How Meddle’s ‘Echoes’ rewrote the side-long rulebook before Dark Side

Pink Floyd’s Meddle (1971) splits the album into two distinct halves: Side A collects five shorter songs (like “One of These Days” and “Fearless”), while Side B is one uninterrupted 23-minute track, “Echoes.” It’s a direct but smarter evolution of the side-long experiment they’d tried a year earlier on Atom Heart Mother, where the 23-minute “Atom Heart Mother Suite” chewed up the entire first side but left the second side as a grab bag of unrelated songs. With Meddle, they flipped the structure—the epic now closed the album, giving Side A a chance to breathe as a self-contained set of tunes—and it worked because “Echoes” actually coheres musically rather than feeling stitched together like the orchestral collage of the earlier suite.

By the time The Dark Side of the Moon arrived in 1973, Pink Floyd had abandoned the idea of a single side-long piece. Instead, they created a continuous 43-minute album where every song flows into the next, but no track overstays its welcome. The side-long concept was essentially absorbed into the album’s overall architecture: Side One ends with “Time” and its reprise, Side Two opens with “Money” and closes with