Two years ago, I ranked every Pink Floyd album from worst to best. It wasn’t a hard task, as it’s clear that the band has about seven, maybe eight average to below-average records. Obscured by Clouds, their final album before The Dark Side of the Moon, is the blurred line between good and great, revealing an impressive run of releases spanning from Dark Side through The Wall. Oh, and The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is in there, too. In my initial ranking, I placed The Wall at #6 out of 15 entries—between Piper and Atom Heart Mother.
The Wall is a record I’ve had a complicated, all-over-the-place relationship with since first hearing it maybe 20 years ago. It’s an album that I associate with my VH1 phase, probably more so than any other title I discovered around that time. This is, in large part, thanks to seeing the “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” music video on one of their rock and roll countdowns and begging my mom to download the song onto my iPod Nano. At some point soon after, I watched The Wall film in its entirety and righteously championed the LP as my favorite Pink Floyd project. This is all before I even became a tweener, mind you. But I grew older and grew out of Pink Floyd, moving through obsessions with their more “mature,” mid-’70s releases, like Wish You Were Here and Animals, before moving away from the band almost entirely.
There came a point where I didn’t like The Wall—not in a “this is bad music” way, but in a “I need something that challenges me better” way. You can say that about most rock bands, that parts of their catalogue will call out to you at different chapters of your life. By now, it’s been at least nine or 10 years since I’ve listened to The Dark Side of the Moon in full outside of work. It’s been even longer since I’ve listened to Piper at the Gates of Dawn. My taste has not fallen back into Pink Floyd’s orbit very much, aside from my yearly returns to Animals, but recently, I spent time with The Wall as a listener, not a writer. And it seems that the pendulum of my interests is swinging back to my genesis as a Pink Floyd fan. Listening to all 81 minutes of Roger Waters’ operatic magnum opus was, to my surprise, just as pleasurable now as it was two decades ago.
I would still put The Wall at #6 in my Pink Floyd discography ranking if I were to re-do the list again. But that’s not meant to be a dig at the band’s 11th album. Rather, it’s a realization that not only is The Wall great, but that The Dark Side of the Moon, Atom Heart Mother, Meddle, Animals, and Wish You Were Here are all bang-on, as well. The Wall is a compelling exercise in deconstructing class disparity in the UK. As far as rock operas go, this one is at the top of the list.
The album’s protagonist, Pink, is an interesting narrator who takes a self-inflicted isolation from the society that dares to exclude him. Revisiting The Wall in 2025 can be difficult, not just because it was a self-serving, band-splitting endeavor 40+ years ago, but because the very same intolerance and ill will Pink communicates to the listener is a bit too on-the-nose in contemporary America. I mean, this is the album that effectively rendered Pink Floyd useless in the grand architecture of the prog-rock genre they helped shoulder into the mainstream in the first place. The Wall’s making led to a cardinal sin: Richard Wright’s firing from the band. But songs like “In the Flesh?,” “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2,” “Mother,” “Hey You,” and “Run Like Hell” are great, career-defining entries for a band nearing its end. Side one of The Wall might be the finest sequence of a Pink Floyd album ever… That is, until side three hits.
The origins of this album—Waters spitting on noisy fans at a show in Montreal in 1977—opened the door for a great contemplation on ego, masochism, and fame. Waters even sought out psychiatric help for the alienated experiences he was having while on the road, noting that he had wanted to build a wall between the band and its audience. So Pink Floyd brought in Bob Ezrin to help produce The Wall, which led to greater conceptual strides and a broadened storyline that eliminated some of Waters’ more anecdotal components.
What came of those writing sessions was a lesson in abandonment, violent life cycles, and a kill-your-idols, cynical take on the dark side of rock stardom. On-stage hallucinations result in fascist dreamscapes, in which one of Pink’s concerts transforms into a Neo-Nazi rally where he goes on racial, prejudiced tirades against minorities. When the album ends with the start of a question that the intro track answers, Waters’ theme—that an existential crisis is a never-ending struggle—comes fully into view. The Wall was a great lyrical upgrade from The Dark Side of the Moon, and, even in its poorest-aged moments, makes for an intriguing consideration of life’s most elaborate, punishing, and unanswerable moral quandaries.
So, now that I’ve had my “come to Jesus” moment with The Wall, I thought it would be fun to rank every song on it from worst to best. Considering that its most popular tracks—“Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” and “Comfortably Numb”—are regarded as two of the best Pink Floyd songs ever, I figured I’d give all 26 tracks a fair shake and celebrate their strengths (or weaknesses).
26. “Stop”
Sandwiched between two much better and much longer tracks, “Stop” is 30 seconds long and features Waters, a piano, and six lines. “I wanna go home, take off this uniform and leave the show. But I’m waiting in this cell, because I have to know: Have I been guilty all this time?” It fits with the record’s narrative just fine, but it’s hard to prop it up any higher, considering it’s the shortest song on the album.
25. “Goodbye Cruel World”
“Goodbye Cruel World” closes side two and effectively signals The Wall’s halfway mark. It’s down-tempo and solemn, with Waters lamenting a made-up mind. “I’m leaving you today, goodbye, goodbye.” Considering what follows (“Hey You”), “Goodbye Cruel World” is skippable if you already know the album’s story.
24. “Vera”
There are vignettes on The Wall that, despite their brevity, are replayable songs. “Vera” is not one of them. It’s fine! Strings and placid guitar strums prod the atmosphere behind Waters’ spoken-word recital: “Vera, what has become of you? Does anybody else in here feel the way I do?”
23. “Don’t Leave Me Now”
The first song on our list that’s a normal length, “Don’t Leave Me Now” is a legitimately frustrating listen. The breathing that acts like an instrument at the track’s beginning cannot be outmuscled by Waters’ lyrical strains. “Remember the flowers I sent? I need you, babe, to put through the shredder in front of my friends.” His vocal pierces and breaks detrimentally. Thank goodness for David Gilmour’s guitar, which cuts in at the last minute and resurrects the song into something tasteful.
22. “Bring the Boys Back Home”
“Bring the Boys Back Home” is a bridge track—80 seconds of choral, scholarly chanting (“Don’t leave the children on their own!”) before kicking into the next song, which is “Comfortably Numb.” “Bring the Boys Back Home” doesn’t work on its own. If you know what the woman saying “Are you feeling okay?” is about to lead into, then the track holds up as a companion work. Solo, it’s just an interlude allowing a pause between thoughts.
21. “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1”
“Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1” is the 3-minute appetizer for the still-great “Part 2,” sounding like a scaled-back, largely subdued composition that teases a blister of Gilmour’s guitar but never ruptures. But don’t worry: His guitar will rupture soon and you’ll never forget it.
20. “Nobody Home”
“Nobody Home” is the second part of the album’s weakest four-song sequence, popping up after “Is There Anybody Out There?” before the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it one-two punch of Vera” and “Bring the Boys Back Home.” It’s a fine track; Waters’ vocal sounds a lot like pre-Ziggy David Bowie. The piano chords and string/horn melody is a sweet touch. This is an instance where The Wall’s rock opera getup leans more theatrical.
19. “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 3”
The last of the “Another Brick in the Wall” triplicate—not as good as “Part 2,” but still pretty cool to sit with. The synth-and-guitar instrumental is potent. The lyrics are an accusational aftermath: “All in all, it was all just bricks in the wall. All in all, you were all just bricks in the wall.” Listen to all three parts as one big track and you’ll feel mystified by how good it is. But “Part 3” on its own is propped up by a great, quick guitar riff and that chugging, looping backing track you can recognize from a mile away.
18. “Outside the Wall”
While I’m not too keen on returning to most of the short instrumentals, I do love “Outside the Wall.” Building upwards into a choral whimsy (“All alone or in twos, the ones who really love you walk up and down, outside the wall”), the song aches out of an explosion and into something storybook and cathartic. If it was three minutes long, it’d probably be flirting with the Top 5 of this list. The final two lines—“Some stagger and fall. After all, it’s not easy banging your heart against some mad bugger’s wall”—put me in a trance.
17. “In the Flesh”
Not to be confused with the very good, sans-question mark song of the same name, “In the Flesh” is just a rehash of the opening track but longer and with a little bit more lyrical expansion. It’s provocative, some will say, as the fantasy of a “replacement band” stepping in for Pink washes over the album. It’s a gesture to find out where the “real fans” stand. But Waters’ use of epithets has aged like milk, especially when he lumps everyone into “riff-raff” and declares: “If I had my way, I’d have all of you shot.” The crowd begins a chant: “Pink! Floyd! Pink! Floyd!”
16. “The Thin Ice”
After a crying baby signals the birth of Pink, Gilmour sings the first part of “The Thin Ice” until Waters’ oddball shriek comes floating in. “You slip out of your depth and out of your mind,” he sings, over a pressed piano note. “With your fear flowing out behind you, as you claw the thin ice.” Gilmour’s guitar solo at the end of the song is so cherry.
15. “Is There Anybody Out There?”
Fit with samples of television noise, “Is There Anybody Out There?” is largely ambient, save for Waters’ repetition of the title four times. It’s haunting until the shadows give way to Gilmour’s acoustic plucking. The song rebuilds itself out of the ashes “Hey You” left behind.
14. “Waiting For the Worms”
A choice example of a Wall song I never enjoyed until my most-recent listen. Upon re-engagement, I’ve come to appreciate the tune for its novelty. The vocals are just too good to ignore the cheeky “Sitting in a bunker here behind my wall, waiting for the worms to come” couplet that leads into the very funny “waiting” bridge that hits like a laundry list of Pink’s fascist dictator hallucinations. It’s aggressive, even at its most melodramatic; Waters, who is oscillating between strident and blissful vocals, vamps through diatribes.
13. “One of My Turns”
The worst thing about “One of My Turns” is that it makes me want to go back and listen to “Young Lust” again. Some of its lyrics, however, are among my favorites on the album, especially this sequence: “I feel cold as a razor blade, tight as a tourniquet, dry as a funeral drum.” Meanwhile, Waters is monologuing over a zig-zagging synthesizer and samples of television chatter. Then, the song explodes into a funky oblivion. Gilmour’s guitar rules here. Out of all of the “opera” tracks on The Wall, this one has grown on me the most.
12. “The Happiest Days of Our Lives”
100 seconds of proggy, reverse echo singing from Waters and delayed guitar from Gilmour, “The Happiest Days of Our Lives” segues into “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” through a montage of helicopter sound effects, drum rolls, and harmonies. Here, the curtain is starting to be drawn, revealing the abusive, strict teachers who demean our narrator Pink. It’s the calm that placates before the meat-and-pudding invectives unravel nearby.
11. “Empty Spaces”
“Empty Spaces” features one of my favorite parts of The Wall, when the song hits a climax and Waters begins playing a descending blues scale. Here we get the lyric “How shall I complete the wall?” as Pink’s marriage begins to deteriorate. He’s still a rockstar, but an alienated and disaffected one.
10. “The Trial”
Not counting the outro “Outside the Wall,” “The Trial” is the album’s grand finale—a stagey, theatrical addendum at the end of Pink’s story. He’s embittered and having a psychological breakdown. The crime at hand—“showing feelings of an almost human nature”—suggests a defiance of his own self-anointed alienation. As the song progresses, he has to face figures from his past: his schoolmaster, his wife, his mother, all of whom are grotesquely rendered in Pink’s subconscious. Waters sings in a different accent for each character, floating between Cockney, Northern English, and Scottish. Like “Outside the Wall,” Waters tells a story from someone else’s perspective. We get to watch Pink from a less personal POV, as his wall gets torn down.
9. “Goodbye Blue Sky”
Side two is the weakest part of The Wall, but “Goodbye Blue Sky” is still very good. A skylark chirps before a child notices an airplane flying above him. The Blitz is coming. A narrator asks if saw the frightened faces and heard the falling bombs. The harmonies on “Goodbye Blue Sky” are the album’s best. “Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter, when the promise of a brave new world unfurled beneath a clear blue sky?” Gilmour sings vocals here, offering a change in perspective from Pink’s. It’s an exhale after the fears of “Mother” came to life.
8. “In the Flesh?”
The Wall starts with a bang, as Gilmour’s guitar shucks the blood off your bones after a voice says “…we came in?”—the final half of the sentence uttered at the album’s end: “Isn’t this where…” This is where we meet Pink, a rock musician who gestures that his father was killed in World War II, made subtly known by the sound of a dive-bomber. Then, a baby cries in his father’s absence. Gilmour’s riff is a head-splitter, and Waters sets the stage for one of rock and roll’s most-epic tales.
7. “Mother”
We’ve reached the “best of the best” territory, where every entry on the list from here until #1 is certifiably great. The closing song on The Wall’s first side, “Mother” reveals Pink’s troubled upbringing—that his mother has grown strict on him since the death of his father. The song is a conversation between Pink (Waters) and his mother (Gilmour), and we learn that the wall he is building exists because of his mother’s overprotective instincts. “Mama’s gonna put all of her fears into you,” Gilmour sings. “Ooh, babe, of course Mama’s gonna help build the wall.” The way the acoustic guitar builds into a decadent electric solo in 4/4 time is tremendous, coming after an odd series of time signatures, including various progressions of 5/8, 6/8, 8/8, and 9/8.
6. “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2”
A song so good it remains lauded even out of context of The Wall, you can’t get more quintessentially Pink Floyd than “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2.” I mean, for some people, this song is Pink Floyd. Part disco, part protest, and part art-rock, “Part 2” earned a Grammy nomination and was a Christmas #1 hit in the UK at the end of 1979. Where “Part 1” introduced Pink’s wall to the listener, “Part 2” begins to unearth the origins of its strongest bricks, revealing traumas inflicted onto him by his mother and school teachers. With four-to-the-bar bass drums, a guitar solo recorded on a 1955 Gibson Les Paul with P-90 pickups, and a recording of kids from the Islington Green School, “Another Brick in the Wall, Par 2” is undeniably stitched into rock and roll’s lexicon. I personally will never forget the song’s music video, which features school kids marching into a meat grinder together.
5. “The Show Must Go On”
Sung by Gilmour, “The Show Must Go On” is Waters’ attempt to make a Beach Boys-like sound on the album’s final side. In fact, Waters even recruited Bruce Johnston to come sing backup vocals on it. With a similar chord pattern to “Mother” and “Waiting for the Worms,” “The Show Must Go On” is breezy and intimate. There’s a verse here that Gilmour rushes through, in which he sings “There must be some mistake, I didn’t mean to let them take away my soul. Am I too old? Is it too late?” so fast he almost eats the lyrics. “The Show Must Go On” is 90 seconds long but undeniably perfect.
4. “Comfortably Numb”
Undoubtedly the popular choice for The Wall’s best song, and I wouldn’t besmirch anyone for picking it. And let me reiterate: Every song in this part of the ranking is great. “Comfortably Numb” was the final single from the album, and it’s been lauded for 40 years for its two guitar solos, both of which are, of course, tremendous—maybe two of the best guitar solos ever recorded to tape. There were arguments between Waters and Gilmour in the studio during the making of this song, as Waters wanted an orchestral arrangement while Gilmour hoped to strip it down. What we ended up with was a middle ground between the two ideas, in what has been called the last time the co-bandleaders “constructively” worked together on a song. “Comfortably Numb” is eloquent and transportive, texturized in euphoria yet shadowed by lyrical horror and despondance. Pink’s breakdown here is richly misunderstood as a drug ballad, but there’s no denying the truth: There’s a collapse ringing out of those guitar chords.
3. “Hey You”
The second half of The Wall begins with “Hey You” and a Nashville-tuned acoustic guitar. But the strums give way to a fretless bass and Richard Wright’s Fender Rhodes. Gilmour’s eventual guitar solo merges with a Hammond organ put in overdrive. After a first-person deterioration is sung by Gilmour, Pink is referred to in the third-person by Waters, and we begin to see his recognition of his own demise. But the outside world is too far out of reach and he cannot escape the wall. “Hey You” is not all sinister, as the song’s template expands through octaves. There’s a chord sequence in here that gets repeated four tracks later on “Bring the Boys Back Home,” and the leitmotif of “Another Brick in the Wall” shows up in E and A minor. While there are other songs on The Wall that feed into the “rock opera” construction, “Hey You” is the track that feels the most dynamic.
2. “Run Like Hell”
A modest hit in the States, “Run Like Hell” begins with dampened strings and left-hand muting, as Gilmour performs quarter notes and descending triads that feel quintessential now of the rock chords that would, eventually, define the ‘80s sound. It’s a dance-oriented, chugging, and percussion-heavy rhythm brightened by sensual guitar moves. Waters’ shreik returns here, as Pink reckons with a stardom that parallels the perils of fascism. Compositionally ambitious, especially when Richard Wright’s Prophet-5 wails into the bleakness, “Run Like Hell” is not just one of the best songs on The Wall—it’s one of Waters and Gilmour’s greatest efforts as a tandem, a track so good it flourishes on its own and in the context of Pink’s story.
1. “Young Lust”
“Young Lust” is the bluesiest song on The Wall. Gilmour and Waters wrote it together, and the former sings lead, wailing on about being a “rock and roll refugee.” Pink is a stranger in a new town and, to escape the exhaustions of touring, wants a casual hook-up with a “dirty woman.” The raunchiness is amped up by Gilmour’s appetite for crunchy guitar moves, bites of 32-bar playing, and Waters’ smooth chorus. But the shadow of domesticity lingers, as the song ends with Pink talking to a telephone operator, attempting to make a transatlantic collect call to his wife back home. A man picks up the other line, revealing that she’s been cheating on him while he’s away. “Young Lust,” for as hard-nosed and raucous as it is, becomes an amped-up bridge into Pink’s greatest mental deterioration. This is Pink Floyd at its most hedonistic, ripping through the sound barrier with some of the fiercest guitar licks the band ever captured on a record while quantifying a marital collapse all the same.
What’s your favorite song off The Wall? Let us know in the comments.
