The beloved music of any post-smoking college student, Pink Floyd was the first band to employ film loops, pyrotechnics and light shows for their acts (which, every pot smoker knows, enhances the experience). Their music, too, was heavily LSD-inspired. Early albums were more acoustic experimentation that formal songs, and none reached the charts until their first of five concept albums.

On this day, March 24, in 1973 Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon was released in record stores. True to their roots, the group paid very high attention to sound quality, with the band engineer Alan Parsons using a recently developed 16-track recording machine. The album was tied together with the overarching theme of the forces prevalent in life, with individual tracks exploring a different force each time.

The single that reached the U.S. Top 20 was “Money”, an exploration of the debilitating and corrupting effects of the pursuit of wealth. Other tracks explored mortality (“The Great Gig in the Sky); mental illness (“Brain Damage”); and a theme that the band would return to time and again, war (“Us and Them”).