Obscured by Clouds is the great overlooked album in the Pink Floyd catalogue — a record made almost in passing, and far better than that suggests. Released in 1972, it is a film soundtrack, knocked out in two hurried weeks in France while the band were busy building The Dark Side of the Moon. Yet the rush suited them: it is warm, tuneful, unpretentious and full of charm, and it sits so close to the masterpiece that followed that it plays like its friendly, unassuming younger sibling.

The short version

Obscured by Clouds (1972) is Pink Floyd’s seventh album and their second soundtrack for the French director Barbet Schroeder, three years after More. It was recorded in about two weeks at a chateau studio near Paris, squeezed between tour dates and the sessions that would produce The Dark Side of the Moon. The tight deadline pushed the band away from the side-long epics of Meddle and Atom Heart Mother and toward ten short, focused songs — which is exactly why it works. Self-produced, it features early use of a synthesizer, some of David Gilmour’s warmest singing and playing, and a clutch of lovely tunes. It reached number six in the UK and, thanks to the single Free Four, became the first Pink Floyd album to crack the American Top 50.

Two weeks in France

The commission came from Barbet Schroeder, whose first film the band had scored in 1969. His new one, La Vallée, followed a group of travellers on a journey through the highlands of Papua New Guinea in search of a hidden valley — a place so wrapped in cloud that mapmakers had simply marked it as unseen, which is where the album’s title comes from. Working from a rough cut with stopwatches in hand, Pink Floyd wrote and recorded the whole thing in roughly a fortnight at the Château d’Hérouville outside Paris, in the middle of a punishing touring schedule and while The Dark Side of the Moon was already taking shape. The pressure, by all accounts, energised them rather than crushed them. A late falling-out with the film’s production company meant the record came out under its own name rather than the film’s — which is partly why so many listeners have never quite thought of it as a soundtrack at all.

The sound

This is the loosest, most relaxed Pink Floyd album, and one of the most immediately likeable. Gone are the twenty-minute suites; in their place are short songs with proper tunes, played by a band who sound like they are enjoying themselves. It opens on a hazy, synthesizer-led instrumental, moves through easygoing blues-rock, gorgeous acoustic balladry and a couple of atmospheric instrumental pieces, and closes on something stranger and more cinematic. David Gilmour is at the heart of it, singing most of the songs and threading his guitar through everything. And running underneath is the unmistakable sense of a band on the cusp of greatness — the textures, the synth washes, even a drum pattern or two, would soon resurface, refined, on The Dark Side of the Moon.

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The songs

The album opens with the title track, a slow-building instrumental built on an early synthesizer drone, which runs straight into the driving When You’re In. Burning Bridges is a mellow, organ-washed song sung by Richard Wright and Gilmour; The Gold It’s in The… is a cheerful blues-rock stomp. The clear highlight is Wot’s… Uh the Deal, a beautiful, understated acoustic ballad with a lovely Wright piano solo — a song Gilmour loved enough to revive on his solo tours decades later. Mudmen is a soaring Gilmour-and-Wright instrumental; Childhood’s End, written and sung by Gilmour, borrows its title from an Arthur C. Clarke novel and points straight at the album to come. Free Four is the oddest of them all: a bouncy, singalong tune carrying a far darker lyric, and the first Pink Floyd song in which Waters wrote openly about the father he lost in the war — a theme he would return to for the rest of his career. Stay is a gentle Wright ballad, and Absolutely Curtains closes the record on an eerie instrumental that ends with a recording of chanting from the film. The cover suits it perfectly: a blurred, out-of-focus film still of a man in a tree, reaching for something just out of view.

Reception and legacy

At the time, Obscured by Clouds was treated much as More had been — as a side project rather than a proper Pink Floyd album — and it was quickly buried by the phenomenon that arrived nine months later. Yet it did well: number six in Britain, and the band’s first American Top 50 placing, with Free Four becoming their first song since 1967 to get real airplay in the States. Since then its stock has risen steadily, and it is now routinely called the most underrated album in their catalogue. Its real significance is as a bridge: recorded alongside The Dark Side of the Moon, it is where the band tightened up their songwriting and started using the tools and textures that would make that record work. Listen to the two back to back and the family resemblance is unmistakable.

The verdict

Obscured by Clouds is not a major Pink Floyd album, and it is not where anyone should start — The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here have that covered. But of all their lesser-known records, this is the one most worth your time, and the one most likely to surprise you. It is short, warm, melodic and easy to love, with no grand concept to wrestle with and a couple of genuinely lovely songs in Wot’s… Uh the Deal and Childhood’s End. Play it once the famous albums are familiar, and you will find a relaxed, generous, thoroughly charming record — and a fascinating glimpse of a great band limbering up for the biggest album of their lives.

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