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Pink Floyd will always be known for their massively successful concept albums, and David Gilmour and Roger Waters' tense, and personally explosive, dynamic on albums like Dark Side of the Moon seems reminiscent of another masterful songwriting duo known for rock high concepts. Indeed, "there would have been no Dark Side of the Moon, and no dragons-and-warlocks-themed prog-rock epics," writes Jody Rosen at , "had the Beatles not decided to don epaulets for their lark of an album cover and impersonate a vaudeville band."

But where The Beatles' loose conceptual masterpieces had their stormy and sad moments, they generally kept things chipper on albums like Sgt. Pepper's. Pink Floyd seemed determined to do precisely the opposite, setting a template for entire genres of metal to follow. 1977's especially reminds me of nothing so much as an album by Megadeth or Mastodon. Musical and thematic similarities abound: epic, booming, doomy songs with lyrics completely uninterested in charming their listeners. "Sheep," for example, contains a modified version of the 23rd Psalm: "The Lord is my shepherd. He maketh me to hang on hooks in high places and coverteth me to lamb cutlets."

As the brutish title alerts us, is an adaptation of George's Orwell's Animal Farm (and the origin of Pink Floyd's giant inflatable pig). The schematic allegory of Orwell's book lends a high degree of coherence to Waters' extended songs-only five in total. But he supplies his own characteristic bile (he famously spit on a fan during one tour, an incident that inspired The Wall). It couldn't be more appropriate. Where Orwell's novel is a transparent attack on Stalinism, Waters adapts his critique to "the economic and ideological systems within late-twentieth century liberal democracies." So argues Phil Rose in an in-depth study of Waters' lyrical ideas. The album's "primary concern... is to reveal the effects that technocratic capitalist relations have on the nature of human beings and the evident divisions that undemocratic structures of power create among us as individuals."

Orwell showed the effects of "undemocratic structures" by reducing individuals to animal types, and so does Waters, simplifying the classes further into three (and leaving out humans altogether): the ruling pigs, praetorian and aspiring capitalist dogs, and the sheep, the mindless masses. The opener, "Pigs on the Wing (Part One)" (top), an urgent acoustic strummer that gets picked up at the end of the album in a strangely upbeat reprise, sets a dystopian tone with images that may now seem old hat (bear in mind debuted five years before Blade Runner).

If you didn't care what happened to me,
And I didn't care for you,
We would zig zag our way through the boredom and pain
Occasionally glancing up through the rain.
Wondering which of the buggers to blame
And watching for pigs on the wing.

Most of the songs began their lives as a rough collection that came together after Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here. Waters insisted on the literary conceit, against Gilmour's objections, but the themes had already been very much on his mind. " Dogs," above, was once a sardonic rant called "You've Gotta Be Crazy," and one of its bleakest stanzas survives from that earlier track:

You gotta keep one eye looking over your shoulder.
You know it's going to get harder, and harder, and harder as you
get older.
And in the end you'll pack up and fly down south,
Hide your head in the sand,
Just another sad old man,
All alone and dying of cancer.

There may be no sharper an antithesis to "When I'm 64." The image is made all the more devastating by the homicidal paranoia surrounding it. Not all of the Orwell overlay works so well, but when it does, it does so with devastating force. Consider these lines from "Sheep," as terrifying as any late Medieval judgement scene, and more effective for an age that may not believe in hell but has seen the slaughterhouses:

What do you get for pretending the danger's not real.
Meek and obedient you follow the leader
Down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel.
What a surprise!
A look of terminal shock in your eyes.
Now things are really what they seem.

The band's "bleakest studio album," argues Brice Ezell at Consequence of Sound, "feels eerily relevant in these grave times." I can't help but agree. Pink Floyd greatly inspired much of the heavy music to follow, doing as much as Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin, I'd argue, to engage the imaginations of metalheads and prog-rock storytellers. Much of the music that followed them sounds very dated, but forty years after its release, their gloomiest record-which is saying a lot-seems more relevant than ever. Animals ends on an ambivalent note, hopeful but wary. The pigs are still on the wing, and the only remedy at hand, Waters suggests in the last few lines, may be to "know that I care what happens to you / And I know that you care for me."
Related Content: Hear How Clare Torry's Vocals on Pink Floyd's "The Great Gig in the Sky" Made the Song Go from Pretty Good to Stunning Pink Floyd's "Echoes" Provides a Soundtrack for the Final Scene of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey The Life & Times of Donald J. Trump: A Feature Film Set to Pink Floyd's The Wall is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Pink Floyd Adapts George Orwell's Animal Farm into Their 1977 Concept Album, Animals (a Critique of Late Capitalism, Not Stalin)

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Pink Floyd will always be known for their massively successful concept albums, and David Gilmour and Roger Waters' tense, and personally explosive, dynamic on albums like Dark Side of the Moon seems reminiscent of another masterful songwriting duo known for rock high concepts.

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Dramatic Reading of "Old Major's Speech" From George Orwell's Animal Farm

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Have you ever wondered what animals in Animal Farm represented? Well look no further!

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A short biography of Georges Orwell on the BBC site

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A short biography of Georges Orwell on the BBC site

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Orwell was a British journalist and author, who wrote two of the most famous novels of the 20th century 'Animal Farm' and 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'.

Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair on 25 June 1903 in eastern India, the son of a British colonial civil servant. He was educated in England and, after he left Eton, joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, then a British colony. He resigned in 1927 and decided to become a writer. In 1928, he moved to Paris where lack of success as a writer forced him into a series of menial jobs. He described his experiences in his first book, 'Down and Out in Paris and London', published in 1933. He took the name George Orwell, shortly before its publication. This was followed by his first novel, 'Burmese Days', in 1934.

An anarchist in the late 1920s, by the 1930s he had begun to consider himself a socialist. In 1936, he was commissioned to write an account of poverty among unemployed miners in northern England, which resulted in 'The Road to Wigan Pier' (1937). Late in 1936, Orwell travelled to Spain to fight for the Republicans against Franco's Nationalists. He was forced to flee in fear of his life from Soviet-backed communists who were suppressing revolutionary socialist dissenters. The experience turned him into a lifelong anti-Stalinist.

Between 1941 and 1943, Orwell worked on propaganda for the BBC. In 1943, he became literary editor of the Tribune, a weekly left-wing magazine. By now he was a prolific journalist, writing articles, reviews and books.

In 1945, Orwell's 'Animal Farm' was published. A political fable set in a farmyard but based on Stalin's betrayal of the Russian Revolution, it made Orwell's name and ensured he was financially comfortable for the first time in his life. 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' was published four years later. Set in an imaginary totalitarian future, the book made a deep impression, with its title and many phrases - such as 'Big Brother is watching you', 'newspeak' and 'doublethink' - entering popular use. By now Orwell's health was deteriorating and he died of tuberculosis on 21 January 1950.

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Read a concise summary of George Orwell's life and works. Discover what lead him to write his novels including 'Animal Farm' and Nineteen Eighty Four'.

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A BBC radio documentary about George Orwell and Animal Farm - Focus on the part from 2mn39 to 5min39

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A BBC radio documentary about George Orwell and Animal Farm - Focus on the part from 2mn39 to 5min39

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Witness History - George Orwell and Animal Farm - BBC Sounds

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Catch up on your favourite BBC radio show from your favourite DJ right here, whenever you like. Listen without limits with BBC Sounds.

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A summary of Karl Marx's theory - Communism

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A summary of Karl Marx's theory - Communism

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The Soviet Union - Historical Timeline - Focus on the first 2min30

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The Soviet Union - Historical Timeline - Focus on the first 2min30

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The Soviet Union: Historical Timeline [1917-1991]

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Symbolism of the Windmill in 'Animal Farm'