The Endless River is the fifteenth and final studio album by the English rock band Pink Floyd, released in November 2014 by Parlophone Records in Europe and Columbia Records in the rest of the world. It was the third Pink Floyd album recorded under the leadership of the guitarist, David Gilmour, after the departure of the bassist, Roger Waters, and the first following the death of the keyboardist, Richard Wright, in 2008, who appears posthumously.
The Endless River was promoted with the "Louder than Words" single and artwork installations in cities around the world. It became the most pre-ordered album of all time on Amazon UK and debuted at number one in several countries. The vinyl edition was the fastest-selling UK vinyl release since 1997. The album received mixed reviews: some critics praised the nostalgic mood, while others found it unambitious or meandering.
The Endless River is based on music recorded during the sessions for Pink Floyd's previous studio album, The Division Bell (1994). The Division Bell was recorded in 1993 and 1994 in Britannia Row Studios in London, and on the Astoria boat studio, belonging to guitarist David Gilmour.[5] Pink Floyd recorded hours of music during the sessions;[6] the engineer Andy Jackson edited it into an hour-long ambient composition tentatively titled The Big Spliff,[5] but the band did not release it.[7]
Keyboardist Richard Wright died of cancer on 15 September 2008.[8] In 2013, Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason decided to revisit the unused Division Bell recordings to make a new album, re–recording parts, adding new ones, and using modern studio technology.[9] Gilmour said: "With Rick gone, and with him the chance of ever doing it again, it feels right that these revisited and reworked tracks should be made available as part of our repertoire."[9] Only a small part of The Big Spliff was used.[10] Two tracks from The Big Spliff are included on the deluxe version of the album as bonus tracks.
Gilmour asked guitarist and producer Phil Manzanera, who co-produced his 2006 solo album On an Island, to work on the material. Manzanera, Jackson and engineer Damon Iddins spent six weeks assembling four 14-minute pieces. Gilmour gave two pieces to producer Youth, who added guitar and bass parts. In November 2013, Gilmour led sessions with Manzanera, Youth and Jackson to record material with Mason, saxophonist Gilad Atzmon and bassist Guy Pratt.[5] Vocalists including Durga McBroom recorded backing vocals, and Gilmour recorded lead vocals on "Louder than Words",[11] with lyrics by his wife, author Polly Samson.[12] Bassist and songwriter Roger Waters, who left Pink Floyd in 1985, was not involved.[13]
"Autumn '68", named in reference to the 1970 Pink Floyd song "Summer '68", features a recording of Wright playing the Royal Albert Hall pipe organ during the rehearsal for Pink Floyd's show at the Royal Albert Hall on 26 June 1969.[14][15] "Talkin' Hawkin'" contains a sample of scientist Stephen Hawking's speech taken from a British Telecom commercial, which was also sampled for The Division Bell on "Keep Talking".[16] Mason received writing credits for "Sum", and "Skins", a two-and-a-half-minute drum solo.[14]
Gilmour said The Endless River would be Pink Floyd's last album, saying: "I think we have successfully commandeered the best of what there is ... It's a shame, but this is the end."[17] Mason said it would likely be the last Pink Floyd album.[18] In 2024, Gilmour explained that The Endless River was not originally intended to be released as "a properly paid-for Pink Floyd record,” but that he was "bullied by the record company" to produce it as such.[19]
Composition
The Endless River comprises four pieces, which form a continuous flow of mostly ambient and instrumental music.[20] Gilmour said: "Unapologetically, this is for the generation that wants to put its headphones on, lie in a beanbag, or whatever, and get off on a piece of music for an extended period of time. You could say it's not for the iTunes, downloading-individual-tracks generation."[21] Mason described the album as a tribute to Wright: "I think this record is a good way of recognising a lot of what he does and how his playing was at the heart of the Pink Floyd sound. Listening back to the sessions, it really brought home to me what a special player he was."[9]
"Louder than Words" is the only track with a lead vocal.[22] Samson wrote the lyrics after observing the band's interaction during the rehearsals for their 2005 Live 8 reunion, their first performance with Waters in over 24 years. She said: "What struck me was, they never spoke ... It’s not hostile, they just don’t speak. And then they step onto a stage and musically that communication is extraordinary."[23] The album title is taken from a lyric on the last track of The Division Bell, "High Hopes": "The water flowing / The endless river / For ever and ever." Gilmour said it suggested a continuum between the records.[24]
Packaging
The Endless River cover art depicts a young man punting a Thames skiff across a sea of clouds towards the sun.[25][26]After the death of longtime Pink Floyd artist Storm Thorgerson in 2013,[27] Pink Floyd collaborated with Aubrey Powell, co-founder of Thorgerson's design company Hipgnosis.[28] Powell discovered 18-year-old Egyptian artist Ahmed Emad Eldin and asked to use the concept from his piece Beyond the Sky for The Endless River.[29] Eldin was a Pink Floyd fan and accepted enthusiastically.[30] Powell felt Ahmed's concept had "an instant Floydian resonance", and described it as "enigmatic and open to interpretation".[31] The final cover is a recreation of Eldin's work by London design firm Stylorouge.[32] Powell felt that the cover summed up the title and music, and was appropriate for the recording on the Thames.[25]
The Endless River was also released in boxed DVD and Blu-ray "deluxe" editions, containing a 24-page hardback book, postcards, and a bonus disc of three additional tracks and six music videos.[12] The DVD edition includes the album in Dolby Digital and DTS5.1 surround sound, plus a 48kHz /24 bit stereo version. The Blu-ray has DTS Master Audio and PCM, 96/24 5.1 surround and a PCM stereo 96/24 version.[12]
Promotion
Pink Floyd were affected by the sale of EMI to the Universal Music Group, which lasted from 2011 to 2013. The European Commission and the Federal Trade Commission approved the sale with conditions, including the sale of certain EMI assets.[33] Pink Floyd, along with many other bands under the EMI roster, were transferred to different labels during the process. The Parlophone Label Group was formed under Parlophone as one of many assets to be sold off by Universal following the acquisition of EMI, with Pink Floyd transferred to the Parlophone Label Group during the sale.[34] The Warner Music Group, in 2013, struck a deal with Universal to buy the Parlophone Label Group from EMI, acquiring publishing rights to Pink Floyd's back catalog and future releases in the process.[35][36]
In a tweet on 5 July 2014, Samson released the album title and a projected release window of October 2014[37] to pre-empt a tabloid newspaper report.[5] The announcement was followed by backing vocalist Durga McBroom posting a photo of her alongside Gilmour in the recording studio.[38] Details about The Endless River were announced on Pink Floyd's website on 7 July.[39]
Pink Floyd and Parlophone unveiled The Endless River on 22 September 2014, including the release date, artwork and track listing, accompanied by a promotional website, a hyperstitial for the Pink Floyd website.[40] The site featured an artist's statement, photographs from the Division Bell sessions, pre-order details and two teasers, one featuring a 30-second snippet of "It's What We Do", and a television advertisement, featuring the album's geometric-based artwork.[41][42]Pre-orders on physical and digital formats started the same day.[43][44] Prominent installations of the album's artwork were placed around the world, including a four-sided 8m tall billboard placed in South Bank, London,[26][45] and large-scale poster advertisements in cities such as Berlin, Paris, Los Angeles, Milan, New York and Sydney.[46][47]
The album's only single, "Louder than Words", premiered on Chris Evans' breakfast show on BBC Radio 2 as a shortened radio edit. Gilmour and Mason appeared in an interview for BBC Radio 6 Music to promote the album and to discuss Wright's contributions. The track "Allons-y (1)" was made available to download from the iTunes Store on 4 November 2014. In the week before release, The Endless River became the most pre-ordered album in Amazon UK's history;[48] the following week, the record was broken by III by Take That.[49] There was no Endless River tour, as Gilmour said it was impossible without Wright.[50][51]
On the review aggregator site Metacritic, The Endless River has a score of 58 based on 24 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[53]
Ludovic Hunter-Tilney of the Financial Timespraised the nostalgic "Floydian" sound, reminiscent of Pink Floyd's work prior to The Wall (1979), and wrote: "How fitting that a band so accustomed to loss should close their account with an engrossing elegy to their own past."[63] Cameron Cooper of The Music gave the album three and a half out of five, writing that it felt "less like a swansong and more like a final homage ... the lack of vocals gives the music more freedom, allowing it to speak for itself".[64] In The Guardian, Alexis Petridis described it as "not a new album from an extant band, but an echo from the past – or a last, warm but slightly awkward group hug ... on those terms, it works just fine". He praised the lead single and final track "Louder than Words" as "stately, poignant and open-hearted".[55] In Rolling Stone, David Fricke wrote:"Wright was the steady, binding majesty in the Floyd's explorations. This album is an unexpected, welcome epitaph."[62]The Observer wrote that the album is "an understated affair but unmistakably the Floyd ... a pretty good way to call it a day."[59]
J.C. Maçek III of PopMatters wrote: "Without the vocals, something is very clearly missing and the listener is left wanting more. While this makes for a good album, The Endless River is not quite fitting to serve as the final album of the greatest rock band of their kind, to say nothing of one of the greatest rock bands of any kind ever to perform."[61] Andy Gill of The Independent called it "just aimless jamming, one long thread of Dave Gilmour's guitar against Rick Wright's pastel keyboards and Nick Mason's tentative percussion, with nary a melody of any distinction alighted upon for the duration .... without the sparking creativity of a Syd or Roger, all that's left is ghastly faux-psychedelic dinner-party muzak."[56] The NME wrote that The Endless River was "a collection of spruced-up outtakes ... On those limited terms it works well enough, and it's interesting from a certain geeky perspective, but it's never quite as satisfying or substantial as you want it to be."[58]Pitchfork wrote that The Endless River "is quintessentially and self-consciously Pink Floyd, for better or for worse ... it proves to be one of the few Pink Floyd releases that sounds like a step backwards, with nothing new to say and no new frontiers to explore."[60] Mikael Wood of the Los Angeles Times called it "so excruciatingly dull (even by Pink Floyd's often-dull standards) that the band's name on the cover feels like a straight-up bait-and-switch".[65]
Commercial performance
In the week before its release, The Endless River displaced Fourby One Direction as the most pre-ordered album of all time on Amazon UK.[66] It debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart, with sales totaling 139,351 the third highest opening sales week of 2014,[67] making it Pink Floyd's sixth UK number one.[68][69] As of 27 November 2014, the vinyl edition had sold 6,000 copies, making it the fastest-selling UK vinyl release of 2014 and the fastest-selling since 1997.[70] The album also debuted at number one in several other countries, including France, Germany, Portugal, Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, New Zealand,[71] and Canada.[72] In the US, it debuted at number 3 on the Billboard 200 with 170,000 copies sold in its first week;[73] by January 2015, it had sold 355,000 copies there.[74] Worldwide, The Endless River sold over 2.5 million copies in 2014.[75] Tracks from the album have been downloaded/viewed a total of over two hundred million times on Spotify, the top track being Things Left Unsaid with over 20 million plays.[76]
* Sales figures based on certification alone. ^ Shipments figures based on certification alone. ‡ Sales+streaming figures based on certification alone.
Ian Emes, a British artist and film director, and Pink Floyd's original animator, created a film using The Endless River music that was released in 2019.[172]
The Dark Side of the Moon is the eighth studio album by the English rock band Pink Floyd, released on 1 March 1973, by Harvest Records in the UK and Capitol Records in the US. Developed during live performances before recording began, it was conceived as a concept album that would focus on the pressures faced by the band during their arduous lifestyle, and also deal with the mental health problems of the former band member Syd Barrett, who had departed the group in 1968. New material was recorded in two sessions in 1972 and 1973 at EMI Studios in London.
The Wall is the eleventh studio album by the English rock band Pink Floyd, released on 30 November 1979 by Harvest/EMI and Columbia/CBS Records. It is a rock opera which explores Pink, a jaded rock star, as he constructs a psychological "wall" of social isolation. The Wall topped the US charts for 15 weeks and reached number three in the UK. It initially received mixed reviews from critics, many of whom found it overblown and pretentious, but later received accolades as one of the greatest albums of all time.
Animals is the tenth studio album by the English rock band Pink Floyd, released on 21 January 1977, by Harvest Records and Columbia Records. Pink Floyd produced it at their new studio, Britannia Row Studios, in London throughout 1976. The album continued the long-form compositions that made up such previous works as Meddle (1971) and Wish You Were Here (1975).
Wish You Were Here is the ninth studio album by the English rock band Pink Floyd, released on 12 September 1975 through Harvest Records in the UK and Columbia Records in the US, their first for the label. Based on material Pink Floyd composed while performing in Europe, Wish You Were Here was recorded over numerous sessions throughout 1975 at EMI Studios in London.
Atom Heart Mother is the fifth studio album by the English rock band Pink Floyd. It was released by Harvest on 2 October 1970 in the United Kingdom, and on 10 October 1970 in the United States. It was recorded at EMI Studios in London, and was the band's first album to reach number 1 in the UK, while it reached number 55 in the US, eventually going gold there.
A Momentary Lapse of Reason is the 13th studio album by the English progressive rock band Pink Floyd, released in the UK on 7 September 1987 by EMI and the following day in the US on Columbia. It was recorded primarily on the converted houseboat Astoria, belonging to the guitarist, David Gilmour.
The Division Bell is the 14th studio album by the English rock band Pink Floyd, released on 28 March 1994 by EMI Records in the United Kingdom and on 5 April by Columbia Records in the United States.
Echoes: The Best of Pink Floyd is the fourth compilation album by the English rock band Pink Floyd, released on 5 November 2001 by EMI internationally and a day later by Capitol Records in the United States. It debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album chart on 24 November 2001, with sales of 214,650 copies. It remained on the chart for 26 weeks. The album was certified gold, platinum and double platinum on 6 December 2001 in the US by the RIAA. It was certified triple platinum in the US on 8 January 2002, and quadruple platinum on 10 September 2007.
Delicate Sound of Thunder is a live album by the English band Pink Floyd. It was recorded over five nights at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, New York, in August 1988, during their A Momentary Lapse of Reason Tour, and mixed at Abbey Road Studios in September 1988. It was released on 21 November 1988, through EMI Records in the UK and Columbia Records in the United States.
A Collection of Great Dance Songs is a compilation album by the English rock band Pink Floyd. It was released on 23 November 1981 in the United Kingdom by Harvest Records and in the United States by Columbia Records.
Pulse is the third live album by the English rock band Pink Floyd, released on 29 May 1995 by EMI in the United Kingdom and on 6 June 1995 by Columbia in the United States. It was recorded during the European leg of Pink Floyd's Division Bell Tour in 1994.
The discography of the English rock group Pink Floyd consists of 15 studio albums, six live albums, 12 compilation albums, five box sets, three EPs, and 27 singles. Formed in 1965, Pink Floyd earned recognition for their psychedelic or space rock music, and, later, their progressive rock music. The group have sold over 250 million records worldwide, including 75 million in the United States.
On an Island is the third solo studio album by Pink Floyd member David Gilmour. It was released in the UK on 6 March 2006, Gilmour's 60th birthday, and in the United States the following day. It was his first solo album in 22 years since About Face in 1984 and nearly 12 years since Pink Floyd's 1994 album The Division Bell.
Live in Gdańsk is a live album by David Gilmour. It is a part of his On an Island project which includes an album, tour, DVD, and live album. It was released on 22 September 2008. A David Gilmour Signature Series Fender Stratocaster was released at the same time.
The discography of David Gilmour, the lead guitarist of Pink Floyd, consists of five studio albums, two live albums and 17 singles.
Prayer is the debut studio album by German DJ and record producer Robin Schulz, released on 19 September 2014. The album includes the singles "Waves ", "Prayer in C ", "Willst Du" and "Sun Goes Down".
"Louder than Words" is a song by English rock band Pink Floyd, written by David Gilmour and Polly Samson. The song, featuring lyrics written by Samson to accompany a composition by Gilmour, was recorded by the band as the closing track of their fifteenth studio and final album, The Endless River. The track features a posthumous appearance by former keyboardist and founder member of Pink Floyd, Richard Wright, and an appearance by electronic string quartet Escala. "Louder than Words" is the only song on the album with lyrics, which were sung by Gilmour.
Rattle That Lock is the fourth solo studio album by English musician David Gilmour. It was released on 18 September 2015 via Columbia Records. The artwork for the album was created by Dave Stansbie from The Creative Corporation under the direction of Aubrey Powell, who has worked with Gilmour and Pink Floyd since the late 1960s.
The Later Years is a box set by the English rock band Pink Floyd released on 13 December 2019 by Pink Floyd Records. It follows the 2016 box set The Early Years 1965–1972, and compiles Pink Floyd's work under the leadership of David Gilmour after the departure of Roger Waters in 1985.
Luck and Strange is the fifth studio album by the English guitarist and songwriter David Gilmour, released on 6 September 2024 by Sony Music. It was produced by Gilmour and Charlie Andrew. Gilmour said Andrew challenged him musically and was not intimidated by his past work with Pink Floyd.
↑ "Top Stranih [Top Foreign]" (in Croatian). Top Foreign Albums. Hrvatska diskografska udruga. Retrieved 15 November 2014.
↑ "Czech Albums – Top 100". ČNS IFPI. Note: On the chart page, select 46.Týden 2014 on the field besides the words "CZ – ALBUMS – TOP 100" to retrieve the correct chart. Retrieved 18 November 2014.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.