I didn’t used to like Animals much. My estimation of it has grown a lot in the last decade.

Roger Waters’s preachy anger is divisive at the best of times, and in later days it would certainly be turned to the service of evil, but 1977’s Animals is as good a use of it as there is. Inverting the central metaphor of Orwell’s Animal Farm, this album critiques the capitalist class system and posits that the bonds of love are the best antidote to it. It almost reads like the Floyd’s response to the rise of punk rock; fellow rocker-turned-reactionary old fart John Lydon famously wore an “I Hate Pink Floyd” during his days as the Sex Pistols’s Johnny Rotten. Here they show they can offer up their own jaded, cynical criticism of reactionary culture while still having 15-minute guitar solos. In the age of Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, the revolving door of British Prime Ministers, and a few billion more pigs and dogs and sheep pushing each other toward the slaughterhouse, it’s become impossible for me to not take some solace in this album’s rage.

The highlights are “Dogs”, a lengthy piece driven by Gilmour’s guitar solos and his rawest, best vocal performance of his career, depicting the hidden violence of middle-class ambition, and “Sheep”, a pointed, Wright-heavy look at the toxic effects of the proletariat living in fear.