I love all of their albums, but there's something truly special about the musicality and emotional impact of the songs and album as a whole for The Sound of Madness
There subsequent albums are fantastic, but have more ups and downs than the consistent high bar of The Sound of Madness
Similarly, I think Disturbed Immortalized was Disturbed's peak work, with The Light and The Sound of Silence being incredible peaks of their signature style and highly musical storytelling on a fantastic album.
Wow, I entirely forgot that Devour existed until just now. It blew my teenage mind when I first heard it. I also forgot how much I hated that every single store seemed to be playing The Crow and the Butterfly when you walked in.
Not their last album before Roger Waters left the band (that was The Final Cut, the album which followed), but it was far superior, and arguably their best album-- and inarguably their magnum opus.
The David Gilmour-led era of Pink Floyd was ok, but it would never reach the fevered heights and sick intensity of the Roger Waters days.
Some of the tracks are based on his childhood, and seeing how many The Wall tours he did. In 2016 he turned it into an opera. So the album is very personal to him.
A lot of the tracks have to do with what both Waters and Gilmour went through as children, as they both lost their fathers to World War II. David Gilmour got writing credit on a bunch of the tracks as well. And given the amount of work that both Waters and Gilmore put into the album, it’s not really right to say that it was a solo project. Not even to mention what Nick Mason put into it. If you wanna cut out Richard Wright’s contributions, considering that he got fired during this album’s production, that would be fair. 
The Wall is absolutely Rogers album. The concept and the songs are all his. Gilmour only received credits on three of the songs.
You can’t point to a few guitar solos and then give Gilmour half the credit, it was a great contribution, but even Gilmour would admit that Roger wrote the wall.
More popular, more commercially successful, and more accessible to casual fans. Agreed.
But for magnum opus, I gotta agree with the wall for a few reasons
They made a movie out of it
The ode to the intense para social relationships that revolve around stardom and how a truly crazy creative can take advantage of it in scary ways was not only true back then, but predictive of how much worse it would get in current time.
DSotM always seemed like a lot of good ideas in an unordered list. I felt like they could be scrambled and the album would be similar, except for the first and last songs… Meanwhile the wall tells a story of pain, alienation, search for meaning, lashing out, and then a quest for self-forgiveness.
Is this a joke? This is where they’re newfound mediocrity was cemented. They peaked at Ride the Lightning, everything after that was more and more watered down garbage.
There’s argument to be made for several albums across their career (including their first), but I think REM’s Document was the last great one they made. I know a lot of people will cry and point to Automatic for the People, but they are wrong.
This is exactly what I was coming here to comment. This album was fucking astounding, complex, beautiful, intense, musical, destructive… Every single noise in that album was intentional and meant something. Trent was making music at the time that was so far above and beyond what anybody else was doing or has done since.
Then Atticus Ross joined. Now they make background music for movies. It is fucking heartbreaking.
Disagree about he falling off. TPAB is probably one of the albuns of the century and gonna be really difficult someone create an album just like TPAB, on hiphop scene.
All media claims TPAB as a masterpiece and they put Kendrick on one level I guess almost nobody can take. And TPAB isnt my favourite album from him. Mr. Morale is a good LP , btw.
Dunno if they are falling off, but since Lonerism , they (or just Kevin Parker) are more focus producing music aside psych rock. Nowadays, Its visible Kevin is more focus on pop music, and his collaborations explains his focus.
He is now producing the new album of Dua Lipa. And the last song from her, has clearly new Kevin vibes
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