Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon turns 37 Wednesday after another year kicking ass on every concept album that came before or after it.

The English quartet's sixth studio effort is a seamless masterpiece that cannot be readily sliced and diced into iTunes singles for sale, as the band argues during its ongoing dispute with its record label, EMI.

Confidently hop-scotching across the themes of life, death, violence and mental illness – and foregrounding groundbreaking musical experiments in sampling, tape loops and synthesizers – Dark Side of the Moon has continually astounded brains and eardrums since its arrival.

While the other epic sonic explorations listed below have challenged the status of Pink Floyd's 1973 record, Dark Side remains Earth's reigning concept album. Disagree? Scan the releases below and let us know your favorites in the comments section.

Frank Zappa: Freak Out! ———————–

Sgt. Pepper's may have popularized the concept album, but this experimental sonic mash from Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention is arguably rock's first concept album.

Freak Out! skewered pop culture with sharp humor and flawless precision, although it was neither a critical nor commercial success after its 1966 release. But from influencing Sgt. Pepper's production to paving the way for rock's ambitious avant-garde leanings in the decades to come, Freak Out! has rightly taken its place as one of the finest concept albums ever made.

Later Zappa concept albums like Joe's Garage and Thing Fish simply cannot compare, as great as they are. I suppose there truly is nothing like the first time.

Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here, Animals, The Wall ————————————————-

Pink Floyd not only made the most memorable concept album in history, it made several of them, including these three standouts.

Wish You Were Here extended the band's philosophical meditations on Syd Barrett's mental illness and the machinery of capitalism, especially in the music industry, but the scathing criticism of politics, media and conformity found on Animals remains Pink Floyd's most underrated classic.

The Wall's subsequent interrogation of stardom, solitude and fascism crossed over huge on the charts and even in theaters, in the form of Alan Parker's 1982 musical movie. But by the time the band's original lineup got to its last concept album, The Final Cut – which is more or less Roger Waters' first solo effort – it had run out of steam.

The Beatles: Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band ————————————————-

Greatest pop band ever? No question.

But the Fab Four never really hopped onto the concept-album bandwagon, although it's arguable that they popularized it with this loose collection of unforgettable tunes from their fictitious alter ego, the Lonely Hearts Club Band.

There's no reason to run down the list of accolades bestowed upon Sgt. Pepper's here, as you should have them memorized if you care anything about music history. But from its orchestral experimentation and drug references to its unimpeachable songcraft, Sgt. Pepper's may be a concept-album lightweight, but it's a heavy legend.

The Moody Blues: Days of Future Passed ————————————–

Don't hate on the hippies: It's an unsustainable position.

Why? Because The Moody Blues' second album brilliantly married pop and classical music in a way that has yet to be equaled. And given the accelerating adoption of orchestration in rock and pop after Days of Future Passed's release in 1967, a mind-blowing year for music, that's saying something. Longevity is often the greatest revenge.

The Moody Blues' first album imbued its invented symphony with earnest poetry charting the phases of life, from birth to death, in poignant fashion. It also spawned more than a few classic singles like "Tuesday Afternoon" and "Nights in White Satin," as well as brilliant deep cuts like "Dawn Is a Feeling," which is just begging for a trip-hop remix. The Moody Blues might not have survived the age of irony, but we sure could use the band's optimistic spirit in a depersonalized 21st century.

The Who: The Who Sell Out, Tommy, Quadrophenia ———————————————-

If this immortal quartet could have survived the death of its unhinged drummer Keith Moon, there's a slim chance it could have overtaken Pink Floyd as Earth's greatest concept-album factory. But it would have needed help: The Who Sell Out was a mostly uneven affair about, well, selling out.

Like The Wall, the unclassifiable Tommy explored the netherworlds of sainthood and sin, personal and sociopolitical identity, and also spawned a deeply bizarro film – this one from mad genius Ken Russell. (As a kid, I once caught both films in a double feature, and needed psychological treatment afterward.)

The mod-heavy Quadrophenia was a less accessible rocker about scenes, gangs and youth, although it delivered some of the most beautiful songs ever, like "The Real Me" and "Love Reign O'er Me," in full volume. If you want to be a stickler about it, you could throw in the unbeatable Who's Next, which started out as Pete Townsend's inscrutable rock opera Lifehouse, before he finally threw in the towel. But even then, you'd have a hard time catching up with Floyd. And there's no shame in second place.

The Kinks: Pick an Album, Any Album ———————————–

To be fair, not all of The Kinks' releases are concept albums proper. But enough of them are that it would take up too much space to headline them here. A perennial favorite is the stunning Village Green Preservation Society, which laments the loss of English tradition. High irony, considering the band started writing it after being banned from America, which hurt the group's ability to fully capitalize upon the British invasion. But there are other standouts as well, including Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One, a decadent brain-fry that housed the group's biggest '70s single, "Lola." And then there's Muswell Hillbillies, Soap Opera and ... well, you get the point. Although the band has forever labored in the shadow of The Beatles, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and other English immortals, a cursory listen to most any of its concept albums will make a cogent argument for its inclusion in rock royalty. Speaking of royalty ...

David Bowie: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars ————————————————————————–

Although Bowie was already a star when this stone-cold classic arrived, he went positively supernova shortly after its release. Following his world-beating 1969 single "Space Oddity" and underrated but amazing albums like The Man Who Sold the World and Hunky Dory, Bowie's metamorphosis from reliable talent to undisputed superstar was firmly cemented by the seminal Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, his fifth album overall, and not just because of tunes like "Moonage Daydream," "Suffragette City" and the inestimable title track.

Bowie came to embody the alien at the heart of the concept album, in concert and in his fans' wild imaginations, immediately propelling him into hedonistic legend. The dystopian album about extraterrestrials, terrestrial doom, sex, drugs and worse came to strange life in concert, where Bowie adopted all theatrical manner of costume and affect to carve out a name for himself as one of pop's most compelling characters. While almost all of Bowie's chugging concept rock from the '70s found in subsequent recordings like Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs is mandatory listening for any music nut, Ziggy Stardust remains the crowning achievement from that comparatively short period of his chameleon career.

Husker Du: Zen Arcade ———————

Years after the concept album craze faded, this alternative rock power trio crafted a double album of disillusion, alienation and raw power.

Almost all of Husker Du's catalog is equal parts frenetic energy, lyrical catharsis and musical abandon, but Zen Arcade, as its title implies, managed to chart a measured third way that encompassed folk, pop, psychedelia, jazz and more without sacrificing anything in the way of substance.

Its reputation has only grown since its 1984 release on punk icon SST, and for good reason: It helped sequence the genes of the alternative rock movement, and helped sustain its relevance and brilliance until Nirvana came along and skewed everything straight. As clean as Zen Arcade was in its moving parts, it was much more gritty than anything that arose after alt-rock's crossover into the mainstream. They don't make them like they used to.

De La Soul: 3 Feet High and Rising, De La Soul Is Dead ——————————————————

The inclusion of De La Soul's first two releases might feel like heresy to the Yes and Queenryche fans out there, but just remind yourselves that this is far from a definitive list. As a musical release, 3 Feet and Rising helped carry hip-hop's Golden Age after touching down in 1989. Its Lewis Carroll-like delivery of dense diction was simply groundbreaking, given rap's infatuation at the time with call-and-response simplicity and overt boasting.

Instead, De La Soul painted complicated but beautiful pictures of hip-hop's hopeful future, concretized around the debut's chief concept of the Daisy Age, an easy nod to hippie optimism. Songs like "Magic Number," "Ghetto Thang" and "Buddy" were variously hilarious, hard-hitting and horny, and were held together by experimental strands of intricate sampling.

Which is where things got tricky. As a music industry release, 3 Feet High's innovations in sampling helped lead us directly to our current age of rampant copyfight, in which the industry as we knew it gasps its dying breath.

De La Soul didn't see the zeitgeist it helped shape coming, but it easily recognized that optimism had little place in hip-hop's crossover future and promptly killed itself off in the 1991 follow-up De La Soul Is Dead, its best effort ever. Anchored by riotous skits and punctuated with tough criticisms of hip-hop couched in head-tripping bounce, De La Soul Is Dead documented the death of the band and of the genre's innocence. It remains one of the greatest hip-hop albums of all time, while its authors continue to create brilliant work in the shadow of shiny lessers like Kayne West.

Nine Inch Nails: The Downward Spiral, Year Zero ———————————————–

The golden age of hip-hop coincided with the golden age of alt-rock as well, which is when Trent Reznor and his unholy marriage of industrial dance and punk first detonated with 1989's Pretty Hate Machine. But Reznor entered the stardom stratosphere with his less danceable but still doom-oriented concept album The Downward Spiral.

It was a lucrative crossover that won nearly unanimous critical acclaim, which feels weird given its dark desperation. But disaffection was killing then, and tracks like "Closer," which chronicled a day in the life of a suicidal despondent, sealed the deal. Even if the creator was richer than he had ever been in his life.

Reznor thankfully transposed that personal drama to the world at large for his 2007 concept album Year Zero, which centered on the more topical themes of escalating global militarism and social and spiritual decline. It was unapologetic in its political criticism, and expansive in its technological innovation, especially when it came to the internet. Reznor conceived of Year Zero as one part of a greater sci-fi project that involved alternative-reality games, television shows, protest art and more, including a possible film. Since its release, Reznor has become an independent mogul with more savvy than the entire mainstream music industry combined. What a concept.

Blowback: What's Your Favorite Concept Album of All Time? ———————————————————

That's Wired.com's take. What's yours? Tee off on our picks or share your favorite concept albums in the comments section below.

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