1973 stands out as one of rock’s most bewildering and exhilarating years, a moment when experimentation collided with ambition across genres.
Prog rock was reaching labyrinthine extremes, from King Crimson’s jagged polyrhythms to Gentle Giant’s baroque, counterpoint-laden eccentricities. Glam and art rock pushed theatricality and sonic oddity to new heights, with David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane and Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure blending flamboyance, abstraction, and avant-garde textures.
Meanwhile, the underground and continental scenes explored hypnotic repetition, electronic experimentation, and krautrock minimalism, exemplified by Can and Kraftwerk. Across the year, albums were longer, arrangements more intricate, and the boundaries between genres blurred. Listeners were confronted with sounds that could be at once dazzling, disorienting, and deeply inventive.
1973 wasn’t just a year of great music – it was a year when rock itself seemed to twist and turn, testing the limits of taste, structure, and imagination. Its strange energy left an indelible mark, inspiring countless artists and cementing the year as a benchmark of adventurous creativity.
Best albums of 1973
15. Genesis – Selling England by the Pound
This prog rock masterpiece combines intricate instrumental passages with literary, whimsical lyrics, yet the album has an eccentric charm. From 'Firth of Fifth’s impossibly ornate piano and guitar interplay to 'I Know What I Like’s pastoral oddities, Genesis balance structure and strangeness. The band’s willingness to juxtapose English folk imagery with complex time signatures makes the album both accessible and subtly bizarre, a quintessentially British prog statement that feels delightfully idiosyncratic without losing musical coherence.
14. Elton John – Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Widely regarded as Elton John's masterpiece (and the high water-mark of one of rick's greatest album runs), Goodbye Yellow Brick Road contains some fascinatingly eclectic detours. Songs like 'Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding' blend progressive ambitions with pop sensibility, creating a theatrical, slightly surreal opening. Throughout, Elton navigates styles from rock to ballad to cabaret, producing a kaleidoscopic experience. Beneath its glossy surface lies a surprising unpredictability in arrangements, chord progressions, and dramatic flair that makes GYBR more adventurous than casual listeners might expect.
13. Lou Reed – Berlin
A dark, theatrical concept album exploring addiction, domestic abuse, and despair, Berlin shocked listeners accustomed to Lou Reed’s earlier glam-rock tone. The narrative-driven songs, such as 'Lady Day' and 'Caroline Says II', mix vulnerability, anger, and melodrama. The music’s sombre orchestration and Reed’s detached vocal delivery create an unsettling, almost operatic tension. Critics initially rejected Berlin, but its haunting, emotionally raw storytelling has earned cult admiration, a testament to Reed’s fearless willingness to confront darkness head-on.
12. Can – Future Days
Krautrock pioneers Can took minimalism and hypnotic repetition to a new level on Future Days. Tracks such as 'Moonshake' and the sprawling title track layer circular grooves with ambient textures and fractured vocals, creating an almost trance-like, alien soundworld. The band’s refusal to follow conventional song structures or standard rock dynamics results in an immersive, strange listening experience, rewarding patience with unexpected melodic and rhythmic discoveries. It’s serene, eerie, and endlessly inventive – a testament to 1973’s experimental spirit.
11. Roxy Music – For Your Pleasure
Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure is one of the strangest, boldest, and most intoxicating albums of 1973 – a record where glam rock dissolves into full-blown art-rock experimentation.
The band sound liberated and boundary-less: Bryan Ferry croons like a haunted cabaret star trapped in a chrome-plated future, while Brian Eno floods the music with synthetic squiggles, tape manipulations and alien ambience. 'Do the Strand' turns dance-craze satire into a gleefully unhinged manifesto; 'The Bogus Man' stretches into a hypnotic, unsettling groove; and 'In Every Dream Home a Heartache' drifts from deadpan suburban satire into an apocalyptic guitar eruption.
Even the production feels slightly unreal, as if the album is unfolding in a decadent, neon-lit dream. Sleek yet grotesque, glamorous yet claustrophobic, For Your Pleasure is a high-water mark of early ’70s experimentation – an audacious collage of irony, seduction, and dread that set Roxy Music apart as true art-rock visionaries.
10. David Bowie – Aladdin Sane
Aladdin Sane is, in many ways, a bolder and more experimental record than the more celebrated Ziggy Stardust. Suitably for a year in which rock splintered into stranger, darker shapes, it sees the face of 1972, David Bowie, pushing glam into artier, more volatile territory. 'Panic in Detroit' bristles with tense, apocalyptic energy, while 'Lady Grinning Soul' veers into smoky, exotic, sensuous melodrama. And at the album’s centre, Mike Garson’s avant-garde piano on the title track turns glam rock into something jagged, surreal, and thrillingly unhinged.
9. Pink Floyd – The Dark Side of the Moon
It's so iconic as to seem almost comfortable listening now, but Pink Floyd's magnum opus was unusual for its seamless integration of concept, sound effects, and studio experimentation. From the ticking clocks in 'Time' to the wordless vocal textures in 'Us and Them', the album’s sonic palette was radically different from most of the rock landscape of the era. Its philosophical themes, tape loops, and meticulous production created an immersive, otherworldly listening experience, blending progressive rock ambition with ambient innovation – a technically brilliant and subtly strange masterpiece that still feels fresh decades later.
8. Faust – Faust IV
In a year overflowing with radical, boundary-busting rock, Faust IV still feels like the strangest kid in the room. The German avant-rock outsiders fused motorik pulses, musique concrète, brittle guitar sketches, surreal humour, and sudden pockets of eerie beauty into something nobody else was attempting in 1973. 'Krautrock' drifts like a cosmic engine, while the rest of the album lurches unpredictably between abstraction and melody. Even among ’73’s experiments, Faust IV remains uniquely unclassifiable – playfully anarchic, unexpectedly hypnotic, and brilliantly alien.
7. Fripp & Eno – (No Pussyfooting)
A bold leap into the unknown. Robert Fripp and Brian Eno abandoned traditional songcraft altogether, building vast, slowly shifting soundscapes from tape loops, sustained guitar tones and early ambient-processing experiments. In very 1973 fashion, there are just two tracks to discuss. 'The Heavenly Music Corporation' unfurls like an endless horizon, while 'Swastika Girls' layers delicate patterns into something both mechanical and dreamlike. Even by that year’s experimental standards, this was radical: a blueprint for ambient, post-rock and drone decades before those terms existed, and a work of hypnotic, otherworldly beauty.
6. Klaus Schulze – Cyborg
The second solo album from former Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra tempel drummer Klaus Schulze is one of 1973’s most captivating and forward-thinking sonic experiments, a double album that seems to dissolve the boundaries between electronic composition, ambient drift, and deep-space psychedelia.
Built from vast washes of synthesizer, processed choir, and slowly shifting drones, it creates an atmosphere that is at once futuristic, meditative, and strangely ominous. Schulze wasn’t just exploring new textures – he was constructing entire environments, worlds of sound that feel suspended outside time.
Cyborg’s patience and scale were radical for its era, inviting listeners to surrender to immersion rather than melody. Half a century later, its influence reaches from ambient and techno to film scoring, yet its eerie, enveloping beauty still feels singular.
5. Le Orme – Felona e Sorona
Italian prog rock is a rich world to explore, and the fourth album from Venetians Le Orme is one of its gems: a strangely beautiful prog-rock fable spun from early-’70s sci-fi imagination. Its tale of two opposing planets – one blessed, one doomed – unfolds through luminous melodies, elegant keyboard passages, and sweeping dynamics that balance delicacy with drama. The album’s surreal atmosphere and cohesive storytelling give it a dreamlike quality, making it one of the era’s most enchanting and imaginative concept works.
4. Kraftwerk – Ralf und Florian
The third LP from Kraftwerk – at this stage still a duo, hence the name – introduced electronic minimalism to rock audiences in 1973. The duo layered repetitive sequences, synth textures, and quirky vocal snippets to create a hypnotic, mechanical soundworld. Tracks like 'Kristallo' blend robotic rhythms with melodic experimentation, foreshadowing the future of electronic pop. Ralf und Florian's strange, almost alien aesthetic stood apart from contemporaneous guitar-based rock, making it one of the year’s most unexpected and influential releases.
3. Magma – Mëkanïk Dëstruktïẁ Kömmandöh
One of 1973’s most boldly alien creations: a choral, percussive, jazz-rock ritual delivered entirely in the French band’s invented Kobaïan language. Its relentless rhythms, operatic chants, and cosmic intensity build like a cult ceremony set to music. Hypnotic, unsettling, and utterly singular, the album defines just how strange and adventurous rock could be in 1973, pushing beyond genre into a world entirely its own.
2. Gentle Giant – In a Glass House
Gentle Giant’s In a Glass House is arguably 1973’s strangest, most brilliant album. Every track is meticulously crafted, yet deliberately complex and labyrinthine. Songs like 'The Runaway' and 'Way of Life' feature abrupt tempo changes, counterpoint vocals, and baroque instrumentation. The band’s experimental approach challenges listeners while rewarding attention, combining intellectual rigour with eccentric artistry. Its daring structures, intense energy, and unusual textures make it the pinnacle of 1973’s adventurous, genre-defying rock output.
1. King Crimson – Larks’ Tongues in Aspic
King Crimson’s fifth album pushed prog rock into jagged, experimental territory unlike anything that had come before. Tracks like 'Exiles' and the sprawling title suite blend improvisational jazz, heavy, distorted guitar, and intricate, shifting polyrhythms. Robert Fripp’s angular, serpentine guitar lines intertwine with Jamie Muir’s unconventional percussion and John Wetton’s commanding, resonant vocals, creating a sound both aggressive and hypnotically immersive.
The album’s daring structures, abrupt tempo shifts, and unusual instrumentation made it a touchstone of adventurous 1973 rock. It challenges listeners while rewarding deep attention, exemplifying King Crimson’s fearless pursuit of sonic innovation and helping define a year when experimentation, unpredictability, and theatricality in rock reached new heights.
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