The Wall

The Wall is the last Pink Floyd album to include all four post-Barrett-era band members. The Wall topped the US charts for 15 weeks and reached number three in the UK. It initially received mixed reviews from critics, many of whom found it overblown and pretentious, but later received accolades as one of the greatest albums of all time.

The Wall is a rock opera that explores abandonment, cycles of violence, and isolation, symbolized by a wall. The songs create a storyline of events in the life of Pink, a fictional rock star based on Waters and Pink Floyd's former frontman Syd Barrett. The first half of the album largely features events from Waters' childhood and young adulthood, such as the death of his father in WWII, and his wife's infidelity. The album also includes several references to Barrett, namely the track "Nobody Home", which mirrors lyrically one of Barrett's final songs for the Floyd, the unreleased B-side "Vegetable Man" through descriptions of the narrator's possessions and character. "Comfortably Numb" was inspired by Waters' injection with a muscle relaxant to combat the effects of hepatitis during the In the Flesh tour in Philadelphia. In the song "In the Flesh" Waters "imagines himself as a fascist dictator".