Credit: TIDAL
Tue 12 May 2026 21:13, UK
Eclecticism and curiosity are perhaps the two greatest attributes in the music world – and Pink Floyd is a band often praised for both. From humble, interstellar beginnings as an early psychedelic rock group, Pink Floyd approached the 1970s with new concerted efforts to push against the predetermined walls of musical tradition.
After recording a run of experimental and commercially underperforming albums in the late 1960s, the group arrived at the sound that would boost them to global stardom. Meddle, released in 1971, planted the seeds that grew into the mighty conceptual masterpiece, The Dark Side of the Moon. By this point, the band had crafted their own strange blend of genres, from blues to jazz and most of the in-between.
After 1975’s commercially successful and critically lauded Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd’s ninth studio album, the group decided to record the 1977 follow-up, Animals, at their own studio. Having built Britannia Row Studios in Islington, Pink Floyd stepped away from the top-tier facilities of Abbey Road Studios to make way for their “roughest” album, which inadvertently tessellated with the blossoming punk movement.
“I think Animals is interesting,” drummer Nick Mason told Ultimate Classic Rock while reflecting on Animals in 2022. “On the technical side of all the albums we’ve made, this was perhaps the roughest one, for all sorts of reasons. It was made at the same time that punk was kicking off, [but also] this was our own studio that had been built on a budget.”
“All of our previous recordings had been done at Abbey Road, [where they had] the very, very highest standards,” he continued.
“The equipment was good [at our studio], but it was not as good. In some ways, it’s not a bad thing, but in another way, it justifies the [2018] remix and the remastering.”
Nick Mason on Animals
There is something fitting about Animals sounding slightly frayed around the edges, though. This was not the pristine, almost clinical grandeur of The Dark Side of the Moon or the aching beauty of Wish You Were Here. By 1977, Britain itself felt exhausted. The country was lurching through strikes, economic collapse and social resentment, and Roger Waters channelled that bitterness directly into the record’s bones. The ugly cynicism of tracks like ‘Dogs’ and ‘Pigs (Three Different Ones)’ needed a little dirt under the fingernails. Had the album been polished to Abbey Road perfection, it may well have lost some of the menace that makes it such a compelling listen today.
Touching on this later in the conversation, Mason exemplified the precarious studio conditions with an anecdote which is risible in hindsight but would have been subject to fury and frustration in the moment. “There was absolutely nothing to stop one of us engineering a guitar solo,” he said. “I have a memory of Roger and me actually supervising a guitar solo of David’s and actually wiping it by mistake… That was, again, something you wouldn’t get at Abbey Road.”
Further reading: From The Vault
In many ways, Animals also marked the moment Pink Floyd stopped sounding like four musicians pulling in the same direction and started resembling Roger Waters’ increasingly singular vision. David Gilmour’s guitar work still gives the album much of its emotional heft, particularly on ‘Dogs’, but the atmosphere surrounding the sessions felt noticeably colder than before. The sprawling warmth that occasionally surfaced on earlier records was disappearing, replaced by something you could probably describe as more suspicious, or confrontational, even.
The 2018 remix in question, helmed by legendary sound engineer James Guthrie, was upheld for four years amid the age-old dispute between Waters and Gilmour. This time, the pair clashed antlers over the album’s re-written liner notes, which reportedly omitted the fact that Waters wrote four of the five songs, while Gilmour co-wrote ‘Dogs’. The dispute was finally settled, and the remastered and remixed version was released.
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