The art of sequencing an album is a delicate balancing act, and nowhere is that balance more crucial than the final track.
A truly great album closer is more than just the last song; it's the period at the end of a novel, the final, lingering chord that either resolves the journey or throws the entire listening experience into dizzying new context. It must serve as a synthesis of everything that came before, providing catharsis, resolution, or (in the hands of rock's greatest artists) a breathtaking final twist.
From epic, philosophical pronouncements to quiet, reflective goodbyes, the perfect closing track secures the album's legacy. It dictates the memory the listener walks away with, ensuring the experience doesn't just fade out but concludes with an emphatic, unforgettable statement. The tracks below represent the pinnacle of this craft from rock’s golden era, leaving the listener simultaneously satisfied and desperate for the repeat button.
21. The Who: 'Won’t Get Fooled Again'
From Who’s Next, 1971
Although often remembered as a standalone anthem, 'Won’t Get Fooled Again' has another life – as a devastating album closer. Its cyclical message – revolution replacing one ruling class with another – perfectly concludes Who’s Next’s themes of disillusionment and power. Pete Townshend’s synthesiser loop creates a sense of inevitability, while Roger Daltrey’s primal scream near the end feels like pure existential release. It doesn’t resolve the album’s tensions; it confirms them. As a closing statement, it’s brutal, cynical, and thrillingly loud.
20. Echo and the Bunnymen: 'Ocean Rain'
From Ocean Rain, 1984
A suitably epic closer, 'Ocean Rain' provides the ultimate cinematic, grandiose payoff to the sweeping drama of the Bunnymen's eponymous fourth album. The track is built on a massive, melancholy string arrangement and Ian McCulloch's dramatic, yearning vocals, casting the song as the final, emotional centrepiece. Its theatrical scope and orchestral climax go some way to confirming the band's self-proclaimed status as 'the greatest band in the world', leaving the listener utterly drenched in atmosphere.
19. The Stooges: 'L.A. Blues'
From Fun House, 1970
The final, chaotic explosion of Fun House is a necessary sonic release. After 30 minutes of brutal, primal, tightly-controlled garage rock, 'L.A. Blues' is where The Stooges finally let the entire house burn down. It is an utterly anarchic jam session: a free-form blast of noise, shrieking saxophone, feedback, and drums that fall apart entirely.
It is anti-music, anti-song, and entirely anti-commercial, yet it perfectly encapsulates the band's destructive energy. Placing this absolute sonic collapse at the end ensures that the final impression of Fun House is not just of hard rock, but of total, glorious, unhinged self-immolation.
18. R.E.M: 'Find the River'
From Automatic for the People, 1992
Closing R.E.M.’s darkest, most introspective album, 'Find the River' acts as a meditative, beautiful coda on mortality and the search for peace. The entire album deals with themes of death, aging, and loss (see 'Everybody Hurts' and 'Try Not to Breathe'), and this song offers the final, metaphoric release. Michael Stipe’s voice is hushed and yearning, comparing life's journey to a river flowing to the sea. It’s neither happy nor sad, but deeply accepting.
The subtle string arrangement and acoustic guitars ensure the album doesn't end with a bang, but with a quiet, poetic fade into the distance, leaving the listener with a feeling of profound, restful finality.
17. The Clash: 'Train in Vain'
From London Calling, 1979
This track was not meant to be the closer; it was literally squeezed onto the album at the last minute, hence its omission from the sleeve's tracklist. However, its accidental positioning is perfect. After the genre-hopping, politically charged energy of the previous 18 tracks, Joe Strummer's plaintive, soulful breakup ballad offers a crucial moment of personal reflection. Its blend of funk, soul, and new wave rhythm gives London Calling its final, unexpected stylistic twist, closing the epic sprawl with a moment of universal, relatable heartache rather than a grand political statement.
16. The Velvet Underground: 'Oh! Sweet Nuthin'
From Loaded, 1970
Following a series of taut, high-energy pop songs designed to finally get the band radio play, Lou Reed offers this gentle, weary, but ultimately warm acoustic ballad as a farewell. As Reed's final song with The Velvet Underground, it carries a double significance: the conclusion of the album and the quiet end of an era.
It’s a beautiful, melancholy meditation on life's simple failures and small victories, carried by a rich, soulful vocal from Doug Yule. It resolves the album's commercial focus with a moment of genuine, heartfelt soul, giving the listener a gentle hug and a simple goodbye before the lights come up.
15. U2: 'Love Is Blindness'
From Achtung Baby, 1991
U2's greatest closing track resolves their post-80s, experimental rebirth with chilling finality. After the noisy, industrial, and often ironic soundscapes of Achtung Baby, 'Love Is Blindness' is stripped down to its core: a slow, agonizing blues ballad about the destructive nature of obsession. Bono’s vocal is raw and exposed, and The Edge delivers one of his most restrained, yet absolutely stunning, guitar solos: a slow, spiralling descent into noise that sounds like the final gasp of hope. It's a dark, dramatic, and intensely atmospheric conclusion that proves love can be the most dangerous drug of all.
14. Bruce Springsteen: 'Jungleland'
From Born to Run, 1975
'Jungleland' is the grand, operatic finale of the album that saved Springsteen's career. It’s a sweeping, nearly 10-minute epic that brings the Jersey streets of the album's narrative to a tragic, cinematic close. It features the 'Princess' and the 'King', characters whose doomed romance unfolds against the backdrop of desperate urban warfare.
The emotional climax is undoubtedly Clarence Clemons’ towering saxophone solo, a magnificent piece of musical storytelling that perfectly captures the heartache, desperation, and fleeting hope of the entire record. By the time the final, wistful piano chords fade, the feeling is less one of excitement and more one of profound, exhausted relief, as the curtain falls on Springsteen's gritty melodrama.
13. The Rolling Stones: Moonlight Mile
From Sticky Fingers, 1971
Sticky Fingers' closer is the beautiful sound of utter exhaustion. After an album steeped in swagger, sex, and menace, the Stones close with vulnerability and weariness. Mick Jagger’s lyrics – about loneliness on the road – feel genuinely exposed, while the sweeping strings elevate the song into something almost cinematic. It’s the sound of dawn after debauchery. As a closer, it humanises the band, revealing the emotional cost beneath the bravado.
12. Prince: 'Purple Rain'
From Purple Rain, 1984
Few closing tracks feel as cathartic as 'Purple Rain'. After an album of tension, sexuality, ego, and conflict, Prince offers transcendence. The song’s slow build, gospel-inflected harmonies, and iconic guitar solo turn personal pain into communal release. As a closer, it doesn’t just end the album: it elevates it, transforming drama into redemption. The final moments feel earned, monumental, and unforgettable.
11. King Crimson: 'Starless'
From Red, 1974
Think of prog rock, and raw emotion isn't perhaps the first mood that springs to mind (fantasy and virtuosity would both be higher up the pecking order). But the epic closer to King Crimson's monumental 1974 album Red is prog at its most emotionally devastating.
What begins as mournful beauty slowly mutates into grinding, mechanical menace before collapsing back into despair. As the final track on Red (and the last King Crimson recording for several years), it feels like a band burning itself out in real time. It’s not just an album closer; it’s a collapse, an implosion, and a farewell all at once.
10. Led Zeppelin: 'When the Levee Breaks'
From Led Zeppelin IV, 1971
Led Zeppelin closes their epic, mythic 1971 masterpiece with a towering, monolithic slab of blues rock that sounds unlike anything else in their catalog. The track is famous for John Bonham's massive, lumbering drum sound, achieved by recording the kit at the bottom of a stairwell in Headley Grange.
The sheer sonic weight and slow, heavy groove feel apocalyptic, perfectly matching Robert Plant's lyrics of disaster and chaos. It doesn't fade out; it simply stops, leaving a stunning vacuum in its wake. This track ensures that the final, lasting memory of Led Zeppelin IV is its heaviest, most earth-shaking and rhythmically intense moment.
9. The Beatles: 'Tomorrow Never Knows'
From Revolver, 1966
Less an album closer, more a portal opening into the entire psychedelic era. Following the Baroque precision of 'Got to Get You into My Life', 'Tomorrow Never Knows' throws the listener into a dense, surreal soundscape defined by tape loops, backward guitars, and John Lennon's voice, which was processed through a Leslie speaker cabinet to sound like a Tibetan monk chanting on a mountaintop.
It’s challenging, meditative, and utterly revolutionary. Placing this experimental, abstract piece last ensures that Revolver doesn't simply finish; it dissolves the listener's expectations and leaves them suspended in a state of cosmic bewilderment, perfectly foreshadowing the chaos and creativity of the following year.
8. Pink Floyd: 'Echoes'
From Meddle, 1971
At 23 minutes, 'Echoes' is less a song and more a vast, sonic destination that closes Meddle with breathtaking grandeur. It has become synonymous with the album because it distills Pink Floyd's new, post-Syd Barrett ambition into one continuous, evolving journey. It moves from delicate, arpeggiated piano through hypnotic space-rock grooves and ends with the unsettling, whale-like cries created by Richard Wright's Binson echo unit. It confirms the album as a work of meticulous, beautiful experimentation, leaving the listener in a profound, atmospheric silence.
7. Bob Dylan: 'Desolation Row'
From Highway 61 Revisited, 1965
Even by Bob Dylan’s unique standards, ending an electric blues-rock album with a surreal, 11-minute epic was an audacious move. 'Desolation Row' abandons propulsion for imagery, inviting the listener into a dreamlike wasteland populated by cultural ghosts.
As a closer, it acts like a slow fade from chaos into contemplation. After the confrontational bite of the preceding tracks, Dylan opts for reflection rather than resolution. It’s a reminder that endings don’t always need volume: sometimes they just need space.
6. The Doors: 'The End'
From The Doors, 1967
No album closer has ever felt more final. 'The End' is ritual, prophecy, breakdown, and farewell rolled into one. Its slow, hypnotic build, taboo-shattering lyrics, and funereal atmosphere give the sense that something irreversible is happening. As the final track on The Doors’ debut, it announces not just a band, but an entirely new kind of rock darkness. It doesn’t resolve the album: it annihilates it. As closing statements go, nothing is more daring, disturbing, or definitive.
5. David Bowie: 'Rock 'n' Roll Suicide'
(From The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, 1972)
The final chapter in the magnificent tragedy of Ziggy Stardust. The song starts quietly, building tension and drama as Ziggy offers a final, desperate plea for connection. It crescendos into a soaring, orchestral climax where Bowie, as Ziggy, offers himself up as a saviour – 'You're not alone!' – before the song and the character are obliterated in a final burst of sound.
'Rock 'n' Roll Suicide' is not just an album closer: it provides the necessary dramatic resolution to the entire Ziggy concept, leaving the listener heartbroken but exhilarated by the spectacular emotional arc of the ultimate rock and roll prophet.
4. Talking Heads: 'This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)'
From Speaking in Tongues, 1983
Haunting, beautiful, touching... and a somewhat jarring contrast to the rest of the album whose curtain it brings down. Following the complex funk rhythms and manic energy of the rest of Speaking in Tongues, the much-loved 'This Must Be The Place' is a disarmingly simple, electronic love song.
Its childlike synth line and Byrne's sincere, almost awkward vocal delivery create a sense of innocent domestic bliss, offering a warm, human resolution after the album's hyper-intellectual chaos. It leaves the listener with a feeling of unexpected, gentle peace.
3. Pink Floyd: 'Eclipse'
From The Dark Side of the Moon, 1973
Following the rising panic of 'Brain Damage', 'Eclipse' is the perfect, definitive ending to the widescreen existential horizons of Floyd's epic, The Dark Side of the Moon. The track abruptly shifts from the personal ravings of '"'Brain Damage' into a universal, philosophical chorus about the balance of all things in life ("All that you touch / And all that you see / Is all that your life will ever be").
It’s a sudden moment of clarity and resolution, punctuated by the final, chilling sound of a heartbeat fading out and the spoken words, "There is no dark side of the moon really... matter of fact it's all dark." It snaps the listener out of the album’s immersive journey with a final, unnerving existential thought.
2. The Rolling Stones: 'You Can't Always Get What You Want'
From Let It Bleed, 1969
The closing track of one of The Stones’ darkest albums, this song offers a brilliant, cynical summation of the hedonistic Sixties. Kicking off with the magnificent sound of the London Bach Choir, it is an epic, sprawling production featuring French horn and Al Kooper's keyboards.
The central theme – that you won't always achieve your desires, but you might find what you need – is a mature, philosophical moment for a band often associated with pure drive and ego. It's a gorgeous, slow-burning piece of acceptance that perfectly ends an album steeped in death and political upheaval.
1. The Beatles: 'A Day in the Life'
From Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967
No other song serves as a more complete, awe-inspiring synthesis of an album's themes and sonic ambition. 'A Day in the Life' is the pinnacle of the psychedelic era, seamlessly merging John Lennon’s dreamy, reflective newspaper reportage with Paul McCartney’s upbeat, everyday life segment.
The two famous orchestral crescendos – a chaotic, magnificent surge of sound – and the final, echoing E-major piano chord that sustains for over forty seconds provide the definitive, definitive period on rock's greatest album. It resolves the surreal journey of Sgt. Pepper's with a beautiful, unified statement on existence and consciousness, ensuring the final feeling is one of profound, lingering wonder.
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