three Different Ones) is the most pointed, a slow, sardonic attack on figures of power and moral authority — one of them, the campaigner Mary Whitehouse, named outright. Sheep skewers the passive crowd but grants it a moment of revolt, building from a quiet organ passage to a galloping, furious finale in which the flock at last turns on those who herd them. And then there is the sleeve: a giant inflatable pig floating between the chimneys of Battersea Power Station. During the photo shoot the pig broke free of its moorings and drifted off across London toward Heathrow, briefly alarming air traffic before coming down — a mishap that only added to the image’s legend, and one of the most iconic in all of rock.

Reception and legacy

Animals arrived in the year punk broke, and although Pink Floyd were exactly the kind of established band punk claimed to despise, the album’s anger and disgust chimed oddly well with the mood of 1977 — one paper called it the most ruthless English record ever made. It sold heavily around the world, and over time has come to be seen as one of the band’s most cohesive and hard-hitting records, a particular favourite among fans who prize their darker side. It also marked a turning point within the band: this was the album on which Waters took near-total creative control, a shift that would define — and eventually fracture — the group over the records that followed. A remixed version finally appeared in 2022.

The verdict

Animals is Pink Floyd’s bleakest great album, and one of their toughest and most focused. It lacks the immediate hooks of The Dark Side of the Moon and the aching beauty of Wish You Were Here, so it is probably not the very first Floyd album to hear. But it rewards the effort richly: the songwriting is sharp, the mood is gripping, and Gilmour’s guitar work on Dogs alone makes it essential. For anyone drawn to the harder, angrier edge of the band — and to the beginning of the Waters-dominated era that would lead to The Wall — Animals is a dark masterpiece well worth the plunge.

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