When John Lydon scrawled the words “I HATE” overtop a Pink Floyd T-shirt in the mid-1970s, the future Sex Pistols frontman was engaging in more than just an act of wearable music criticism—he was defining punk in both its aggressively regressive musical aesthetic and anti-establishment ideology. While the raw sound of punk could be easily traced back to snotty mid-‘60s garage bands, and its torn ‘n’ frayed fashion to Richard Hell’s naturally decayed attire, no gesture summed up the emergent movement’s malcontent and DIY spirit so succinctly as Lydon’s two-word magic-markered manifesto.

At the time, Pink Floyd represented everything punk was not: musically skilled, conceptually ambitious, filthy rich, tastefully bearded. But if Pink Floyd were an easy target for punks, they were also an odd one—the two camps were a lot more spiritually in tune than either may have cared to admit. Long before punk waged its war on rock-star posturing, Pink Floyd had set the template for how a band could become popular without encouraging their own celebrity; while Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Rick Wright, and Nick Mason weren’t exactly anonymous figures, their public image was certainly secondary to the music they created. Musically, they refused to conform to prevailing pop convention; lyrically, their songs avoided the goblin-populated fantasias commonly associated with prog-rock in favor of pointed critiques on British institutions and classism. And compared to their more flamboyant peers—like the outrageously costumed Peter Gabriel, or the cape-shrouded Rick Wakeman—Floyd’s standard jerseys-‘n’-jeans look was practically Ramones-like in its self-effacing simplicity.

But while Pink Floyd may not have been the most egregious example of excess, for many punks, they were the greatest disappointment. In their earliest, Syd Barrett-fronted iteration, they were practically a proto-punk band, the sinister, serrated riffs of “Lucifer Sam” and “Interstellar Overdrive” serving as a mainline to future avant-rock outfits like Can, Hawkwind, and Pere Ubu. But with Barrett’s increasingly unstable psychological state prompting his ousting in 1968, Pink Floyd became a dramatically different band, with Waters and Gilmour gradually refashioning the group into art-rock sophisticates. To punks, Pink Floyd were the poster boys for rock‘n’roll’s transformation from misfit music into a posh lifestyle soundtrack for the sort of middlebrow amusement-seekers who could afford top-of-the-line stereos. (Even Lydon would later admit his infamous T-shirt treatise was motivated less by a distaste for Pink Floyd’s music than for their perceived air of superiority.)

Among fans of punk and its myriad subgenre offshoots (post-punk, goth, industrial, indie rock, etc.), it’s been customary to lionize the Syd Barrett end of the Floyd canon while writing off the band’s subsequent, star-making output as pretentious pap. But where Barrett has served as a constant figurehead for eccentric rock acts over the past 40 years—from the Soft Boys and Jesus and Mary Chain, to Neutral Milk Hotel and MGMT—the influence of ‘70s-era Floyd has been absorbed into the underground at a much slower rate, and yet has manifested itself in more surprising ways. With remaining members Gilmour and Mason releasing a new (and by all accounts final) Pink Floyd album, The Endless River, this week here’s a chronological look at some of the key artists who, over the past four decades, have helped promote the post-Barrett Floyd from punk-loathed pariahs to alt-rock patriarchs.

Wire: 154 (1979)

Wire weren’t the first punk band to flirt with Floyd—the Damned actually enlisted drummer Nick Mason to produce their polished, power-poppin’ 1977 sophomore album, Music for Pleasure—but they were the first to sign to the band’s longtime home base of Harvest Records. (The title of Wire’s debut album, Pink Flag, has variously been interpreted as both a tribute and affront to their labelmates.) And while frontman Colin Newman’s vocal mannerisms and musings are clearly cast from the Syd Barrett mold, Wire’s evolution more closely mirrored Floyd’s post-Syd path, channeling their formative aggression into the frost-covered terrain of 154. If the influence was ultimately more spiritual than directly sonic, Wire at least turned the frequent label of “the Punk Floyd” from a pejorative into an ideal, transforming punk’s edict of “no future” into a boundless one.

The Flaming Lips: “One Million Billionth of a Millisecond on a Sunday Morning” (1987)

Twenty-five years before they wrangled the likes of Peaches and Henry Rollins for an all-star full-album cover of Dark Side of the Moon, the Lips were pissing off Jesus and Mary Chain fans in San Francisco by capping their opening set for the Scottish miscreants with a straight-faced cover of “Wish You Were Here”. (As Coyne reminisced to Pitchfork in 2009, “If we’re thinking of punk rock as pissing in the face of whatever the established cool is supposed to be, playing that Pink Floyd song on that night was the most punk rock thing we could have done.”) But on the band’s 1987 sophomore full-length, Oh My Gawd!!!... The Flaming Lips, that Floyd fixation became a crucial ingredient in the band’s formative acid-punk stew—no more so than on this nightmarish nine-minute tour de force, which sounds like a trio of wastoids trying to figure out how to play “Echoes” before saying “fuck it” and setting fire to the garage.

Jane’s Addiction: “Mountain Song” (1988)

Jane’s Addiction’s carnivalesque clamor was the result of a collision between two seemingly oppositional forces: classic FM-radio rock and goth. Mediating between the two worlds was Eric Avery’s omnipresent basslines, which bear the deep, dub-inspired texture endemic in post-punk, but also the muscular, propulsive playing heard on Floyd classics like “One of These Days” and “Sheep”. (Not to be outdone, goth O.G.s the Cure would flex a distinctly Waters-like groove on their 1989 single “Fascination Street”—which isn’t so surprising given that Robert Smith has cited Pink Floyd: At Pompeii as his favorite rock doc.)

The Orb: “A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Centre of the Universe” (1989)

At the turn of the ‘90s, Pink Floyd was becoming an evermore audible touchstone for American metal acts attempting a crossover, be it Metallica’s “Hey You”-modeled power ballad “Nothing Else Matters”, or Queensryche’s “Mother”-fudging “Silent Lucidity”. But in the UK, a decidedly different aspect of the band’s legacy was beginning to take root. The primitive electronic oscillations, synth-sculpted soundscapes, random sampled chatter, barnyard sounds, and metronomic precision that defined mid-‘70s Floyd served as the template for emergent acid-house producers venturing into more ambient realms. Alex Paterson made no secret of his Floyd fandom, sampling David Gilmour’s guitar line from “Shine On Your Crazy Diamond” on the Orb’s debut 20-minute dub-house odyssey, while paying tribute to Animals with not one, but two album covers. The admiration worked both ways: In 2010, Gilmour teamed up with the Orb for the double-album collaboration Metallic Spheres.

Ween: “Birthday Boy” (1990)

The spirit of Syd Barrett was a guiding force throughout the early ‘90s lo-fi boom that turned home-taping hermits like Lou Barlow and Robert Pollard into indie-rock deities. However, on their first proper album, GodWeenSatan, four-track freaks Gene and Dean Ween pledged allegiance to ‘70s Floyd—if only by accident. For the purposes of this discussion, what’s interesting about “Birthday Boy” is not the song itself—a poignant fuzzed-out lullaby that bears zero aesthetic relation to Pink Floyd—but in the moments before and after. The track opens with a mutated organ drone and piano tap that sounds uncannily like a snippet of “Echoes” sped up; our suspicions are confirmed in its dying seconds, when Dean’s guitar cuts out and you can hear Rick Wright sing the Floyd epic’s final verse. All in all, a cautionary tale of what happens when Floyd fans run out of shrooms and start huffing Scotch Guard—i.e., they’re liable to record over their favorite albums. (Fortunately, the dudes had a backup copy of Meddle on vinyl—and rightfully positioned it to guard their booze-‘n’-pills stash in the video for 1993 hit single “Push Th’ Little Daisies”. And yet that would prove be only the second-most clever visual tribute to Pink Floyd on "120 Minutes" that year.)

Nine Inch Nails: “Ruiner” (1994)

While Nirvana were credited with breaking punk into the mainstream, many of the alternative-rock acts that followed in their wake (Tool, Primus, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins) more closely resembled the prog progeny of Pink Floyd. However, among his fellow Lollapalooza nationalists, Trent Reznor was the only one to recognize Floyd’s unsung role as machine-welcoming proto-industrial visionaries. This Downward Spiral deep cut comes on like a club remix of “Run Like Hell”, but makes a cold stop mid-song to indulge in the sort of comfortably-numbing guitar solo David Gilmour routinely used to kindle a hockey arena full of cigarette lighters.

The Beta Band: “Dry the Rain” (1997)

Comparing Radiohead to Pink Floyd had become a favorite rock-critic pastime by 1997, but Thom Yorke and co. never really embraced the association. Though the two bands may have shared an exploratory sensibility, bleak lyrical outlook, and a desire to disappear completely from the limelight, Radiohead never displayed a Floydian flair for high-concept, multi-sectional art-rock movements, ultimately favoring a more deconstructive tack. Radiohead contemporaries the Beta Band proved more faithful Floyd loyalists, even as their irreverent collage-rock accommodated folk, hip-hop, house, and musique concrète influences. But grounding the whole enterprise was Steve Mason’s unerringly calm croon, which suggests many teenaged nights spent zoning out on the bedroom floor to Floyd’s “Fearless”—a song that, like the Betas’ calling-card single “Dry the Rain”, begins as a sunbaked front-porch strum before acquiring a soccer-stadium-sized grandeur.

__Godspeed You! Black Emperor: F__♯ __A__♯ ∞ (1998)

Spotlight-shunning band with a deep distrust of media and government produces side-long orchestral-rock suites featuring Western-soundtrack overtones, wordless choral vocals, and dramatic crescendos. Sound familiar?

…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead: “Up From Redemption”/“Aged Dolls”/“The Day The Air Turned Blue” (1999)

Though they were developing a reputation as the last band you’d want to share your backline with, Trail of Dead were already plotting their grand designs even before Interscope granted them the budget to hire a second drummer. On this side-two suite from 1999’s underrated Madonna, the Austin outfit tries to condense the entirety of The Wall—the goose-stepped megaphoned barking, the “In the Flesh?”-sized fanfares, “The Trial”-style theatricality—into 10 minutes, while Jason Reece’s climactic chorus cry locates the heretofore untapped sweet spot uniting Roger Waters and Ian Mackaye.

Air: The Virgin Suicides (2000)

Air’s emergence was perfectly timed to herald a shift away from the kitschy exotica that permeated so much ‘90s alterna-culture toward more sophisticated attempts at recapturing the feel-good sounds of bygone golden eras (a quality shared with fellow upstart French acts like Daft Punk and Phoenix). While their early work was awash in an ELO afterglow and Gainsbourgian boudoir funk, Air’s ominous soundtrack to Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides—in keeping with the film’s soft-focus, mid-‘70s setting—aimed straight for the darkest side of the moon, producing a vivid Floydian flashback, whose rainbow-prism rays eventually extended to the progged-out set pieces featured on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories.

LCD Soundsystem: “Never as Tired as When I’m Waking Up” (2005)

“Losing My Edge”, James Murphy’s debut single as LCD Soundsystem, famously skewered the futile sport of hipster trend-spotting, but also served as a pocket syllabus of the various underground innovators—from Can and Beefheart to the Slits and This Heat—often excluded from the dominant music-history narrative that favors bands like Pink Floyd. So it was rather surprising when, smack dab in the middle of LCD’s debut album, Murphy traded in his crate-digger credentials for this delightfully dazed, laser-show-ready reverie. But what at first seems like a WTF anomaly in the LCD canon proves to be the peaceful denouement to the existential meltdown heard on “Losing My Edge”. This is the sound of a retired scenester who’s lost his edge and doesn’t give a shit anymore—so he’s just going throw on his worn-out copy of Meddle and zone out in his easy chair.

Swans: “Avatar” (2012)

Swans’ Michael Gira has been into Floyd since before you were born (provided you’re younger than 45). As he told Clash magazine in 2012: “I was fortunate enough to be at a Pink Floyd concert in 1969. In that era, post-Syd, they were still a supremely great band. Even better, in many ways. The music was more Wagnerian, more monolithic, these big crescendo-ing pieces, like ‘Careful With That Axe Eugene’.” But it really wasn’t until the Swans’ post-2010 reformation that such Pink Floyd-scaled pomp became a prominent feature of the sludge-punk pioneers’ increasingly expansive sound—particularly on this standout from The Seer, where, atop an unrelenting “One of These Days”-style hypno-bass-throb, Gira gravely intones “your life is in my hand” like someone who’s really going to cut you into little pieces.

Darkside: “The Only Shrine I’ve Seen” (2013)

Though beatmaker Nicolas Jaar and guitarist Dave Harrigton have said the name of their project is not an intentional Dark Side of the Moon tribute, their 2013 album Psychic does little to dissuade that theory. But beyond Jaar’s Rick Wright-worthy synth vistas and Harrington’s atmospheric guitar shimmer, Psychic centerpiece “The Only Shrine I’ve Seen” taps into an oft-overlooked aspect of Pink Floyd’s legacy—that, when you strip away its kiddie-choir-delivered dystopian diatribe, “Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2” is an ace disco track. Once that unmistakably Gilmourian liquid-funk riff emerges at the four-minute mark, Darkside couldn’t make their affections more obvious if they had bought a Pink Floyd T-shirt and scrawled the words “I LOVE” on top.