For Fans of A Saucerful of Secrets

"A Saucerful of Secrets" the track is not a pop song, not a jam, not a drone. It is a composed piece in four movements, written collectively by a band that had just lost its primary songwriter and needed to find out what it actually was. The fact that they found something this coherent, this genuinely affecting, in that moment of crisis is remarkable. The organ swell in the final section, "Celestial Voices," is as quietly devastating as anything on Dark Side. It simply arrived six years earlier, with less production and more fear in it.

This is the unpopular position among a certain stripe of fan, but it holds up. Barrett's genius was real and the first album is extraordinary, but it was also complete. There was nowhere further to go in that direction without it becoming self-parody. The awkward, transitional stretch between 1968 and 1971 produced music that is genuinely experimental in ways the classic period rarely was: Ummagumma, Atom Heart Mother, the long-form improvisation on Meddle. The loss was real. The music it forced into existence was also real.

Pink Floyd pointed toward pure electronic ambience, but they always pulled back toward song structure and blues-derived guitar. Tangerine Dream on Phaedra and Rubycon, and Klaus Schulze on Irrlicht, committed fully to what Floyd only sketched. These records sound like they were recorded inside the title track of A Saucerful of Secrets and never left. If you love the texture but find yourself wanting more of it and less of the verse-chorus constraint, this is where to go.

By 1979 the Floyd had been building this sound for over a decade, and The Wall is where Roger Waters finally turned it fully inward, into autobiography and accusation. The result is extraordinary but also suffocating in ways the earlier records were not. Wish You Were Here is warmer, Animals is more political, Meddle is more purely musical. The Wall is the inevitable conclusion. Fans who only know it should work backward.