Concept Album

Times were when the term "concept album" meant having to phone in sick to wade through some four hour long metaphysical prospectus on flying Nepalese goatherds performed by men in long capes.

— Kevin Maidment, reviewing Saint Etienne's Tales From Turnpike House on Amazon.co.uk

Some albums are just a random assortment of songs that are only linked by being recorded/written at around the same time. Other albums are arranged so that the songs flow together without sudden Mood Whiplash between tracks. Then we have the Concept Album, which goes even further than that. Similar to Rock Operas, concept albums are albums unified by a theme, which can be instrumental, compositional, narrative or lyrical. Most often, they are meticulously planned, with all songs contributing to a single overall theme or unified story; this plan or story is the concept. Given that the suggestion of something as vague as an overall mood often tags a work as being a concept album, the precise definition of the term is up for debate.

Put it blunt, it's a musical work of art with a Central Theme.

In the world of musical theatre, there is a separate and distinct form of concept album known as the album musical, in which the performers are playing characters in a story, a type of recording which encompasses such rock operas as Tommy and Quadrophenia by The Who and The Wall by Pink Floyd.

These often feature an Album Intro Track and/or Album Closure.

Compare and Contrast Kay Fabe Music where the music is more about theatrics or performance, and may or may not have overlap with stories told through their music.

Note: The following albums are referenced by decade, with multiple artists (such as Fear Factory, Alice Cooper, and Jethro Tull) straddling multiple decades. This was done intentionally, to display the progression of concept albums through the past seventy years in scope, detail, intensity, subject, and variety. If you just want to find concept albums by artist, please expand all folders and use your browser to search the name of the artist. While adding examples, please separate multiple albums by the decades during which they were released. (In this way, the page can become a Concept Page!)

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Examples

Concept Artists

• Celestial Navigations has each "song" tell a short story.
• Every album by The Mechanisms tells a story.
• FEMM is a duo chronicling two sentient mannequins sent into society to liberate other mannequins from human oppression. Mannequins begin to suddenly disappear all around Japan...
• Frank Zappa made a number of these over his career: Freak Out!, Absolutely Free, We're Only in It for the Money, Lumpy Gravy, Cruisin' With Ruben And The Jets, 200 Motels, Frank Zappa Meets the Mothers of Prevention, Civilization Phaze III,... Furthermore, there is a lot of continuity nods (nicknamed ''conceptual continuity'' by Zappa) between songs and albums; sometimes a Brick Joke spans several albums; almost all of Zappa's albums are part of the same universe.
• Gorillaz are technically a concept band, but many of their music videos follow a narrative thread, such as rappers being kidnapped for experiments.
• Most of the Homestuck albums which aren't Volumes are concept albums, concentrated on exploring a specific topic, theme or group of characters from the series. Perhaps the straightest example is M.G. Bowman's Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido, themed around the origin and purpose of Sburb and presented as a series of cryptic clues to its true nature, yet not a specific tie-in to any group of characters in particular.
• Most of The Hold Steady's albums also feature the same characters and themes, so they can be considered a Concept Band (in the same vein as Craig Finn's previous band, Lifter Puller).
• Neal Morse of Prog Rock groups, Spock's Beard and Transatlantic. After converting to Christianity, Morse produced the Christian themed concept album, Snow, with Spock's Beard, after which he focused on a solo career focused on his new found faith, often deviating from his prog rock roots, though he has produced several prog rock Christian concept albums, including ? about the tabernacle and Sola Scriptur about Martin Luther.
• Right Away, Great Captain! is essentially a concept band by Manchester Orchestra lead singer Andy Hull.
  • The first album, The Bitter End tells the story of a man finding his wife sleeping with his brother, so he leaves his children behind to go live as a sailor for three years, where he befriends his Captain, and the two talk about the existence of love.
  • The second album, The Eventually Home tells of the man, now the Captain of the ship after the death of the Captain from the first CD, returning home to either forgive or murder his wife and brother. At the end of the album, he is still unsure what he wants to do.
  • The story is expected to be resolved by the planned third album.
• Every release from Pain Of Salvation is a concept album.
• Many of the albums from the intergalactic metal band GWAR are concept albums. Almost every album has an accompanying DVD, which is either a concert, or a movie that more details the album's plot.
• The Protomen more or less exist to make their Mega Man Rock Opera concept albums, with a focus on tragedy, the psychology behind fascism, and robot destruction.
• The Megas' music and concept albums are based on the original Mega Man games, with their The Belmonts EP drawing on the Castlevania mythos instead.
• Rhapsody of Fire has their ten-part (as in, ten sequential albums) epic "Symphony of the Enchanted Lands" (itself split into two five-album sagas), telling a Tolkien-esque High Fantasy tale which is sometimes narrated by Christopher Lee. And it is awesome.
• Each of the three studio albums by Kendrick Lamar tells a story:
  • Good Kid MAA Dcity (2012) is a fictionalized version of his own teen years. K-dot is dating a girl named Sharane his parents don't like. He goes over to her house one day to hookup and her cousins jump him. He and his friends come back to retaliate and one of them dies in the shootout. He decides he wants to give up his old life, find God, and work on his music.
  • His 2015 album, To Pimp a Butterfly is also a fictionalized version of his own life. He starts off a metaphorical caterpillar, rough around the edges in his new found life, and finally blossoms into the butterfly as he grows used to his fame.
  • 2017's DAMN is about what it means to be a black man in America and Kendrick's own path to understand what that means.
• Epica base most of their albums upon themes and concepts. Usually abstract and existential or based in myth and religious ideals.
• Not only is every Coheed and Cambria album a concept album, but every album ties in to a single story, called the Amory Wars, which the lead singer has adapted into a comic book series.
• Most albums by tool tend to fall under this classification. The themes presented in the albums are also further represented with visual motifs in the music videos and album art. Whether they clarify or confuse those themes depends on the listener and the listener's level of sobriety at the time though.
• Every Sound Horizon album. Each and every one of them.
• Haken has done this to an extent on every album. Aquarius is a Rock Opera about a fisherman who finds a mermaid and sells her to the circus, Visions is about a man who sees his own death and his haunted by it, and The Mountain isn't a Rock Opera, but has some interwoven themes about pride, hubris, and giving insignificant things significance (as well as some repeated musical concepts).
• Devo as a band are a concept in itself. Almost every piece of media that they produce - music, live shows, video, stage characters, merchandise, video game (Adventures of the Smart Patrol), book (My Struggle), and even various commercial spots - have some sort of social commentary or subversion to their unifying concept of "de-evolution".
• Every one of GACKT's non-compilation albums, as well as singles. Even his concerts are designed to be visual interpretations of his albums and singles, if not a continuation of their story.
• All of Mike Watt's solo albums, so far. His first, Ball-Hog Or Tugboat, is notably the only one where the "concept" is purely musical, with no real running theme in the lyrics - the album is meant to be based around collaboration, with a different lineup of musicians appearing on every song and most of the lead vocals being performed by someone other than Watt.
• The Insane Clown Posse have spent the better part of their career doing a concept album cycle - the Dark Carnival. The concept was that the six Joker's Cards were harbingers of The End of the World as We Know It, to be revealed one by one. The last two albums, The Wraith and Hell's Pit, were based around Heaven and Hell respectively. They returned to this concept in 2009, with Bang! Pow! Boom!, about a continuous explosion which cleanses evil souls from the carnival grounds, and the first of a series of new Joker's Cards.
• Several albums by Rush fit this category to varying degrees, usually with titles that are a play on words for the central concept. Their final studio album, 2012's Clockwork Angels, is the strongest example.
• All of Avantasia's albums are this.
• All of Ayreon's albums are concept albums with several different singers, and they all tell different parts of the same weird sci-fi/fantasy story.
• All of Mägo de Oz albums with the exception of Belfast and La Bruja qualify.
  • The album Finisterra tells the story of a technologically-dependent future dystopia. Gaia also qualifies.
• Other than the very earliest of their work, just about everything that Fear Factory have ever written is thematically close enough that you might even call it a concept career.
• All of Classical-Christmas/Rock fusion group Trans-Siberian Orchestra's albums are concept albums, as they all have a story built into them. The narrations can be found in the liner notes for each album. this makes their concerts VERY entertaining, as they go through the story, complete with narration, accompanied by some of the best light shows known to mankind.
• The Alan Parsons Project lived and breathed this trope; nearly all of their albums were concept albums. They explored a wide range of concepts:
  • Musical adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's works (Tales of Mystery and Imagination).
  • The effect of robots and technology on human culture (I, Robot); pyramid power & Egyptian mysticism (interest in which was widespread in the US and UK in the 1970s) (Pyramid).
  • Relationships between women and men (Eve).
  • Gambling and risk-taking (Turn of a Friendly Card), the public perception of industrial & scientific developments (Ammonia Avenue); the worship of money and celebrity (Vulture Culture); the pressures of fame and the ways in which famous people are shaped by them (Stereotomy).
  • The works of architect Antoni Gaudí (Gaudi).
  • Eye in the Sky was originally not intended to be a concept album, as such. Alan Parsons and Eric Woolfson, in reaction to criticism that the whole idea of "concept albums" was becoming stale and cliche, began work on the album with the idea that they would simply write a bunch of songs, make an album, and then decide what (if anything) it was about. Despite that, the album ended up being a loose exploration of the influences of religious and political belief systems.
  • And their solo works after the band's break-up:
    • Alan Parson's On Air, about aeronautics.
    • Eric Woolfson's Freudiana, about Sigmund Freud, and two more albums about Poe.
• Pick an album by The Residents. They've released over 100, and chances are that the one you pick is a concept album. Some of their most popular examples include The Commercial Album (one-minute pop songs), Eskimo (documenting the lives of Polar Eskimos, and told almost entirely through grunting and wind noises), God in Three Persons (a cowboy exploits Siamese twins as faith healers), The King and Eye (bringing new meanings to classic Elvis songs) — also an example of The Cover Changes the Meaning, and Wormwood (retelling some of the Bible's more disturbing stories).
  • The Third Reich 'n Roll is a concept album about a conspiracy theory that the Nazis wrote 1950s and 1960s rock and roll songs to corrupt the youth. In reality its an excuse to make a Cover Album.
  • "The Commercial Album" might be the most rigorously-excuted concept album ever. Not only did they record 40 "pop" songs, each exactly a minute in length, but also bought up 40 one minute add spaces on San Francisco radio, effectively creating their own payola Top 40!
• John Zorn has recorded many concept albums that pay tribute to a particular artist, including his famous Spillane, a homage to Mickey Spillane, most famous for the Mike Hammer novels.
• Erdenstern is a German group producing 'music for your head cnema' - sound tracks usable in role-playing games. Each album by Erdenstern followes a certain theme, such as seafaring (Into the Blue), cold and ice (Into the White) or high-tech SF (Into the Grrey). The separate tracks are seamlessly loopable, but just having them sorfted by themes is very useful.
• Glory Hammer:
  • Their debut album is titled Tales from the Kingdom of Fife. The contents of the album is a High Fantasy story about the fall of Dundee (to an army of undead unicorns), Angus Mcfife's quest for revenge and ultimately reconquering Dundee. All songs come in chronological order, and listening to the album in any other order than that pretty much ruins it all.
  • Their second album is called Space 1992: Rise of The Chaos Wizards. This album is set ten centuries later in 1992, where the fantasy setting has developed into a space setting similar to Warhammer 40,000. This is about Zargothrax being released from his prison by the Chaos Wizards, and the events that ensue. As with the first album, listening to it in any order other than chronological ruins it.
  • The third album is titled Tales from Beyond the Galactic Terrorvortex. It's set in the alternate universe that Angus and Zargothrax end up in after going through a wormhole created by the Earth-Shattering Kaboom at the end of the previous album.
• Over half of Sufjan Stevens's discography is concept music. Enjoy Your Rabbit is electronic music based on the Eastern Zodiac. Michigan is all songs inspired by that state; similarly, Illinois! and its outtake album The Avalanche were inspired by Illinois. The BQE is the soundtrack to a film he made about the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Carrie & Lowell is music he wrote to come to terms with his mother's death (and was supposedly originally conceived as an Oregon album). Sufjan made such a reputation for writing concept albums that his own record label advertised his The Age of Adz by emphasizing that Sufjan had finally made an album that had no concept. (Ironically, the lyrics of that one lend themselves really well to Fan Wanking a concept anyway.)
  • Stevens also collaborated with composer Nico Muhly, The National guitarist Bryce Dessner, and drummer James McAlister to write Planetarium, about the planets and other features of the solar system.
• Cormorant usually connects each song with a common theme for their albums, with Metazoa (animals), Dwellings (immortality) and Earth Diver (conspiracy and deceit).
• Janelle Monáe's solo records Metropolis: Suite I - The Chase (2007), The ArchAndroid: Suites II and III (2010), and The Electric Lady: Suites IV and V (2013) tell the ongoing tale of Cindi Mayweather, a messianic android from the year 2719 hunted by the Metropolis government for falling in love with the human Sir Anthony Greendown. The final chapters of Suites VI and VII (unless the story continues^note In interviews (and on the cover of The ArchAndroid), Monáe said that the next album would be Suite IV. The Electric Lady covers Suites IV and V, and the cover art implies that there will be Suites VI and VII and that will be the end, but there's no knowing if that will change.) will likely be covered in future albums. Dirty Computer is also a concept album, but it is not related to the Cindi Mayweather storyline.
• Iced Earth, over their long career, have produced more concept albums than not, to the point that it'd actually be easier to list the albums that aren't concept albums.^note Iced Earth, Burnt Offerings, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and half of Plagues of Babylon
• The Baseball Project, an alt-rock Supergroup featuring former members of R.E.M., the Dream Syndicate and the Minus 5, has recorded three albums about various aspects of Baseball.
• All of Fall of Efrafa's music is based on their take on Watership Down and its sequel. They disbanded after they had finished telling the story they wanted to tell.
• Most Big Big Train releases are concept albums, or have a unifying theme: The Underfall Yard is about the history's great builders and engineers; Folklore is about Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
• Swedish Power Metal group Sabaton are known for Horrible History Metal about warfare and heroism.
  • In a case where the concept album became the concept for the band, Primo Victoria. Their earlier EPs and actual first album Metalizer were more standard Heavy Metal on varied topics, but were sent into Development Hell by their first label. Then their second label actually let them release an album, which happened to be themed on Horrible History Metal about war (mainly World War II — the title track is about D-Day — and the two Iraq Wars, also including a song each about the Six Day War and the Vietnam War). War songs have comprised the lion's share of the band's output ever since.
  • The Art of War has one song for each of the thirteen chapters of Sun Tzu's magnum opus on military science, quoting from it directly on several songs.
  • Carolus Rex is about the rise and fall of the Swedish Empire in the 17th century, starting with the ascension to the throne of Gustav II Adolf (a.k.a. Gustavus Adolphus), and ending with the death of Charles XII and the Carolean Death March.
  • Heroes is themed after specific war heroes, mainly lesser-known ones such as Franz Stigler^note a Luftwaffe Ace Pilot who escorted a damaged B-17 to safety rather than finishing it off, and then became close friends with its pilot 40 years after the war and Witold Pilecki^note a Polish Resistance leader who infiltrated Auschwitz to lead an uprising, but was later executed by the postwar pro-Soviet government due to his loyalty to the prewar regime.
  • The Last Stand is about, well, last stands, some of which the side holding the line actually won. These range from the Battle of Thermopylae (with multiple references to 300) to the Battle of Vienna ("THEN THE WINGED HUSSARS ARRIVED!") to the "strangest battle of World War II" where a couple dozen POWs, German defectors, American soldiers, and a tank held off a 200-man Waffen SS death squad until reinforcements arrived.
  • The Great War is about World War I, its battles and the extraordinary men who fought in it, such as Manfred von Richthofen the Ace Pilot known as "The Red Baron" and Francis Pegahmagabow who was the most successful sniper of the war.
• Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling were themed around The Prisoner (1967), as all their original songs were written about and named after a specific episode of the series: The songs were released in Anachronic Order over the course of multiple singles and EPs, and once they had a song for every episode of the show, they compiled them into a full album re-organized in the same order of the episodes, then dissolved the project. They've also recorded some non-Prisoner-related cover versions, although even those seem to engage in The Cover Changes the Meaning to loosely fit the themes of the show.
  • An offshoot called Darling Pet Munkee was dedicated to mail order ads found in comic books. Part of the concept is for the lyrics to stick to the hyperbole of the ad copy, as the actual product was usually disappointing in comparison - e.g. "Monster S-I-Z-E Monsters" is about having a Frankenstein's Monster for a pet, when the purposely vague ad was really just selling a large glow in the dark poster of the monster. The "darling pet monkey" ad they named themselves after really was a live squirrel monkey sent through the mail though.
• All of Panopticon's full-length albums except the first one are concept albums; many are explained by their titles. Collapse is about the collapse of society. ...On the Subject of Mortality is about death and religion. Social Disservices is about the abuses in the foster care system. Kentucky is essentially a history of the labour activism associated with coal mining in the eponymous state. Roads to the North and Autumn Eternal are tough, because sole band member Austin Lunn hasn't released the lyrics, and they're largely indecipherable due to the vocal style, but they evidently form a trilogy with Kentucky. (The liner notes do explain some of the concept, but Lunn feels the lyrics are too personal to release.) The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness relates to man's impact on the environment and the difficulty of finding genuine silence in the modern era.^note The lyrics for this album actually weren't released either, but all eighteen songs have explanatory text explaining their concepts, and since the lyrics to the second half are entirely sung or spoken rather than screamed, most of them are easier to decipher. More information can be found on the band's page.
• Every album by Isis is a concept album, and most of them explicitly relate to one another in some fashion, though few of them have Rock Opera-style narratives per se. Details can be found on the band's page.
• Planet P Project by Tony Carey, keyboarder of Rainbow, was made by him for his SF stuff. The self-titled first album is probably no concept album in itself (rather it's all the surplus he couldn't use with the band).
• Most of The Oh Hellos' discography comes in this form:
  • Through the Deep, Dark Valley is told from the perspective of a single character, chronicling their early life, fall from grace, and later redemption. Dear Wormwood continues the story of that same character, now a Love Martyr writing messages to their beloved depicting how their relationship fell apart and their efforts to pick up the pieces and move on.
  • Their follow-up is a four-part series named after Greek mythology's "four winds" and themed after their respective seasons— Notos (summer), Eurus (autumn), Boreas (winter), Zephyrus (spring) —centered around a common theme of change, renewal, and personal growth.
• I DONT KNOW HOW BUT THEY FOUND ME is an indie synth-pop/rock band played as "a band out of time", one that was active during The '80s but never got their big break and were promptly forgotten. Their retreaux music videos and other supplementary materials are framed as coming from old cassette tapes that were recently rediscovered and shared online, additionally with a trail of sinister mysteries surrounding the Tellex Foundation, an ominous corporation whose presence looms over the band's history.
• Most of Christopher Tin's orchestral works each revolve around a particular theme, often drawing from a wide range of vocal traditions with lyrics sourced from famous works of poetry and literature from around the world:
  • His debut album Calling All Dawns — based on Civilization IV's main theme, "Baba Yetu" — centers on a cycle of Day (life), Night (death), and Dawn (rebirth).
  • The Drop that Contained the Sea is inspired by the water cycle and how it connects the world. In Tin's own words: "Taken as a whole, the album essentially traces a single raindrop as it transforms from clouds to snow, mountain streams to rivers, oceans to rain, and back to rain again, in a perfect cycle."
  • To Shiver the Sky — based on Civilization VI's main theme, "Sogno di Volare" ("The Dream of Flight") — centers around the history of aviation from depictions of flight in classical works, to developments in technology and astronomy, to air travel and spaceflight.
  • A series of EPs featuring music from the above three albums, grouped by theme: The Inspiration Thread, The Mythology Thread, and The Celebration Thread.
  • The Lost Birds is a tribute to extinct bird species. In contrast to Shiver, which focused on human achievement, this album is an examination of the natural beauty that mankind has destroyed along the way, and a warning about the fragility of nature and mankind alike.
• Basically all of Vylet Pony's albums are concept albums.
  • Carousel (An Examination of the Shadow, Creekflow, and its Life as an Afterthought) is about a lot of things according to Word of God^note Though here is a tweet from her clarifying what it's not, but sea has left it up to viewer interpretation. The basic plot, however, is this: Vylet finds a magic carousel at the fair that lets her talk to her "shadow", who is evidently not happy with her.
  • Can Openers Notebook Fish Whisperer follows a neurodivergent unicorn named Canni who dreams of being a musician while their parents disapprove.
  • Cutiemarks And The Things That Bind Us follows the lives of various My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic characters, and focuses a lot on interpersonal relationships and identity.
  • The "Starship Ponyville" series ^note Mystic Acoustics, Homeward is a sci-fi series that follows the character Vylet Featherdance. It has a corresponding fanfiction.
  • Love Letters and Love Letters Colourless follow the different sides of a relationship between Rarity and Rainbow Dash respectively.
  • Queen Of Misfits is a moody synthpop album that follows the character Trixie Lulamoon.
• Jhariah:
  • In The Great Tale of How I Ruined It All, the protagonist is that last one standing on a world After the End. Everyone else has been brainwashed by a cult, so he finds a safe place to hide. This instills a sense of Survivor Guilt in him, wondering if his resistance and desire to save everyone are really the right things to do.
  • In A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO FAKING YOUR DEATH, a man fakes his death on a whim and escapes to a better life. However, he fears that the people he left behind will catch on to what he did and get their revenge.
• Most Korean BTS albums are concept albums:
  • The School Trilogy (2 Cool 4 Skool, O!R U L8?2, Skool Luv Affair) had the concept of youth and school.
  • Dark&Wild (an epilogue of sorts to The School Trilogy) follows the concept of the first half of the album being "Dark", and the second half being "Wild".
  • The Most Beautiful Moment in Life, pts. 1 & 2 and The Most Beautiful Moment in Life Epilogue: Young Forever, were focused on the beauty and struggles of being young.
  • Wings follows a coming of age concept, with heavier and more mature themes and a Whole-Plot Reference to Hermann Hesse's Demian.
  • The LOVE YOURSELF Series tells the story of what loving oneself truly means, going from relying on another person, to truly finding love in learning to accept all sides of yourself. Depending on interpretation, it might also be a commentary on BTS' (and idols in general's) relationship with their fans. The installments of the series have their own sub-concepts:
    • LOVE YOURSELF: Her features themes of newfound, fated love, but with the implication that the person is not being true to themself and the other and is hiding their darker side.
    • LOVE YOURSELF: Tear is about discovering how the "love" experienced in Her is fake, since the person, too afraid to show their true self, hid under a mask and therefore wasn't loved for who they were, losing their identity trying to please the other.
    • LOVE YOURSELF: Answer, being a compilation album, registers the entire journey from Wonder to Tear, plus the development of the person now slowly finding happiness in slowly learning to accept and love themself.
  • MAP OF THE SOUL: PERSONA and MAP OF THE SOUL : 7 include a Whole-Plot Reference to Carl Jung's psychological treatise of the same name, referencing the concepts of Persona, Shadow, and Ego.
  • j-hope solo album Jack in the Box is about seeking hope when the world feels like a Crapsack World.

2020s

• Dorian Electra's My Agenda is built around observing toxic masculinity through the POV of a man practicing it, but observed through a tongue-in-cheek queer lens. The album follows a loose narrative of the protagonist's regressive views on gender, sexuality, and reality in general while gradually deconstructing his own deeply-conflicting and inconvenient desire for affection.
• A video game example: Foamstars has a large number of original lyrical songs, ranging from jazz to funk to electronica, and all but one have to do with baths, soap or foam. Even the emotional song about a man upset with his limited and repetitive life quickly turns to him taking a bath to drown his sorrows.
• Harumaki Gohan's Futari No is an album exploring a futuristic Childless Dystopia, where the inhabitants are robots known as "Adults" and most humans have moved onto other planets. The only known human children are two girls named Lili and Nana, who become tightknit Childhood Friends and promise to always be with each other, but are forced apart by Lili moving away. The album further explores what their relationship as they get older, how they lose their childhood innocence, and what growing up looks like for them.
• Grimes' Miss Anthropocene has a loosely connecting thread of mankind's relationship to technology mixed with Gaia's Lament in the form of an "anthropomorphic goddess of climate change", particularly from the track "Violence", which imagines the Earth's relationship to humanity as a mutually abusive romantic relationship through natural disasters and pollution respectively.
• Keldian's The Bloodwater Rebellion in stark contrast to previous albums follows a common thread with it being based on an unpublished novel co-authored by Christer Andresen set in a not-so-distant future where fresh water has become the rarest resource.
• Lovejoy's second EP, Pebble Brain, revolves around the story of lead singer Wilbur breaking up with his home country of England. Sure enough, the album is a blend between relationship drama, political commentary, and relationship drama used as an allegory in political commentary.
• Nine Inch Nails' released the instrumental albums Ghosts V: Together and Ghosts VI: Locusts on the same day in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and are sort of twin albums. Together is described as being for "when things seem like it might all be okay" and is the more hopeful of the two, while Locusts is more bleak. Even the covers reflect this, with Together being light gray and Locusts being black.
• Qbomb: Hyperpunk has a loose story. The protagonist, who's very abrasive and questionably stable, wants to start a band and make loud music that proves that he's worth something. Someone spreads controversy about his band to defame him, and his aggressiveness leads him to "fuck it up" and lose all hope that his music will work. He goes insane and is convinced that he needs to be a "damaged legend" to make an impact, so he builds a giant robot to destroy life on Earth, but has another breakdown. He realizes that the problem is inside him, how he lies to make himself feel better, and as long as that's still happening, he'll never be satisfied. So he sets his aspirations for his band low... and still feels like it'll never be good enough.
• The Secret Chord's Fermi Paradox is about a Homeworld Evacuation in the wake of Gaia's Lament.
• Xiphos released "The Rise and Fall of Athens", which retells the history of the eponymous city through nine of its most prominent figures.
• Nisemono — a 2022 EP by indie/city pop joint Ginger Root — features tracks based on a story where in a fictional 1983, project frontman Cameron Lew was set to produce for an up-and-coming idol who suddenly quits out of pressure before her live debut, with Lew being thrust in her place as he already knows the songs. Appropriately, the EP is thematically about imposter syndrome and the journey to overcome not "being yourself".
• Bunny X's Love Minus 80 consists of Fan Music based on various sci-fi works, primarily from the '70s and '80s, such as Joe Halderman's The Forever War, Will McIntosh's Love Minus Eighty(in the Title Track), and William Gibson's Neuromancer(in "Chiba City Blues").
• Betamaxx's Sarajevo is themed around the 1984 Winter Olympic Games in the eponymous Yugoslav (now Bosnian) city.
• Alice Cooper's Detroit Stories is exactly what it says on the tin - stories about Detroit, including the connection between Alice Cooper, (the man and the band), and Detroit.

2010s

• At least three of Bastille's albums so far have been concept albums.
  • Bad Blood focuses on the past: memories, regrets, old relationships, and the necessity to continue living despite these and make amends for them. Most of the songs seem to be addressed to a romantic partner or friend.
  • Wild World concerns how an ordinary person deals with political and societal turmoil - which turns out to be mostly through escapism and relying on his significant other.
  • Doom Days, the most obviously conceptual, is an "apocalyptic party album" telling the story of a couple who spend a night in debauchery to distract themselves from the increasing bleakness of world events. Not only are two of the songs, "Quarter Past Midnight" and "4 AM," titled with the times when they take place, but the images on the YouTube official audio versions of the songs give each song a canonical time.
  • Give Me the Future concerns, well, the future, not only the problems created and exacerbated by modern technology but also whether any hope remains for the protagonist/singer and his significant other to create a future together.
• The Vaporwave album 9​.​0​水​面​下​Megathrust indirectly retells the events of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
• News at 11 by 猫 シ Corp. is another vaporwave concept album, sourcing music from American TV broadcasts from September 11th, 2001, just hours — if not minutes — before the you-know-what changed the course of American history forever. The soundscapes formed are made as an audio collage of the calm, almost innocent banality of American media at the time, sidestepping mentions of the attacks but ironically highlighting their importance in the end of the nostalgic age that vaporwave is built on.
• Most of the albums clipping. have released are concept albums:
  • CLPPNG focus on telling stories from a third person perspective (there' no "i" in the album, get it?).
  • Splendor and Misery is a slave song/gospel/hip hop space opera about an escaped slave being the Sole Survivor on the slave ship he's commandeered, fighting off loneliness and detection by the slavers.
  • There Existed an Addiction to Blood is a horrorcore album with a 70s/80s horror movie aesthetic, each track preying on typical horror tropes (ranging from vampires being a metaphor for violent black revolution and snuff films).
  • The Wriggle EP is all about sex in some way, ranging from the hard-and-fast life of lower-class strippers off the title track, to meaningless, degrading sex to fill a void.
• Marina Diamandis created Electra Heart (2012) as "basically a vehicle to portray part of the American dream, with elements of Greek tragedy." She makes it clear that the titular character "Electra Heart" is not an alter ego, but rather an exemplification of the dark sides of the American Dream.
• Rabbit Junk has two from the 2010s - Project Nonagon (2010) is a three-part album that tells three different stories about struggles for freedom, occult summonings, and cycling crime (Nonagon's parts are all sequels to 2008's This Life Is Where You Get Fucked), featuring radically different musical styles in each. Meanwhile, Rabbit Junk Will Die! (2018) is a looser concept album themed around mortality and making the most of life.
• Arctic Monkeys' Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is centered around a luxury hotel located on the moon. Many tracks focus on certain people in the hotel, such as the lounge act singer in "Star Treatment", two potential lovers in "Golden Trunks", one of the hotel's receptionists in the title track, and so on.
• The Caretaker's An Empty Bliss Beyond This World is an album inspired by a study in which it was revealed that people with Alzheimer's disease are able to remember scenarios better when they heard music in those scenarios. The album is an ambient album made of pre-World War II vinyl recordings looped and spliced in order to give the listener the feeling of trying to recall memories while suffering from Alzheimer's disease.
  • His later and final project, Everywhere At The End Of Time, is a six-album trek exceeding six hours in length for the entire thing. It goes more into depth into the feeling of Alzheimer's progressing, starting from the pre-World War II records, then slowly progressing into a terrifying mess of electronic sounds and record noises, culminating in the final album, which reportedly "is without description" where every other stage has at least a paragraph describing it. It goes from music and terror to only echoes, a reverbating white noise, and uncertainty, a representation of the final degenerative states of dementia.
• the Mountain Goats released several concept albums in a row starting with 2009's The Life of the World to Come, themed after various Bible verses. They followed this with All Eternal's Deck in 2011 about a deck of tarot cards, and 2012's Transcendental Youth, about mental illness. Then in 2015 they made the album Beat the Champ, which, for a change, was about Professional Wrestling.
• Given that one of their guitarists is nicknamed Kungen - Swedish for "(the) King" - Avatar's 2018 album Avatar Country decides to build upon it by creating the story of the titular nation-state. Led by a king - naturally played by Kungen in the music videos - Avatar Country is embroiled in a bitter war that, if scenes from the video to The King Wants You are to be believed, entirely stemmed from, of all things, a disagreement on music tastes. The King, angered by one of his courtiers suggesting that dubstep/EDM be used in place of The Power of Rock, sends the courtier into exile, where he's captured by Avatar Country's enemies and - in a colossal bit of backfiring - is made to switch sides, eventually becoming the leader of their military.
• Linkin Park gets in on this with A Thousand Suns. It's basically about the fears of war. Naturally professional opinions and fan opinions are divided.
• While Fear Factory's 2010 album Mechanize doesn't have a specific plot, you can hear the oppressive government lying to the regular people, a violent uprising against them, and the final collapse of the revolt and most of the track would fit into the concept albums easily.
• The Enid's Journey's End is about ecological threats and the possibility of space colonisation and Invicta concerns questions of religious faith and morality..
• Coldplay's Mylo Xyloto, which is a romance about the two titular protagonists, a boy and a girl, living and falling in love in a dystopian society.
• Between the Buried and Me's The Parallax: Hypersleep Dialogues and The Parallax II: Future Sequence make up two parts of a very confusing Concept Album. Even more confusingly, some of the band's songs going back as far as the band's second album The Silent Circus can be interpreted as relating to the concept in some way (at the very least, "Swim to the Moon" from The Great Misdirect explicitly relates to the Parallax storyline). Beyond that, Automata is a concept album about a company that steals people's dreams and sells them as entertainment, and Coma Ecliptic has a story about its central character's experiences while in a coma.
• Tyler, the Creator's first three albums formed a trilogy:
  • Bastard features rapping done in response to questions from his school psychiatrist, dealing with his personal issues like being a literal bastard.
  • Goblin is a direct sequel about another session with his psychiatrist and dealing with new issues and the lifestyle that fame brings, eventually ending with him breaking down, killing the other members of Odd Future and realizing his psychiatrist and all his alter egos are a figment of his imagination.
  • Wolf acts as a prequel to both of these, involving a Summer Camp for Youths with mental issues named Camp Flog Gnaw run by the same psychiatrist, and revolving around a psychopathic drug dealer named Sam, a new addition to the camp named Wolf, and a girl named Salem who acts as a love interest to both characters.
• The latest album by Meat Loaf, Hang Cool, Teddy Bear, is narrated from the perspective of a soldier lying half-dead on a battlefield. The first track represents his thoughts at the moment, and each subsequent song presents a different possible scenario of his future.
• Avantasia's The Wicked Symphony and Angel of Babylon continue "The Wicked Trilogy" begun by their 2008 album The Scarecrow. The Mystery of Time is a softspoken steampunk paranormal mystery.
• Britney Spears' Femme Fatale is about toxic relationships and clubbing and Britney Jean discusses a break up and recovering then finding love again.
• In Childish Gambino's Camp, all of the songs on it work by themselves, but when listened to in order they tell an autobiographical story: his difficult childhood ("Outside"), his rise to fame ("Fire Fly"), the contrasting narcissism ("Bonfire") and self-loathing ("All the Shine") that accompany it, his difficulty having actual relationships now that he's successful ("Heartbeat," "L.E.S.," "Kids"), and finally facing his problems ("That Power"). Plus some epic Boastful Rap interludes here and there (which still relate thematically to the overall story).
  • His 2013 album because the internet centers around social media's role in tightening relationships between people, but not necessarily for the best reasons. The album came with its own screenplay that, if read at a steady pace, lines up with events heard in the audio.
• Cold 187um's album The Only Solution is an album-length story about an assassin who seeks revenge against his father's killer and performs assassinations for an unnamed company (implied to be Psychopathic Records). It even comes with a comic book so you can follow the story.
• Color Theory's Lucky Ago is themed after superstitions on a track by track basis, except for the instrumental interlude "Lore":
  • "Shatterproof" - broken mirrors
  • "Unsigned" - chain letters
  • "Hand" - the Dead Man's Hand
  • "Avian" - Magpies as Portents
  • "Phobiac" - the number 13
  • "Dismembered" - Lucky Rabbit's Foot
  • "Fingers" - crossing one's fingers
  • "Sniper" - lighting three cigarettes with one match
  • "Backward" - walking under ladders
  • "Feral" - black cats
• Dockers Guild's album The Mystic Technocracy is an expanding 5-part album in the vein of Ayreon, about a silicon-based alien, the Technocrat, from a far-off planet who creates 3 religions(not so secretly Christianity, Islam and Judaism) to drive humanity to become his mindless slaves. Despite the premise, it is not a total Religion Rant Song, but rather against the fanaticism generated by the religions rather than the religions themselves.
• Nero's Welcome Reality takes place in December the first, 2808 and has a Source Sound feel. Well, except for three songs.
• Cos Mo's The Disappearance of Hatsune Miku.
• Music Inspired by The Snow Goose by Camel consists of music inspired by the Paul Gallico novel The Snow Goose.
• Covenant's Modern Ruin. The songs are gaplessly crossfaded, and the physical version (as opposed to the digital download) ends with the Hidden Track "Modern Ruin Part II", mirroring the intro track.
• Somewhat subverted by Born This Way by Lady Gaga. Many people thought the album had to do with religion due to the sheer amount of religious imagery in it, but she denies this. It also contains references to individuality and self-image.
• Deafheaven's Sunbather is another example of a Mind Screw concept album in Black Metal. The album is described as a concept album that "deals with the profound sadness found in the quest for one's personal perfection... serving as an artistic lucid dream of warmth despite the stinging pain of life's cruel idealism". Reading the lyrics, though, will still leave you stumped as to what they really mean.
• Hexode made a duo of EPs, Sleep Sequence A™ and Sleep Sequence B™ which are loosely based around the idea of falling asleep with the TV on.
• David Comes to Life, by hardcore/punk band Fucked Up, is a quite elaborate narrative of the relationship arc of two characters, David and Veronica. The story is told from multiple perspectives, sometimes by an Unreliable Narrator, and requires an in-depth read of the lyric sheet to achieve its full effect.
• The Mars Volta's latest (possibly last, as the band is on indefinite hiatus) album Noctourniquet is also a concept album.
• The Sword's "Warp Riders" is a tribute to the sci-fi novels of the 1940-70's. The lyrics tell the story of an archer banished from his tribe, a princess in a deep sleep on a distant planet, and a group of space pirates called the Warp Riders. The singer and lead guitarist, who came up with the story, said it was just to give people something cool to think about while they listened to the album. A sort of "epilogue" song called Farstar was released as the B-side to the last track on the record, sending the Warp Riders off to a distant part of the galaxy with echo-y vocals and organs (As opposed to the hard rock/heavy metal sound of the rest of the album).
• Miracle Musical's 2012 album Hawaii Part II has a rather unclear (due to confusing lyrics prone to multiple interpretations) storyline. The most common guess is that it’s about a person arriving to Hawaii, falling in love, then being wrongly accused of murder, pleading insanity to avoid punishment and actually going insane during electroshock therapy.
• My Chemical Romance's Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, about the adventures of the titular outlaws as they battle the evil MegaCorp Better Living Industries (BL/ind.).
• The debut album of Neon Neon, Stainless Style was based on the life of John DeLorean. They followed it up with Praxis Makes Perfect, based on the life of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli.
  • Their earlier EP Four Ways To Scream Your Name is a concept EP about the various aspects of failed relationships, though that may be more to do with the generic nature of their lyrics at that point.
• Kamelot's album Silverthorn is based on a story about a little girl who dies at the hands of her twin brothers.
• Steeleye Span's album Wintersmith, based on the Discworld novel of the same name and the other books in the Tiffany Aching series.
• Ian Anderson, of Jethro Tull fame, later made a sequel to the Jethro Tull Thick as a Brick which he released under his own name. It was, naturally, entitled Thick as a Brick 2. The lyrics focus on five potential scenarios which could have befallen the "author" of Thick as a Brick, Gerald Bostock; the end of the album appears to show all five possibilities, according to Wikipedia, "converg[ing] in a similar concluding moment of gloomy or pitiful solitude".
  • Homo Erraticus is supposedly written by Gerald Bostock, adapted from a manuscript he discovered. The manuscript was written in the early 20th century by Ernest T. Parritt, who, due to malarial fever, had delusions of past lives in history, as well as dark prophecies of the future.
• Gang of Youths: Go Farther in Lightness is about overcoming heavy personal struggles by finding hope and love within oneself and one's loved ones. Another theme common in some of the songs is that they are lyricized as conversations between the singer, Le'aupepe, and whomever is suffering.
• Gorillaz's Plastic Beach is about the band's adventures on the titular beach. The Fall is about 2D's Sanity Slippage as they tour America.
• Kaizers Orchestra's final trilogy of albums, Violeta Violeta vol. I-III, who were all written together and later split into three due to the sheer number of songs the writer was able to come up with for the theme. The albums tell the tale of the past, present and future of a young woman called Violeta who has mystical powers and a complicated and tragic family situation.
• Cytus:
  • Cytus Alive is a collection of eleven songs from sta and Cranky that tell a story of humanity being wiped out by a virus and people going through Brain Uploading so they can continue to exist as robots, and reliving their human emotions by experiencing them in the form of the songs you play.
  • Knight by Eyemedia, Hoskey, Nicode, and M2U is based on the splash screen for "Holy Knight", featuring two childhood friends, Iris and Rosabel. They are eventually separated, with Iris becoming a knight and Rosabel being forced to take the throne of a kingdom after her parents are killed and soon afterwards discovering a mysterious codex. Things...spiral into tragedy after that.
  • Timeline, composed by the Video Game Orchestra, tells the history of Taiwan, where Rayark is headquartered, starting from the Penglai Movement and then covering key points of Taiwanese history such as the Dutch Formosa period and the Japanese occupation of Taiwan. It continues into the future to tell predictions and a Green Aesop about the horrors of nuclear power.
  • L, composed by ICE and made into orchestral arrangements by gaQdan, is about an entity that threatens to destroy Heaven, only to find himself under the control of a boy in Heaven, soon taking over said boy and traveling down to the human realm. He then takes over the boy of a human boy, and the resulting efforts by the forces of Heaven end up triggering a catastrophic meteor shower that destroys the boy's hometown and everyone who inhabits it, including the human boy's parents. The full story can be found translated here.
• Post-Hardcore band Defeater has made it a trend to make each album a concept album, all which connect together as one story: The story of a struggling family in New Jersey after World War II. The band's debut Travels focuses on the younger son of the family who kills his alcoholic father after an argument, resulting with him fleeing home and traveling around the country, only to returning home to find his older brother waiting for him and to execute him due to his leaving causing more suffering to their family. This leads to a heavy Downer Ending, if you can say so.
  • The second concept album Empty Days & Sleepless Nights is actually more of the same story as the first one, but through the perspective of the older brother, showing him more of a Jerk Ass Woobie and even showing how his life was during the time his brother left.
  • Letters Home is also connected to the same family, being about the boys's father during his time in WWII.
  • Abandoned also connects to this trope, being about the priest the boy speaks to at the end of Travels, focusing on his own struggle.
  • Implications now hit that the band's self titled album will focus on the family's matriarch and her sinful role in their downfall.
• Melanie Martinez's "Cry Baby" is about a woman who comes from a dysfunctional family. After her mother murders her father, she falls for a boy but it's an unhealthy relationship and they break up. She falls for someone else but is uncomfortable with intimacy. When she finally invites him and friends to her birthday no one comes. This snaps something in her and she begins to become more confident while at the same time becoming less mentally stable.
• Stone Sour's House of Gold and Bones, is a heavy metal/alternative metal double concept album based on a four-part graphic novel of the same name, written by Corey Taylor (Lead singer of both Slipknot and Stone Sour), and illustrated by Richard Clark. The story follows a character called the Human, who wakes up in a surreal landscape which is later revealed to be a manifestation of his consciousness and life experiences and is directed by his doppelganger Allen to find the House of Gold and Bones before an event called The Conflagration happens, all the while on the run from Black John and his gang of Numbers.
• Transgender Dysphoria Blues by Against Me!, about Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Also a case of Write What You Know, since singer Laura Jane Grace is transgender, though some aspects of the album are fictionalised.
• Cult of Luna has Vertikal, an album based on Metropolis. Mariner, their collaboration with post-metal vocalist Julie Christmas, has a space exploration story inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey.
• The Ocean came out with Heliocentric and Anthropocentric, a two-part scathing critique of religion. The former is focused on history and the treatment of heretics by the church. The latter is focused on apologetics more.
  • Pelagial is another concept album, originally written as an instrumental depicting diving deeper and deeper into the ocean. When vocals were added, it became a metaphor of exploring the self through some Freud-like themes.
• Amplitude 2016's campaign mode tracks are an in-house concept album based around brain surgery, synesthesia, and nanotechnology.
• Hot Chip's 2010 album One Life Stand is broadly about love, relationships, companionship and looking for someone to settle down with and accompany you through life, hence the title (often in some odd directions; Thieves In The Night is somewhat cryptic but appears to be about dating and casual sex, while We Have Love seems to be from the perspective of a couple who have (or had) nothing else keeping them together beyond some vague notion of love.)
• Neil Cicierega's first two mashup albums, Mouth Sounds and Mouth Silence, runs on the concept that music can transcend time when given enough power. Both albums take place in a universe where Smash Mouth's "All Star" did not exist naturally. Mouth Silence takes place on May 3rd, 1999, and throughout the album there are very subtle hints that "All Star" (which, acroding to the double album's lore, existed in a parallel universe where it grew so powerful that it destroyed all other music) is trying to breach through the barrier between worlds. Mouth Sounds takes place the day after Mouth Silence, when "All Star" gained enough power to successfully author itself into the "Non-Star universe" (it is also the day "All Star" was released as a single in real life).
• Tall Tales Of Memoria by Project Trinity.
• Ghost Quartet by Dave Malloy.
• Nightwish's 2015 album Endless Forms Most Beautiful was inspired by the writings of Charles Darwin and contains mainly songs about evolution and the beauty and wonder of the natural world.
• The Magnetic Fields' 50 Song Memoir is a musical autobiography of main member Stephin Merritt, with each song telling a story about a year in his life from 1965, his birth year, to 2015, the year he turned 50 and started writing the album itself. The style of music also gradually shifts to reflect both changing technology and what Merritt's tastes were like at the time: The first few songs primarily feature acoustic instruments - electric guitars and early drum machines and synthesizers start appearing partway through the first disc of the album, and from there these elements start getting more prevalent.
• Reed & Caroline's Hello Science (2018) has a general "science" theme, with songs about such subjects as marine biology, early computers, outer space, and the scientific method itself.
• Vocaloid producer Kurage-P/Wada Takeaki has the 2018 album Watashi no Miseinen Kansoku (Diary of Underage Observation), a series of songs dealing with a group of (mostly) unconnected kids and the wide assortment of problems their school has. According to the album and accompanying comic, its main character is a girl reporting on "youth subject" incidents throughout the school year, and ends with her giving a summary of everything that happened while ending up saving the protagonist of the first track from committing suicide.
• NateWantsToBattle's Songs of Time is based on the soundtrack and story of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
• The Warning with their second album "Queen of The Murder Scene", which tells a story.
• Taylor Swift's reputation (2017), surprisingly. Its Central Themes include fame and celebrity, self-image, and the dangers of mistaking reputation for reality.
• Jarvis Cocker's Room 29, billed as "A song-cycle about a piano in a hotel room," centers around events from the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood, written from the point of view of the baby grand piano in Room 29.
• Kayo Dot has two definite examples in Coyote, a semi-autobiographical story penned by a friend of the band with terminal breast cancer; and Hubardo, an allegorical story about the sacrifices demanded to create True Art. Coffins on Io may be a third example.
• Nearly all of Tessa Violet's songs are about romance, but Bad Ideas takes this further by being a recounting of a romantic relationship that quickly slides downhill into emotional abuse, as well as the aftershocks this relationship left in the protagonist's mental state.
• Rosalía's second album, El Mal Querer (Spanish for The Bad Loving) tells the story of a woman trapped in an abusive relationship, and uses the various sounds characteristic of Flamenco Music to represent the different parts of the struggle (for example, the iconic claps are used to represent physical violence). It is also based on a 13th century novel titled El roman de Flamenca.
• Both Albums by Glass Animals are concept albums:
  • Their first album; ZABA, is based on the book The Zabajaba Jungle by William Steig.
  • Their second album; How to be a Human Being, tells the story of mostly unrelated characters, with each song representing one of the persons depicted on the album cover.
• Nine Inch Nails' untitled 'trilogy' of the EPs Not The Actual Events and Add Violence, and the album Bad Witch^note originally supposed to be an EP as well, but for marketing purposes was re-classified as an album despite being EP length deals with existentialism, the futility of finding the truth, and growing disgust with humanity.
• The Lumineers have two: their second album Cleopatra, which follows the life of an old taxi driver and her choices leading to the lonely life she leads at present; and their third album III, which focuses on a three-person family and the trials they had to face.
• Zach Callison's debut album, A Picture Perfect Hollywood Heartbreak, follows the story of a boy trying to deal with a bad breakup with his girlfriend, Juanita.
• Anaïs Mitchell's 2010 album Hadestown is a retelling of the Orpheus myth.
• Ice Nine Kills: all the songs in Every Trick in the Book (2015) are based on works of literature, whereas The Silver Scream (2018) is themed around horror films.
• Bedroom pop group The Scary Jokes' BURN PYGMALION!!! A Better Guide to Romance (2019) focuses on Jeanine, an journalist, dealing with her neuroses and reflecting on her relationship with movie star Sylvia, as she tends to the latter's country home.
• Bikini Bottom by Worthikids is a loving tribute to Ween's The Mollusk...by way of motifs from Spongebob Squarepants.
• David Bowie: ★ (2016) — Bowie's newfound awareness of his mortality in the wake of a liver cancer diagnosis, which would become terminal while promoting the album and kill him just two days after its release.
• Eminem:
  • Recovery is about Eminem's Career Resurrection, allegorised through a loose story about a broke, trailer-park rocker Shady being in a bunch of toxic relationships with women who can't resist how horrible he is, or women who are Allegorical Characters for the rap game/his fame who abuse him in a mutual Destructive Romance.
  • The Marshall Mathers LP 2 is about a mature (well, by his standards) Eminem/Slim being given another chance at life after being murdered by a Loony Fan for the fact he built a whole career on being a shitty person. He extends forgiveness to his abusive mother, empathises with the wife he had a Destructive Romance with, embraces his neurodivergency and advancing age, and ends with the conclusion that his Heroic Comedic Sociopath persona was only ever just the real him, for bad... but also for good.
  • Revival was conceived around the fact that Eminem had been sent a pop hook by a singer who had died after sending it to him (this hook appears on "Revival (Interlude)". The whole of the rest of the album is based around the idea of death, with Eminem reliving his old personas in turn, and the Album Closure clarifying that this is his past flashing before his eyes as he dies.
  • Kamikaze is an entire album of furious dissing of anybody and everybody who mocked his previous album Revival, his frustrations with mediocre modern hip-hop, Copycat Mockery of lame modern rap, and a love-hate letter to his own notorious Hair-Trigger Temper.
• Tuomas Holopainen's The Life and Times of Scrooge, based on Don Rosa's The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck.
• The Mechanisms almost exclusively wrote concept albums that told a full story based off of a classic folk tale or myth... in space! Once Upon a Time (in Space) took classic fairy tales like Literature/Cinderella and Snow White and set them in an intergalactic civil war. Ulysses Dies at Dawn retold the myth of Odysseus, aka Ulysses in a cyberpunk city, featuring other famous characters from Greek mythology. High Noon Over Camelot featured characters from Arthurian Legend in a Space Western. The Bifrost Incident set characters from Norse Mythology on an inter-dimensional train in space. The individual songs on the Mechanisms' non-concept-albums were also miniature stories set in the universes of their other albums or in the lives of the characters they played.
• We Lost The Sea:
  • Departure Songs (2015) was written in the wake of their vocalist's death by suicide two years prior. Each track is a tribute to a different failed heroic journey in history — the Terra Nova expedition and the death of Lawrence Oates ("A Gallant Gentleman"), a suicide mission during the Chernobyl disaster ("Bogatyri")^note While the three Liquidators were lionized as martyrs and folk heroes in Ukraine, it later turned out that the chain reaction scenario they were sent to prevent was not as bad as initially feared, and all three actually survived the mission. The band was not aware of this at the time the song was written, but have since declared that in an album about heroic stories, one happy ending isn't a bad thing., the death of scuba diver Dave Shaw during an attempt to recover the body of a fellow diver ("The Last Dive of David Shaw"), and the destruction of the Space Shuttle Challenger ("Challenger Part 1 - Flight" and "Challenger Part 2 - A Swan Song") — arguing that they did not die in vain, and that their deeds would be honored and remembered.
  • Triumph and Disaster (2019) is presented as a "post-apocalyptic children's story" about a mother and son spending one last day together in an Earth that has been destroyed by climate change and pollution.
• Will Wood's SELF-iSH is a concept album about reality vs the self.
• Prince Rama's 2012 album Top 10 Hits of the End of the World has the band "channeling" various Fake Bands of different genres who died during the apocalypse, with photos of the duo dressed as the fictional artists appearing in the artwork, and an official press release providing lore about each of the ten bands including how they were killed. Perhaps because it's packaged as a various artists compilation, there's also heavy use of Fading into the Next Song.

2000s

• Red Hot Chili Peppers' 2006 double-album, Stadium Arcadium, is arguably one of these. The band initially wanted to release three separate albums - titled Jupiter, Mars, and Venus, each with distinctive cover art - but decided instead to combine the first two and release the last one as a series of B-sides. The mood of the songs is mostly spacey and psychedelic, overlapping with the original celestial names of the albums.
• Arctic Monkeys' first album, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, was not intended to be a concept album; however, vocalist Alex Turner's lyrical subjects mainly deal with a night of partying and the adversity that one often faces while clubbing, leading it to be branded as one.
• Deltron 3030 is a hip-hop concept album about a sci-fi dystopian future where hip-hop has become a means of underground resistance.
• Opeth's Ghost Reveries portrays a man wandering about destitute and evading the law after murdering his own mother for Satan. It should be noted that not all of the songs relate to the concept ("Isolation Years" doesn't), but most do.
• David Bowie: Heathen (2002) — Portraits of a decaying society in the wake of the Turn of the Millennium and especially the September 11, 2001 attacks (Bowie claimed that the songs were all written pre-9/11, but admitted that the attacks heavily affected its tone).
• Mary and the Black Lamb's "As the City Sleeps."
• Kraftwerk's Tour de France Soundtracks=the titular bicycle race.
• Clive Nolan and Oliver Wakeman (son of Rick Wakeman) have made two concept albums based on literary works: Jabberwocky (based on the Lewis Carroll poem) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (based on the Sherlock Holmes novel).
• Songs from an American Movie, Vol. 1: Learning How To Smile by Everclear. The first half seeks to set up a relationship, from courtship and dating (a cover of Van Morrison's "Brown Eyed Girl", "Learning How To Smile"), to marriage ("The Honeymoon Song"), only to focus almost entirely in the second half on divorce and its effects: the initial shock ("Now That It's Over"), wistful remembrance ("Otis Redding"), finding someone new ("Unemployed Boyfriend"), and the effect on the kids ("Wonderful", "Annabella's Song").
• Mastodon's Leviathan makes Moby-Dick into pure win.
  • Crack The Skye tells the story of a paraplegic boy who uses astral projection and accidentally finds himself in the body of Rasputin the Mad Monk, who then gets murdered, so Rasputin's spirit has to help the boy protect his soul from the devil and return to his body. Though unlike with Leviathan, none of this is anything you'd necessarily pick up on without reading band inteviews.
  • And Blood Mountain, which is about climbing a mountain, and poop going crazy. If you think about it, every Mastodon album has been more insane than the last. Their debut, Remission isn't even a concept album.
• Avantasia's 2000s concept albums are the lighthearted high fantasy/church conspiracy combo in The Metal Opera and The Metal Opera Part II, and The Scarecrow, which is the first part of an ambiguous character drama about a self-destructive artist in the albums in "The Wicked Trilogy".
• Mike Watt's The Secondman's Middle Stand makes parallels between The Divine Comedy and Watt's real-life ordeal with a near-fatal perineum infection.
  • All of the songs in The Hyphenated-Man are inspired by figures in Hieronymus Bosch paintings.
• Hildegard von Bingen is a Latin-language album with downtempo electronic influences based on the compositions of a 12th century nun. It was released by Garmarna, a folk-progressive rock band from Sweden. Yup.
• Pain of Salvation's The Perfect Element I is about two disturbed people who find love within each other, and it ends badly.
  • Remedy Lane is a story of a childhood romance that is reawakened, but then dismantled because of broken pasts, adultery, and suicide.
  • Be describes a situation in which God becomes disappointed (to say the least) with his human creation and decides to "leave them to their own devices".
  • Scarsick continues from "The Perfect Element I", except now, the protagonist watches TV and feels bad about stuff.
• Iron Maiden's A Matter of Life and Death wasn't mean to be a concept album, but all the tracks are reflections on war, religion and death.
• Patrick Wolf is particularly fond of the concept album. His first album, Lycanthropy, centers on his childhood and adolescence.
  • His second, Wind in the Wires, is focused on his Cornish and Gaelic roots.
  • His third, The Magic Position is inspired by a relationship, and focuses on the theme of Love.
  • The Bachelor is one half of two albums that serve as a commentary on depression, inspiration and love. The Bachelor focuses on the first two, and Lupercalia (2011) focused on the latter two.
  • Even his singles have a tendency to wander into this trope, with both the "Tristan" and "Wind In The Wires" EPs featuring two B-Sides each that contribute to the Cornish/Gaelic feel of the aforementioned song's parent album (Although, rather thankfully, his latest batch of singles avoid this).
• The Lyre of Orpheus, by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, is a conceptual retelling of the Orpheus legend, as the name implies.
• Rabbit Junk's 2008 album This Life Is Where You Get Fucked. It's a three-part anthology of short concepts - The Struggle tells of three struggles for freedom from the 1940s to the present day, Ghetto Blasphemer tells of inner-city occult summonings and the havoc thus caused, and This Death is Where You Get Life tells of a city cyclist seeing revenge on the person who stole his bike. 2010's Project Nonagon continues each story.
• the Mountain Goats made more concept albums in the 2000's.
  • Tallahassee follows from Sweden, focusing on a different fictional couple.
  • All Hail West Texas is, as described by singer-songwriter John Darnielle, "Fourteen songs about seven people, two houses, a motorcycle, and a locked treatment facility for adolescent boys."
  • We Shall All Be Healed is about the songwriter's years as a teenage meth addict.
  • The Sunset Tree is about his physically abusive stepfather,
  • Get Lonely is about, well, loneliness.
  • The Life of the World to Come is "twelve hard lessons the Bible taught [Darnielle]".
• Defeater's debut album, "Travels", tells the story of an unwanted child trying to make his way in the world.
  • They've since taken this farther. Their follow-up EP "Lost Ground" tells the story of the homeless man that is met midway through "Travels" (an African American WWII vet) and their latest CD "Empty Days&/ Sleepless Nights" is the story of "Travels" from the older brother's point of view.
• Virgin Steele's The House of Atreus: Act I and The House of Atreus: Act II retell the story of the Oresteia.
  • Visions of Eden is a retelling of the legend of lilith from her perspective.
• The Duckworth Lewis Method by The Duckworth Lewis Method is a concept album about cricket.
• Cradle of Filth's Damnation and a Day is based on some interpretations of Paradise Lost , magnus opus of John Milton, and Godspeed on the Devil's Thunder centers on the life of Gilles de Rai. One could also fit Midian into this category, as the titular city is mentioned in every song, but the album lacks an overall story on the other hand.
• INRI by Psyclon Nine is all negative commentary on Christianity and the consequences of it.
• Saint Etienne's Tales From Turnpike House is a series of vignettes about a day in the life of the residents of a north London block of flats (which doesn't really narrow things down much, since nearly all of their music is about London in one way or another), including The Alcoholic Gary Stead (who turns out to be Drowning His Sorrows) and a couple played by Sarah Cracknell and David Essex arguing about leaving the city to go and live The Good Life. Their stories all eventually link up in the penultimate track, the epic "Teenage Winter".
• Britney Spears's Oops! I Did It Again is being yourself and loved as yourself, Britney is growing up and into your sexuality, In The Zone is sexuality and exploring it, Blackout is forgetting upsets and having a good time, Circus is a mix tape of a circus of sounds.
• Addicted to Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre's Twentieth Century by The World/Inferno Friendship Society is a concept album about, well, the life and times of Peter Lorre. It follows him from being a starving actor in Weimar-era Berlin, to fleeing to Hollywood where he hopes to make it big while struggling with a morphine addiction. The band's performed it live as a semi-musical several times, and has announced that their next album will also be a concept album: a punk version of A Prairie Home Companion.
• Coldplay's Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends, which is thoroughly cohesive and even cyclical but gives each song individual power, part of the reason it's probably the most pop-culturally viable Concept Album in years (the other part being that, rather than an exact story, the album is basically about the highs and lows of life). This coming from Coldplay of all bands blew everyone's mind and won them several Grammys. (Having Brian Eno be the producer for the album probably helped).
  • A Rush of Blood to the Head is a loose concept album about urgency and the quietude that often obfuscates it.
• Kamelot's ''Epica'' and ''The Black Halo'' are concept albums based on Goethe's Faust (the story that developed the modern interpretation of the Deal with the Devil).
• The Power to Believe by King Crimson.
• One by One by Foo Fighters was described by Dave Grohl as "11 tortured love songs", with a major theme of "surrendering to yourself", and a sequencing that described the difficult beginnings of falling in love, and then the relief of feeling comfortable in love.
  • For years people have talked about The Colour and the Shape being a "very loose" concept album about the lifcycle of a loving relationship.
• Rock Plaza Central's 2006 Are We Not Horses? is a song cycle about a race of six-legged mechanical horses being used as cannon fodder in the final battle between Heaven and Hell (and is a direct sequel to their earlier The World Was Hell For Us).
• Devin Townsend's Ziltoid the Omnicient album is about an alien overlord searching for the universe's ultimate cup of coffee.
• Placebo's Sleeping with Ghosts album is about relationships of all kinds, the soulmate-type relationships, the relationships with special needs,and the relationships that had a very bitter end.
• The Hazards Of Love by The Decemberists is about the romance between a young woman named Margaret and a forest-dwelling shapeshifter named William, threatened by William's adopted mother, the queen of the forest, and a murderous scoundrel called the Rake.
  • Also "The Crane Wife," in a looser sense, as an interpretation of the Japanese folk tale. This only involves the title tracks, as the rest are disconnected, self-contained narratives.
  • The 18-minute, five-part EP "The Tain", their take on the Irish epic The Cattle Raid of Cooley, also qualifies.
• Signify by Porcupine Tree tells a single story.
• Axis of Evil by Suicide Commando is essentially a condemnation of the Neoconservative foreign policy practices of the George W. Bush administration.
• Turisas' albums The Varangian Way and Stand Up and Fight tell the tale of Vikings who traveled through Eastern Europe, joined the Byzantine Empire and eventually died in the Battle of Manzikert.
• A Perfect Circle's Thirteenth Step is a concept album about addiction - even the one Cover Version ("The Nurse Who Loved Me", originally by Failure) fits with the overall theme.
  • Despite being a Cover Album, eMOTIVe also counts: All of the covers are of protest songs of sorts, specifically ones that could be considered relevant to the political climate of the US circa 2004 - it was even released to coincide with the 2004 US presidential election.
• The Fame by Lady Gaga is about becoming famous; similarly, The Fame Monster is about the fears Gaga faced while becoming famous.
• Lupe Fiasco's The Cool is a concept album, with all (or at least most) of the songs having the unified theme of, well, "Cool." Though he has a couple songs on there such as Gold Watch that show it in a positive light, for the most part, the album portrays it negatively, even comparing it to a disease in Streets On Fire.
  • In addition, some of the songs advance the storyline of "Michael Young History," who was the boy from He Say, She Say on his previous album, and later died and resurrected as "The Cool." The songs dealing with him show his rise and fall as a hustler, ending in betrayal and death.
• Adultery by Dog Fashion Disco tells the story of a serial killer with split personalities.
• Bomb the Music Industry!'s Get Warmer is a punk concept album about moving, being broke, and being unhappy in general. Surprisingly, it's quite happy. It's also free. http://www.quoteunquoterecords.com/qur013.htm
• Our Lady Peace has one with Spiritual Machines. It is an interpretation of The Age of Spiritual Machines by Raymond Kurzweil.
• Gorillaz have Demon Days (Album), dealing with modern culture and war.
• Both "Kezia" and "Fortress" by the band Protest the Hero.
• Avenged Sevenfold's album City of Evil, both by lyrical progression & thematic unity (tracks 1 through 5 are continuous, track six is a COMPLETE change in tone leaning Lighter and Softer, then from track 7 on we go Darker and Edgier until the penultimate track, and the album's final cut is a Moment of Awesome).
  • Nightmare should have been one about a young American disconnected from modern society and living various nightmares, with all the stories coming together at the end. Alas, the band's drummer Jimmy Sullivan died just before the recording, and the lyrics were changed to make it a tribute album to him instead.
  • The Stage is build around the themes of space, technology, artificial intelligence and nuclear warfare, with a very sci-fi-based storytelling, most notably in "Simulation" which is pretty much The Matrix : A7X Edition. The final track "Exist" spans a whopping 15 minutes and describes the Big Bang, the creation of Earth, the birth of humanity, and is concluded by a 3 minute speech from astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson.
• Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots by The Flaming Lips (despite Wayne Coyne stating that it isn't a concept album), concerns a diverse array of subject matter, mostly melancholy ponderings about love, mortality, artificial emotion, pacifism, and deception, while telling the story of Yoshimi's battle.
• The Love Below by OutKast, more specifically Andre 3000 (Big Boi's Speakerboxxx doesn't have an underlying theme).
• Abney Park's Lost Horizons follow the crew of the HMS Ophelia (an airship) as they travel around the world during a Victorian era that never was - mad scientists, exploring mysterious lands, airship pirates, strange science, and the joy and heartbreak of travelling abound. Later albums expand the concept further, most darkly End Of Days.
• Tomahawk's Anonymous features their interpretations of Native American songs, with a short version of a parlor song ("Long, Long Weary Day") serving as a coda. Their self-titled album has been speculated by fans to be a character study of a Serial Killer, but this has been neither confirmed or denied by the artists themselves ^note opening track "Flashback" seems to be about an abusive/neglectful childhood, possibly setting up a Freudian Excuse, and lyrical themes of crime, violence, and mental illness recur throughout the rest of the album.
• Sepultura recorded two albums based on other works, Dante XXI (The Divine Comedy) and A-Lex (A Clockwork Orange - though the former bandleader stated that the remaining members weren't even fans of it).
• Emilie Autumn has the album Enchant, about a faerie falling in love with a human and the resulting mess.
  • Opheliac is referred to as a concept album on her website. It's about madness in general, specifically Emilie's experience with it(she made the album as an alternative to suicide during a battle with depression). Several songs both on the main album and the bonus disc also deal with the exploitation of and problems faced by women.
• Green Day's American Idiot. Its lyrics feature several characters' names (or at least titles) that are sprinkled throughout the album, and the entire album has a distinct narrative quality. It can be hard to tell under the layers upon layers of Author Tract.
  • As well as the similarly-themed follow-up 21st Century Breakdown.
• Piano Magic's Artists' rifles is inspired by the First World War in both lyrics and music.
• Thirty Seconds to Mars have This Is War. It's all about war, pro and anti. Every song has something to do with conflict and rebellion. With such songs as "A Call to Arms" and "This is War", the meaning is clear. It makes sense when you realize the band fought a war of their own with the record industry in making this.
• Nine Inch Nails have Year Zero, which was about a future American dystopia, accompanied by an extensive ARG.
  • Broken, whilst an EP rather than an album, is also a concept piece, specifically about Trent's experiences working with TVT Records. Yep; "Happiness In Slavery" is not about sadomasochism, despite the rather prominent usage of sadomasochistic imagery.
  • Also, Ghosts. It's over two hours of purely instrumental music, using all sorts of odd sounds and beats.
  • The Downward Spiral is an album about a man's violent disillusionment with everything he holds dear (religion, love, etc.) and ultimately himself, culminating in a suicide attempt that may or may not have worked.
• The album And I Love H.E.R. by rapper Danny! (Daniel Swain) chronicles his love affair with hip-hop, which is personified as a woman.
• Razia's Shadow by Forgive Durden (and tons of guest vocalists from other bands) is a full-cast album musical following the allegorical story of a world split between light and darkness through the actions of a rebellious angel, and the forbidden love between a man from the "dark" and a woman from the "light" that is prophesied to reunite the two halves.
• A Grand Don't Come For Free by The Streets follows an individual who manages to misplace the titular sum of money in the first song. Over the album he meets a girl, has encounters with gambling and taking drugs, argues with the girl, goes on holiday, finds out the girl is cheating on him and loses the girl before the album offers two possible endings where 1. the protagonist angrily shuns his friends and gets into a fight with a TV repairman, winding up angry and miserable or 2. reconciles with a friend, finds the money he lost and meets another girl with the suggestions of a future relationship, but acknowledging that you cant wholly rely on others in tough times when they have their own problems to deal with.
• On Less than Jake's album GNV FLA, every song on the album is about life in Gainesville Florida.
• To The Bottom of the Sea by Voltaire is about a young tinker who goes to sea to make his fortune while fleeing social unrest in his homeland. The ship he is on ultimately sinks in a storm.
• The Liberty of Norton Folgate by Madness, based around the area of London where the band grew up.
• Mind.in.a.box's first three albums: Lost Alone, Dreamweb, and Crossroads, comprise a concept album trilogy. After the non-concept R.E.T.R.O., Revelations continues the story arc with the tracks "Transition and "Unknown".
• The Cruxshadows' Ethernaut tells the story of the fall of Troy from the Trojans' point of view.
• After Forever's 2004 album Invisible Circles, about a teenage girl growing up with Abusive Parents.
• The Hold Steady's 2005 album "Seperation Sunday" revolves around the drug fueled life and travels of lapsed-catholic teenager Hallelujah (Holly) and assorted others (Gideon, Charlemagne, etc.)
• E.S. Posthumus' Cartographer is about a map that was discovered in 1929 and the race of explorers that could have made this map.
• Camper Van Beethoven's New Roman Times is set in an alternate universe present-day United States, which parallels the country's political divisions in real life: The US has separated into two countries that are hostile to each other, the Christian right-wing Texas and the left-wing utopian California. The album follows an unnamed narrator who joins the army of Texas after a 9/11-esque terror attack. He returns disabled and disillusioned, eventually siding with California-based "rebels" and prepares to become a suicide bomber.
• Queens of the Stone Age's third album, Songs for the Deaf, is a concept album that shows their breaking into mainstream radio by using interludes before and after most of the songs that sound like the buzz of a station changing, along with a different DJ/radio personality talking before they play the song. One is completely in Spanish, as well.
• Say Anything...'s ...Is a Real Boy was originally intended to be a rock opera, complete with spoken-word interludes between the songs explaining the story's progression. This knowledge of the album's backstory makes songs like "I Want to Know Your Plans" all the more dimensional and profound. Tragically, the speaking parts were cut from the final album though the story remains the same and is briefly explained in the liner notes of the album:
  "The plot revolved around a moderately successful "indie/punk" rock band called Say Anything, fronted by 21-year-old Max Bemis, an idealistic, introverted singer/songwriter crippled by depression and anxiety and alienated by what he sees as a vast hypocrisy inherent in society. One night, a supernatural power "curses" Max with a mysterious affliction. The "curse" causes his innermost fears, fantasies, and thoughts to burst forth from his mouth at any given time in the form of fully arranged rock anthems. Max simply cannot control it: any time he feels a strong emotion, everything around him becomes a bizarre musical. Though Max's new powers at first seem only to frighten people, they soon cause the opposite effect as Say Anything becomes an accidental phenomenon. The blatant honesty of the lyrics as well as the freak-show appeal of a man physically unable to censor himself strike a powerful chord amongst the underground culture that one dismissed Max's music as "unsubstantial". Now, worshipped by rock-and-roll America as a Christ-like figure, Bemis sets out to use his powers to vanquish all hypocrisy. The proposed rock opera planned to chronicle Bemis' rise to power as well as his undoing by the fundamental flaw in the logic of every self-involved, impassioned rock singer. Whether capitalist America is "the enemy" or not, there is greed, duplicity and hatred in every human being, especially in the greatest hypocrites of all: the "entertainers" among us, whose need for attention fosters a sick dream that they alone hold the key to mankind's salvation. In the end, Max is left to fight "the man" with the corniest song he's ever written and the knowledge that accepting love and salvation lies within admitting he is nothing more or less than a human being."
• Franz Ferdinand tried their hand at this trope with Tonight: Franz Ferdinand (which was also a New Sound Album, but that's besides the point). Unlike most of the rest of the albums on the list, the concept is rather mundane (and ends up succeeding for it): it's about a drunk, debauched night on the town (most likely Glasgow).
• John Frusciante's third album, To Record Only Water for Ten Days, refers to the ten separate times during which he conceived the album and wrote all the songs for it. During the writing process, he claims that he envisioned his body as a tape recorder, with the water of music and life rejuvenating and cleansing him, and that imagery propelled the entire album.
  • His tenth album, The Empyrean, is about the collision of ancient and modern ideas of spirituality and how it is relevant to our daily lives.
• Arcade Fire's first three albums qualify:
  • Funeral is about aging, loss, and community.
  • Neon Bible is about religion/the apocalypse, with television and the ocean somehow recurring.
  • Anyone who needs the subject of The Suburbs explained deserves to be shot for literally incredible thickness (although in a somewhat unique twist, the album is not some kind of meditation on the subject from the outside but rather a "letter from suburbia," reflecting Win Butler's youth in that ultimate suburb—The Woodlands, Texas).
• Funeral for a Friend's Tales Don't Tell Themselves is a concept album about a guy called David who goes out in a boat and gets into trouble, being away from his family for several months with no means of contacting them. The lyrics take place from both his perspective, and that of his wife and young son who don't know what is going on. In an unusual move for a concept album the story isn't told in the correct order, rather it is chosen for flow. However, the sequence featuring "All Hands On Deck Pt 1: Raise The Sail", "All Hands On Deck Pt II: Open Water", and "Out Of Reach" is clearly in order and "Into Oblivion (Reunion)" is obviously the last part despite being the first track.
• The Mars Volta's album De-Loused in the Comatorium follows a young man overdosing on morphine and rat poison, enduring a week-long coma in which he sees vivid visions of mankind and his own psyche, and finally, committing suicide. The story itself is a bit of Truth in Television, as it's based on the life and death of Julio Venegas, a close friend of Mars Volta frontman Cedric Bixler-Zavala. Their second album, Francis the Mute, is also a concept album.
  • And of course, there's The Bedlam in Goliath, about the band's experiences with a ouija board.
• Local H's 12 Angry Months describes one year of emotions surrounding a breakup, including anger, sadness and moving on.
• Porcupine Tree's Deadwing is apparently a concept album, but what that concept actually is is something Steven Wilson is keeping to himself for now. He's apparently working on a film for it.
  • In Absentia is more definitely a concept album, about serial killers.
  • Additionally, "Lightbulb Sun" is a horridly depressing (and presumably autobiographical on Wilson's part) story about relationships dissolving as time passes.
  • Fear Of A Blank Planet and The Incident also focus on specific themes and stories.
• Tori Amos has created several concept albums, including Scarlet's Walk (the tale of a woman's trek across the country) and Strange Little Girls (a collection of covers of songs originally performed by men, redone from a woman's perspective).
• Sixx:A.M.'s album The Heroin Diaries Soundtrack is the soundtrack to Nikki Sixx book "The Heroin Diaries". Each song represents a chapter in the book.
• Hospice by The Antlers tells the utterly soul crushing tale of the doomed relationship between the narrator, a hospital worker, and the deeply troubled patient for whom he works as a home visitor. Suffice to say, things don't go well. An extraordinarily harrowing album about despair, pain and hopelessness, but through it all, love.
• Richard Thompson's 1000 years of popular music is an unusual take on the concept album, as he didn't write any of the songs. Instead, it's a history of popular music starting in the 11th century and ending with Britney Spears.
• Falling Up's album Fangs! tells the story of a man who journeys to another planet to investigate an attack on his home world. The prologue of the story is given in the liner material, but the actual story is...rather unclear.
• Armor for Sleep's What To Do When You Are Dead is a concept album that starts with the protagonist committing suicide by driving his car into a lake because he has issues with his girlfriend. The subsequent songs follow him as he, now a ghost, hangs around haunting said girlfriend and moping about how much it sucks to be dead before finally accepting his fate.
• The Thrice album "The Alchemy Index" was released in 2 parts of 2 volumes, and relates the 4 elements to music. Fire is the heavy album, water has a more electronic sound, air is light and the songs flow seamlessly, and earth is acoustic and bluesy.
• Wincing the Night Away by The Shins tells the story of a teenage Nietzsche Wannabe who falls asleep and enters an Alice in Wonderland-like dream world where he falls in love with a girl, to whom he tells his philosophy, ruining her outlook on life. Life Lessons ensue.
• Mayday Parade's A Lesson in Romantics, arguably.
• Cursive does this a lot.
  • 2000's Domestica was about the relationship between two characters named Sweetie and Pretty Baby. The album relates (almost directly) to events from lead singer Tim Kasher's divorce (though some concepts, like cheating, were added). The album ends rather ambiguously. However, according to Tim Kasher the couple in the story end up staying together, despite all their differences and the fighting.
  • 2003's The Ugly Organ tells the story of the lust, love, and empty sex throughout the "Ugly Organist's" life.
  • 2006's Happy Hollow revolves around the titular small, upper class, God-fearing town, with each track telling a different story of faults that those living in Happy Hollow portray that seem at odds with the town's "perfect" image. The final track, "Hymns for the Heathen", is an afterword of the album.
  • 2009's Mama, I'm Swollen depicts a middle-aged man full of failure and facing a hell of personal demons.
• Showbread's Anorexia and Nervosa are about a pair of identical twin sisters who take very different paths in life. Anorexia works with the sick and eventually founds a hospital. Nervosa goes to work at a slaughter house and becomes a stripper. Both come to the same end.
• Futureperfect by VNV nation is about the death of optimistic/idealistic visions of the future's prospects.
• Project 86's Truthless Heroes.
• Truth of the World: Welcome to the show by Evermore, is about media, propaganda and advertising, with occasional interludes by a trash-news type show that shares it's name with the album.
• Edge of Sanity's Crimson II continues the story of Crimson with the awakening of the tyrannical queen from the first album.
• Darren Hayes' third album, This Delicate Thing We've Made is a double album exploring the concept of time travel.
• Machina/The Machines of God, by The Smashing Pumpkins. Noted for its storyline being told through many outlets: the album, its only-released-via-the-internet sequel, its artwork, the band's Web site and cryptic flyers handed out at concerts.
  • Similarly, their album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness is a loose concept album about the cycle of life and death.
• The My Chemical Romance album The Black Parade is about a cancer patient who may or may not die at the end.
  • Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge may also qualify.
  • I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love is the twisty but understandable story of two lovers during a vampire invasion/attack.
• Dream Theater's Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory follows the story of Nicholas and the discovery of his past life, which involves love, murder, and infidelity as Victoria Page.
  • Interesting note: The "part one" in Metropolis Pt. 1: The Miracle and the Sleeper was tacked on as a joke. Part two was originally a twenty-minute song which would later be developed further into "Metropolis Pt. 2".
  • Octavarium also sort of counts, as it revolves around musical concepts: The first track is called "The Root Of all Evil, each track is in a progressively higher key, with the 8th track, called Octav[e]arium, is the same key as the first but an octave higher, there are interludes where the flats and sharps would be, etc. In addition, the artwork of the album also revolves around these types of numerical themes. Read more about it here.
• Chaos and Creation in the Backyard, by Paul McCartney. Notable because this album was immediately recognized as a concept album, but it took over a year for Paul's fans to learn what the concept actually was.
• How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb by U2.
• Duncan Sheik's Whisper House album is based around the concept of ghosts commenting (quite cynically) on the foibles and hardships of the living. It doesn't follow a strict narrative throughout, but a vaguely sketched cast of characters are introduced in the first song and followed up on in the final song.
• Shadow Gallery has a two-part (three planned) multi-disc epic with Tyranny and Room V. They detail a romance between two revolutionaries working to bring down a fascist government, but it turns out the female has peculiar strand of DNA which is vital to the operations of the system. Naturally, it's a bit of a Cliffhanger as of now.
• Semi-fictional example: Dethklok's Dethwater. The entire album was written for sealife, and was recorded in the Marianas Trench. Features such songs as "Go Into the Water" and "Murmaider" ("It's about mermaid murder.")
• King Geedorah's Take Me to Your Leader. Rapper Daniel Dumile (MF DOOM) takes on the persona of space monster King Geedorah, and the album is told through his alien perspective on humans... who he ultimately wishes to enslave.
  • In fact, most of Dumile's work qualifies. His first album, Operation: DOOMSDAY (released in 1999), chronicled the story of DOOM, a young college student turned Diabolical Mastermind after a scientific accident scarred his face (if that reminds you of anything, it's supposed to).
  • His next venture focused on Viktor Vaughn, a typical otaku b-boy from Latveria with a knack for technology and an ego the size of Michigan who is flung back in time to 1993 by one of his experiments.
  • In Madvillainy, DOOM reluctantly finds himself in a Villain Team-Up with miniature supergenius Madlib, while Viktor Vaughn swears revenge after DOOM steals his girl. DOOM's crime spree continues in The Mouse and the Mask, where he and his new partner, the deadly Danger Mouse, are sought by a Legion of Doom.
  • Judging from the fact that he adopts different personas for different albums, usually performs wearing a mask (or in shadow, with sunglasses, as Viktor Vaughn), and the fact that all of his characters have their own speech styles, mannerisms, and storylines, it's safe to say Daniel Dumile has a concept career. There's even a rivalry between two of his identities.
• Wolves in the Throne Room recorded a trilogy of concept albums from Two Hunters to Celestial Lineage, but especially given that the band haven't released lyrics from Black Cascade, fans still aren't entirely clear on what the concept is.
• Queensrÿche's Operation: Mindcrime tells the story of a somewhat-ethical mercenary who gets brainwashed by a charismatic terrorist leader into becoming an assassin.
  • This release is notable for being the first progressive metal album to meet mainstream success and for renewing the idea of the concept album in metal.
• Iced Earth's Horror Show is about the monsters and characters from various classic horror movies; The Glorious Burden is about various historical wars and battles (with a second CD of three songs an extremely long song in three parts about the Battle of Gettysburg), and Framing Armegeddon (Something Wicked Pt. 1) which tells the story of a world conquered by evil invaders and their 10,000 year hidden struggle against them. The Crucible of Man (Something Wicked Pt. 2) is the sequel to the former album and was released in 2008.
• Poets and Madmen by Music/Savatage has no narrative but is about an Abandoned Hospital and a famous photographer tormented by Post-Historical Trauma.
• Fear Factory's Digimortal album is about a society which creates clones of people, and transfers their soul and memories into them to prolong life. Includes at least one song from one of the clones in question.
• Alice Cooper released a trilogy of albums called the Brutal Planet/Dragontown/Eyes Of Alice Cooper trilogy (About life in a post-apocalyptic Crapsack World). He also released Along Came A Spider (About a serial killer who attempts to construct a spider out of the body parts of his victims).
• Akiko Shikata's Harmonia is built around the theme of the Classical Elements: the wind part (track 1 to 4) focuses on the feelings of traveling and flying in the sky; the fire part (5 to 8) has tense songs with heavy electric instrumentations and dark lyrics; the water part (9 to 12) contrasts it with soothing songs and light instrumentations; the earth part (13 to 15) has a "tribal dance" feel to it. Each part is introduced by a short interlude titled "Chouwa ~ something", all four of which form the first verse of Chouwa ~ Harmonia, the penultimate track. Harmonia ~ Mihatenu Chi he brings all this together in a joyful conclusion.
• Peter Gabriel's 2002 album Up deals with themes of birth and death (mostly death).
• The album Nigredo by Diary Of Dreams (a Dark Wave band from Germany) is a concept album with a story. It's about a person who discovers that he's actually a being called K'tharsia, who is also the fifth element necessary to create a deadly virus, the titular Nigredo, that would destroy most of humanity. At the end, he unites with the other four elements, leading to the plague outbreak. One of the following albums, Nekrolog 43, seems to take place into the world after the events of Nigredo. Not that you would know any of that without reading the booklets. Or even after that.
• The Canadian post-hardcore band Silverstein released their album A Shipwreck in the Sand in 2009, which follows an unnamed character who finds out his wife has been cheating on him with his best friend. The man then burns his wife's house down out of spite while she and their six-year-old daughter are inside, but upon realizing that he still loves them, he rushes into the burning building to save them. The wife presses charges against her husband, and wins custody of their daughter in prison. However, with lack of evidence to support that the husband had indeed burned the house down, the husband is released until the next day. The husband drives to a motel, and upon being faced with a heavy amount of jail time and realizing he can't survive without his family, commits suicide in his motel room.
• The Ocean has written Precambrian, a concept album about the entire geological history of the Earth.
• maudlin of the Well's Bath and Leaving Your Body Map may be one of the few cases to combine this with The Walrus Was Paul. For information, face of the band Toby Driver has stated that there is a puzzle buried in the music, lyrics, and packaging to the two albums. "The Secret Song", a subsequent release by the band, was intended to help unlock the puzzle. This was in 2001. As of 2019, no one has successfully figured it out.
• Karnivool's Sound Awake seems to have a clear emotional arc to its lyrics and several songs refer to similar concepts and phrases, so it has been interpreted as a concept album about its protagonist coming to grips with the hypocrisies and injustices in society, along with the emotional struggles inherent in doing so. The band has explained a couple of the songs, explicitly saying that the lead-off single "Set Fire to the Hive" is a "sonic call to arms" designed to remind listeners that living in a democracy gives them specific rights, and to challenge them to examine how much control they actually have over society and their own lives. Many of the other songs can be interpreted in a similar fashion.
• Eternal Kingdom by Cult of Luna has a fantasy narrative with a Direct Line to the Author claiming it was the diary of a mental patient institutionalised for murdering his family. This was later revealed by the band to be a hoax at the expense of music journalists. Somewhere Along the Highway is a concept album, too, challenging traditional gender roles and deconstructing many of the tropes inherent in society's assumption that Men Are Tough. The band's first three full-length albums may not be explicit concept albums but have some common themes about Sinister Surveillance and globalisation.
• Eminem:
  • The Marshall Mathers LP is about Eminem struggling with the obsessive parasocial relationships and moral panic caused by his rise to fame.
  • The Eminem Show casts him as a megalomaniacal Smug Super, addressing his recent gun violence charge, divorce, lawsuits, and tabloid-gothic personal problems.
  • The titular encore in Encore is Eminem committing a mass shooting before killing himself. The album is themed around the mental breakdown that led him to get up there, incorporating a lot of Celebrity Is Overrated, intentional Angst Dissonance, him repeating with, arguing with and contradicting himself in a wild variety of shifting voices and accents, and suicide imagery littered throughout the album art, including a suicide note on the CD label and a photo of Eminem with a gun in his mouth under the disc tray.
  • Relapse is about the misery of Eminem's drug addiction and the predatory, brutal nature of people's relationships with the famous, told through the metaphor of a Medical Horror-themed Slim Shady who stalks celebrities and disgustingly slaughters people while trying to get his next hit of prescription medication.
• Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota's 2000 album Momo Sampler is a picture of Argentina's society around the time it was done, with different characters from all the different walks of society being represented in every song, from the lower and indigent classes ("Una piba con la remera de Greenpeace", "Rato molhado", "La murga de la virgencita") to those in the middle class whose interests vary from the weird but innocuous ("Morta punto com") to the outright dangerous ("Sheriff", about a woman obsessed with what was called "gatillo fácil" and "mano dura"). The opener "El templo de Momo" even calls this version of Argentina's society a "murga".
• Bruce Springsteen's 2002 album The Rising is a strange example as it functions as a concept album despite many of the songs being written before the incident that inspired it (the September 11th attacks), but thanks to clever album sequencing, the context makes it seem like they can't be about anything but 9/11. For example "Nothing Man" was written in 1994 about a soldier or police officer wounded in the line of duty, but in the context of the album, it's easy to read the protagonist as a first responder. "Lonesome Day" is ambiguous enough that it could be about a breakup, or about grieving a loved one lost in the attacks. "Waitin' On A Sunny Day" was written before the attacks as well, but its theme of hope and optimism in the face of grim circumstances fits in well with the rest of the album. "My City of Ruins" was originally written about economic recovery in Springsteen's adopted hometown of Asbury Park, but it could just as easily apply to cleaning up the literal ruins of downtown New York.

1990s

• Frank Zappa released Civilization Phaze III just before his death in 1993. The album revolves around a group of people living inside a giant piano and commenting on the outside world, acting as an allegory for Zappa's impending death from prostate cancer, which was already terminal by the time it was detected in 1990.
• Darkest Days by Stabbing Westward was envisioned by the band as a four-act story, with each portraying a different emotional phase gone through after a break-up. The first act (tracks 1 through 4) is about sabotaging the relationship. The second act (tracks 5 through 9) is about lust, hope, and longing. The third act (tracks 10 through 12) is about hitting rock bottom after it is all over. The fourth act (tracks 13 through 16) is about recovery and self-respect.
• Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville. Each song is supposed to be an Answer Song to Exile on Main St., but it's hard to tell. As a whole, however, the album is about expected gender roles of women in the face of hypocritical societal expectations.
• The Last Temptation by Alice Cooper is about a bored young man who visits a circus sideshow run by the devil and ultimately faces off with him. Neil Gaiman wrote the graphic novel adaptation.
• Christopher Lee himself got into the spirit when he released his symphonic metal album Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross, based on the life of the Holy Roman Emperor. It, likewise, is awesome'.
• Mike Watt's Ball Hog Or Tugboat? had no over-riding lyrical theme, but musically it was all about collaboration: A different group of musicians played on each song, and usually someone other than Watt himself would sing lead vocals (Henry Rollins and Frank Black, for instance).
  • Contemplating The Engine Room uses an extended metaphor about The Navy to relate his family history and his years with The Minutemen.
• The Offspring's Americana is a sarcastic reflection on unhappy American lifestyles. The band did not set right away on this, but realized they had a theme after a few songs complaining about the US in the late 90s were recorded.
• Opeth's My Arms, Your Hearse tells the story of a man who dies and follows his lover around as a suspicious ghost.
  • Still Life tells the story of an atheist in medieval Europe who is banished from his home and returns years later to reclaim his lover, now a nun, only to see her killed and fly into an Unstoppable Rage; he is afterward promptly executed.
• Sepultura's album Roots is a bittersweet homage to their own country, Brazil.
• The Divine Comedy have done a few concept albums. Promenade is about two young lovers on New Year's Eve (and the songs are nearly all thematic connected with a water motif). Casanova examines how the titular character could exist in modern day society. A Short Album About Love is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
• Rush's 1990s concept albums are Counterparts and Roll the Bones. The latter is about chance and fate.
• the Mountain Goats' Sweden is a story about a fictional couple.
• Abducted by Swedish death metal band Hypocrisy, is an album about a man who is abducted by aliens and becomes a test subject until he dies (which is marked by a sudden Genre Shift into two Pink Floyd-esque Progressive Rock tracks)
• Pain of Salvation have Entropia, a story dealing with the personal and religious struggles of a family torn apart by war. One Hour by the Concrete Lake is about a weapons manufacturer who begins to realize the implications of his job.
• Less than Jake's Hello Rockview in which all the songs follow a general theme of growing up and leaving home. It helps that the lyrics sheet takes the form of a comic book, showing a man returning to his hometown and realizing that he no longer belongs there.
• Britney Spears's ...Baby One More Time is summer romances and youthful love.
• Blind Guardian has one based on The Silmarillion, titled Nightfall in Middle-Earth. It starts with the War of Wrath and then goes back to the Darkening of Valinor through the Nírnaeth Arnoediad.
• Christian Hard Rock band Resurrection Band (AKA Rez) released a Concept Album as their swan song. The album Lament follows a clear narrative of a man trying to find the good things in life on his own, getting increasingly cynical and weary, eventually breaking down completely. Fortunately, he finds the answers he was asking for in Jesus and the album winds down as he finally finds peace.
• Praise the Fallen and Empires by VNV Nation concept albums. Praise the Fallen is about the battle to direct the course of one's own life, Empires is about how people operate socially by creating metaphorical empires such as in-groups.
• Embryodead by the German electro-industrial project :wumpscut: is a concept album with a (surprise!) rather morbid concept; that it would be better to have died in the womb than to be born into this cruel, senseless world full of hate.
• WASP's The Crimson Idol - the story of rock star Jonathan Aaron Steel's tragic life journey from his abusive childhood to eventual onstage suicide "eight thousand lonely days of rage" later with eerie parallels with the life and death of Kurt Cobain. (The album was released in 1991, three years before Cobain's suicide.)
  • Every song on Kill Fuck Die is a different take on the theme of Interplay of Sex and Violence.
• Scatman John's debut album, Scatman's World is a concept album about both Scatman John's own rise from alcoholic to popstar, as well as being about the titular country, Scatland.
• Pink Floyd's The Division Bell is an exploration of breakdowns in communication.
• Cradle of Filth's Cruelty and the Beast revolves around the life of Elizabeth Báthory (subject of legends of vampirism and trying to obtain eternal youth by bathing in blood),
• Nine Inch Nails have The Fragile, which is all about desolation and has been described by Trent Reznor as bleaker than The Downward Spiral. The Downward Spiral was about a Nietzsche Wannabe realizing that by becoming one, he has (ironically) made his life pointless and kills himself. Ouch.
• Mansun's Six is their most complicated album, weaving all songs together into what is best compared to a progressive rock opera. (Although no fan of the album would dare call it that).
• Marillon's Brave is a story about a girl who was found on a bridge but wouldn't say anything to anyone. It's basically a Tear Jerker album.
• The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner by the Ben Folds Five.
• Savatage has several:
  • Dead Winter Dead tells the story of two young fighters in the Bosnian War, a Muslim girl and a Serb boy, who join their sides armies to fight for their homes, but eventually meet and run off together, realizing that the neither of them really want to fight. Dead Winter Dead is doubly remarkable as it takes place during Christmastime, and climaxes with a medley of traditional Christmas music performed in an energetic power-metal style. The song was ''Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24", which gave the band a mainstream hit and inspired the members to form the Trans-Siberian Orchestra (see below) which has produced a few concept albums of its own.
  • The Wake of Magellan, a tale about an old sailor who attempts to kill himself by sailing out to sea and not returning. Before he dies, he gets caught in a storm and finds a young sailor who was drowning. After rescuing him, he can no longer bring himself to commit suicide and returns to shore with the young sailor.
  • Streets: A Rock Opera tells of the rise and fall of rock-star "DT Jesus".
• Varg Vikernes (of Burzum and Mayhem) was essentially forced to make these while in prison: he was only allowed an acoustic guitar and a synthesizer to record with. The result was Dauði Baldrs. It not only directly told the story of the death of the Norse god Baldr, but also allegorically mourns the death of Norse pagan traditions at the hands of Christianity.
• YUP's Toppatakkeja ja Toledon Terästä (1994) is a concept album about singing detective Henri Blavatsky and his investigations on an evil family and a suspicious factory that stuffs mattocks and guilted jackets using dead people's hair.
• Kocorono by Japanese indie band Bloodthirsty Butchers is about a man struggling to come to terms with the end of his relationship with a woman. The song titles go through every month on the calendar (starting with February and ending with January) with the months/seasons reflecting the narrator's general feelings.
• Calling Ov the Dead (misspelling deliberate) by Velvet Acid Christ is about a serial killer brought back to life via nanotech to destroy all forms of order in society.
• Most of Kool Keith's discography.
• Freaky Chakra's Blacklight Fantasy has a sci-fi/cyberpunk theme. Cyberpunk Is Techno, no less. The previous album, Lowdown Motivator, had a psychedelic/spiritual theme and was trancier.
• Warfare's last full-length album Hammer Horror from 1990 has songs based on its namesake's films.
• Guess what type of songs comprise Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' Murder Ballads album?
• Marilyn Manson has three, which together, form a triptych, a three-part story with three separate main characters. The triptych was released in the order of Antichrist Superstar, Mechanical Animals and Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death)).
  • Antichrist Superstar is about a revolutionary figure named The Worm, who fights the establishment of his society, rising up from nothingness into a hero, before becoming sickened by the very people he is fighting for and their adoring and sycophantic nature, and turning on them, becoming the titular Antichrist Superstar and destroying all of reality.
  • Mechanical Animals is about an androgynous space alien turned rock star named Omega (pronounced O-ME-ga, who was forced to become a rock star with a special-made band, The Mechanical Animals, whose entire purpose is to preach hollow anthems. Omega becomes drug addicted and dead to the world, before being mentally enlightened by his own foil Alpha, who is only beginning to feel emotions. Alpha and Omega observe humanity, and view them as mechanical animals, feeling little emotions. Both of them are in love with Coma White, a woman who they are not 100% certain is even real. Omega comes to term with his emotions.
  • The protagonist of Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death) is Adam Kadmon, who lives in the city of Holy Wood. Holy Wood is a parable of America, with their creed of "Guns, God and Government", their worship of dead celebrities (called Celebritarianism) and their elevation of John F. Kennedy as a modern day Jesus Christ. Adam attempts to lead a revolution though music, but is taken into the fold and becomes another part of the machine. He falls in love with a woman called Coma Black, who may or may not be Coma White as well (more on that in a bit), and possibly impregnates her (that too) before killing himself. Finally, there is the interconnection.
    • One of the common theories goes like this. First, Coma White and Coma Black are the same woman. After the death of Adam Kadmon, she became addicted to drugs, and also had a son. This son is The Worm. Omega and Alpha both end up falling in love with Coma, but she ends up dying of a drug overdose (in the song Coma White). Omega falls into depression, becoming part of the society of Holy Wood, just like Adam Kadmon before him. The Worm grows up idolizing Omega, but ends up discovering what he has become. Killing Omega and becoming the third revolutionary to try to use music to bring about a change, The Worm becomes a hero to the masses, but their blind idolization sickens him. Turing on them, he becomes the Antichrist Superstar, bringing about the Apocalypse, taking everyone and everything with him.
  • And a review of his Greatest Hits Album states that it's rather ironic that "an artist who kept the idea of the concept album alive during the '90s, turns out to have a greater impact as a singles artist".
• Sting's "The Soul Cages" broadly tells a complete story, and several of the songs feature lyrics referring back to one another.
• OK Computer by Radiohead has been referred to as a concept album by their fans, despite Radiohead themselves saying this wasn't what they were trying to do. Of course, In Rainbows was explicitly stated by Thom Yorke to be an extension of OK Computer, drawing attention to shared themes and sonic patterns between the two albums...
  • Kid A is a slightly more clear-cut example, but not by much. Theories abound as to whether there's a story arc in the album; Thom Yorke even suggested that it was about the first human clone, but this has never been definitively confirmed.
• Amused to Death by Roger Waters, formerly of Pink Floyd, is about aliens visiting earth after the end of humanity and trying to work out what killed our species.
• Garth Brooks recorded an album in the persona of a fictional singer named Chris Gaines called In the Life of Chris Gaines. A mock Greatest Hits Album (yes, it really was called Greatest Hits), it was intended as a "pre-soundtrack" for a movie that ended up never being filmed.
• Lou Reed and John Cale did Songs for Drella together, a concept album that is essentially a biography of Andy Warhol. It's pretty accurate too.
• The Enid's Tripping the Light Fantastic is apparently about the relationship between science and society.
• Iced Earth has two released in the 90's: Night of The Stormrider which tells the story of a man who is betrayed by his religion and becomes, essentially, the anti-christ, and The Dark Saga about the Spawn comics (with cover art from Todd McFarlane)
• The Fear Factory album Obsolete is a concept album with a story that is like a cyberpunk version of 1984. The liner notes even fill in the gaps between the songs, tying them even closer together.
  • Slightly lesser-known is the prior album Demanufacture, about a man who hates the government machine and wishes to destroy it.
• The German punk rock band Die Ärzte released a concept album called Le Frisur, which revolves around... hair. It features songs like "Mein Baby War Beim Frisör" ("My Baby Went To The Barber"), where they sing about how their girlfriend's new hairdo is so horrible they have to end the relationship, or "Medusa-Man (Serienmörder Ralf)" ("Medusa-Man (Serial Killer Ralf)"), which is about a serial killer inspired by the mythical medusa who kills people using his hair.
• Edge of Sanity had Crimson. Crimson tells the story of a "miracle" child born in an era where humans have lost the ability to reproduce, who makes a Deal with the Devil to gain magic powers and becomes a tyrannical queen, who eventually is overthrown and cryogenically trapped in a tank of crimson fluid.
• Dirt by Alice in Chains is absolutely a concept album.
  • And that concept is consuming heroin. Not that its actually THAT obvious at least not in the more popular tracks (Dem Bones, Damn That River, Rooster). A good half of the album has at least some references to dying or wanting to die, being sick and generally being disconnected from the world. And then we have a bunch of songs that are just point blank about heroin, which tells you exactly what kinda sickness they are talking about. Most notably Godsmack (And god's name is smack to some) and Junkhead are just point blank about shooting up. It's cheery stuff.
  • Given that Layne Staley did actually die from heroin use, its possible that connections are made nowadays that weren't on Dirt's first release, at least not by fans, and certainly a lot of the reviews stating about it being about heroin were written post-Stayley's death which does somewhat cloud perception. Now that doesn't mean that there's a lot of thematic unity in terms of being a ground down and hopeless, and its generally accepted to be a concept album, but its hard to say if it's intended to be exclusively about heroin or addiction in general, or if addiction is just one facet of self-disgust.
• The Muppets had two during this period: Muppet Beach Party from 1993 and Kermit Unpigged from 1995. The former is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, while the latter revolves around the Muppets getting lost in a recording studio and meeting celebrities.
• Us, Peter Gabriel's 1992 offering, is about interpersonal relationships, especially ones gone wrong (inspired by Gabriel's divorce from his first wife, his failed romance with Rosanna Arquette, and his oldest daughter becoming more distant from him).
• The Neutral Milk Hotel album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is about the singer's mounting obsession with Anne Frank and her eventual death. The songs each flow into each other and many are reprises of previous songs.
  And I know they buried her body with others
  Her sister and mother and five hundred families
  And will she remember me fifty years later?
  I wished I could save her in some kind of time machine
• Front Line Assembly's Tactical Neural Implant is pretty much Cyberpunk: The Album.
• Lifter Puller's final LP, Fiestas + Fiascos, covers a nightclub arson and the events that lead up to it.
• Bolland & Bolland's Darwin - The Evolution, about the life and writings of Charles Darwin. ^note One could easily argue that the Bollands were trying to copy The Alan Parsons Project's formula here.
• The Seduction of Claude Debussy by The Art of Noise (a group headed by Trevor Horn) is about the life and works of Claude Debussy. Sound-wise, it combines Drum and Bass, electronica, breakbeat, and hip-hop with classical music. Vocally, it features soprano, rap, and spoken word narration.
• While not an outright one, all the songs on Nirvana's Nevermind tend to follow the general themes of teenage sexuality, loneliness, the madness that results from rejection, or an obsession over a girl.
• Meat Loaf's Welcome to the Neighbourhood (1995) tells the story of a couple's relationship from first meeting and having sex in "Where the Rubber Meets the Road" through falling passionately in love, infidelity, breaking up and the narrator's eventual death in "Where Angels Sing".
• Eminem's The Slim Shady LP is a concept album about his Heroic Comedic Sociopath Anti-Role Model alter-ego Slim Shady, his Dark and Troubled Past, and the poverty and abuse that made him as messed up as he ended up, as well as the concept of ordinary people's repressed dark sides in general.
• David Bowie:
  • The Buddha of Suburbia (1993) — Based heavily on the Hanif Kureishi novel of the same name, being put together from Bowie's soundtrack for the book's miniseries adaptation (to the point where it was misleadingly marketed as a soundtrack album despite only having one song that was actually in the show).
  • 'hours...' (1999) — Themes of reflection on a life long-lived in anticipation of the incoming end of the millennium.
• Coming Out of Their Shells (1990) — a Pizza Hut-sponsored Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles album that would later be adapted into a musical.
• Bersuit Vergarabat has Don Leopardo (1996), an album talking about the life and times of fictional character Don Leopardo Vir Thomsio. Only the first 15 out of the album's 18 songs qualify, though.
• Life Of Agony's River Runs Red. Three dramatic interludes interspersed throughout the album tell a story of a teen in a troubled home who gradually becomes Driven to Suicide. While not directly advancing the plot, the actual songs deal with similar themes of suicide, abuse, and alcoholism.

1980s

• Frank Zappa's concept albums during the 1980s: You Are What You Is (1980), Thing-Fish (1984).
• The Final Cut by Pink Floyd involves the strict schoolmaster from The Wall being haunted by his time fighting in World War II and his futile attempts to relate his traumas to his loved ones or warn his pupils of the madness of war, whie he watches the Falkland Islands War unfold. It also serves as an indictment of Margaret Thatcher and sums up Waters' feelings that she betrayed the "post war dream" of peace and goodwill soldiers like Waters' late father died to protect.
• Iron Maiden's Seventh Son of a Seventh Son.
• Rush's 1980s concept albums include Moving Pictures, Grace Under Pressure, Hold Your Fire, Signals, Power Windows, and Permanent Waves.
  • Signals focuses on the hang-ups of human communication. Power Windows is dedicated to discussions of money, charisma, and ambition. Grace Under Pressure is about war and death. Hold Your Fire is about spirituality and the human condition. Permanent Waves is about freedom of expression. Moving Pictures is about the triumph of the individual.
• Time, by Electric Light Orchestra, is about a man who is involuntarily brought to the future by time-travelers and shown "the wonders of [their] world."
• Pete Townshend's White City (featuring Floyd guitarist David Gilmour) explores working-class despair in the titular London borough and the emotional connection one feels to the place where they grew up, no matter how happy they were to leave it.
• Metallica:
  • Master of Puppets: Every song on the album is focused on the theme of "control" whether it's controlling someone else or being controlled by someone or something.
  • Ride the Lightning is similarly focused around the theme of "death", although that just might be because Metallica likes death.
  • And Justice For All is similarly themed around miscarriages of justice.
• The Enid's Something Wicked This Way Comes is about mental attitudes to the threat of nuclear war.
• King Diamond tells an All American Ghost Story divided between two albums, "Them", and Conspiracy. They are about a family living in a haunted mansion who gets a visit from their Grandmother, coming home from an insane asylum. She is constantly haunted by a group of spirits known only as "Them".
  • Then there's Abigail.
• Kraftwerk's Computer World is a concept album about a world run by computers... which pretty much has come true today!
• Misplaced Childhood, by Marillion, is a semi-autobiographical story about the singer growing up, establishing a career, and struggling to come to terms with losing his first love. The songs reference each other in their lyrics and musical motifs, and contain several Shout Outs to other artists who influenced the band.
• Blue Öyster Cult's Imaginos.
  • And nearly any BOC song co-written by Sandy Pearlman; even their name is drawn from Pearlman's poetry.
• Miles Davis spent the 80s releasing experimental albums that married jazz and 80s pop. In this fashion (particularly with Milestones and Bitches Brew), he invented several new variations on the jazz genre.
• Akina Nakamori's 1986 album Fushigi. Fushigi, in Japanese, means "strange" and that's a word that can best be used to describe the album. Nakamori had been one of the biggest idols in Japan at the time (along with Seiko Matsuda) but decided she needed a new sound if only for an album thus she enlisted the help of the band EUROX to create an album that would embody the title: straying from the tried and true pop/idol mold with densely layered and droning instrumentation combined with Nakamori's usually powerful voice being mixed and distorted so much as to sound like an echo blending into the music in what could best be described as what would happen if Cocteau Twins decided to make a J-Pop album.
  • While it reached number one it caused considerable controversy as many fans complained about not being able to hear the vocals. Nowadays it's usually regarded as one of her best albums and the one that signified her growth from just being an idol to a true musical artist.
• A Flock of Seagulls attempted this on their album The Story of a Young Heart.
• Music from "The Elder" is a concept album from KISS. It was also supposed to be the soundtrack for a movie that was never made. Even the band wishes the album had met the same fate.
• Neil Young's Trans is arguably a concept album exploring the collision, conflict, and melding of the traditional and the modern, nature and technology, man and machine. The album was inspired by Young's therapeutic exercises with his son Ben, who was rendered mute by cerebral palsy.
• Pink Floyd frontman Roger Waters went on to make more concept albums in his solo career. The Pros And Cons Of Hitchhiking is a recounting of a man's dreams through one night, where in he questions his life, marriage, and future — through the metaphorical journey of a hitchhiker. Radio K.A.O.S. is about a vegetative boy, Billy, who can hear radio waves and discovers his power to transmit them after his wrongfully incarcerated brother hides a stolen cell phone under the cushion of Billy's wheelchair. He then attempts to simulate World War III to scare the world's population into caring more about each other.
• Some of Jethro Tull's other concept albums are thematic not in the things they describe, but in the idiom in which they are described; examples, Broadsword and the Beast (using fantasy fiction as metaphor) or Under Wraps (spy thrillers as metaphors for interpersonal relationships).
• Alice Cooper's Flush the Fashion (Many songs appear to be commentaries on life in America circa 1980) and Special Forces (Several songs about war and its after-effects) also focus on a common theme, but likely are not considered "true" concept albums.
• Kate Bush's Hounds of Love. Side one is a collection of songs loosely arranged around the nature of love. Side two is more cohesive - a story about a woman lost at sea (and arguably dying) who has a dream flashback to a previous life and a visit from her future self.
• Warren Zevon did this once with his album Transverse City, describing a consumer-driven hell of a dystopian future.
• The Styx album Paradise Theater. Referencing a famous playhouse from Chicago notable for its grand architecture and sumptuous productions (the former making it a likely candidate for preservation as a historical landmark if it hadn't sadly predated that relatively modern phenomenon), the album uses the gradual fall into disrepair and eventual destruction of the theatre as a metaphor for urban flight, loss of culture, and societal decay.
  • Kilroy Was Here chronicles a future dystopia in which the Moral Music Majority bans all rock music. Kilroy, an outlaw musician, breaks out of jail disguised as a servant robot (featured in the single "Mr. Roboto"). The title is taken from World War II graffiti.
• Ein kleines bisschen Horrorshow (A little bit horrorshow) by german band Die Toten Hosen follows the plot of A Clockwork Orange.
• Similar to The Final Cut above, Punk Rock band Crass were inspired by The Falklands War to release a holistic critique of everything they saw as wrong with British society at the time, reflecting the band members' belief that all political struggles were interrelated (a concept referred to in academia as intersectionality). Reflecting this, Yes Sir, I Will was composed and performed as a single song with only a division between vinyl sides (and even this was cross-stitched on CD releases of the album); to this day it remains the longest punk song ever recorded. Reflecting the band's anarchist sentiments, the album's lyrics critique aspects of society such as religion, war, capitalism, sexism, government, police brutality, censorship, and punk itself. The album closes with an appeal to the listener to take direct action. Penny Rimbaud explained:
  The boundaries increasingly ceased to have any relevance — prior to The Falklands War, one naively believed that there were separations between 'this' and 'that' and that if you dealt with 'this' then you could do 'that'... like songs - each song had its own little separate thing to deal with and Yes Sir, I Will is a statement about the fact that there isn't any separation - that it's all one and the same thing, that there is no single cause or single idea — there's no-one else to blame but yourself. That you can't say, "Well let's now concentrate on the Northern Ireland problem", "let's now concentrate on the problem of sexual relationships"... you can't do that — everything now is one major problem and that problem stems from yourself.
• Daniel Amos, upon reinventing themselves as a New Wave Music band, embarked on an ambitious four-album concept series, The Alarma Chronicles, intended as a wake-up call for American Christians. The first album, ¡Alarma! (1981), was about the corruption of the Church—a scathing satire of Christians' shortcomings. Doppelgänger (1983) was about the corruption of the Self—a reflection and acknowledgement of one's own character flaws. Vox Humana (1984) was about the corruption of the World—an examination of the dehumanizing effects of materialism and new technology. And the final album, Fearful Symmetry (1986), was a vision of Heaven. A single story, in four parts, ran in the liner notes of each album, further tying all of them together.
• Eurythmics did a half-concept album, half-soundtrack for a filmed adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984). Tracks include "Room 101", "Doubleplusgood," "Sexcrime (1984)" and "Greetings from a Dead Man."
• Tears for Fears: The Hurting (1983) explores Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith's troubled childhoods.
• Kreator's Pleasure to Kill has each song featuring a way to die, according to Word of God.
• Mike Batt (creator of The Wombles band act, you surely heard?) "Zero Zero". Another Nineteen Eighty-Four adaption (1982).
• David Bowie: Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) (1980) — Themes of sociopolitical protest and change in the wake of the turn of a decade, Bowie's impending departure from RCA Records, and the Conservative Revolution in both the US and UK.
• R.E.M.: Fables of the Reconstruction (1985) is based around folk mythology from the southern United States.

1970s

• The ultimate concept double album just might be The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis. It comprises 23 tracks about a Puerto Rican juvenile's metaphysical journey in which he loses his brother (more probably his soul), is reborn, is castrated and gets his manhood stolen by a huge raven. This is after he meets, makes love to, kills (unwillingly) and eats a bunch of siren-like creatures. And those are only some of the highlights.
  • Also the albums From Genesis to Revelation (1969) and Selling England by the Pound (1973) by the same band could be considered concept albums (the former being about The Bible, and the latter being about English society and how much it's changed in the modern age).
• Frank Zappa's concept albums during the 1970s: 200 Motels (1971), Joe's Garage (1979).
• Pink Floyd:
  • Meddle (1971) could be considered this, and is officially described as a loose concept album, and fans say it is the direct precursor^note although Obscured by Clouds came in between the two to The Dark Side of the Moon.
  • The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) explores the external forces that drive a person, and in which could lead them to madness or obsession if they are not careful. A few of Floyd's other albums also fit the category:
  • Wish You Were Here (1975) (1975) was a musical ode to the group's ex-frontman Syd Barrett, who suffered Creator Breakdown in a big way after the band released its first album (though a few songs are about corruption in the music business instead).
  • Animals (1977) is a critique of capitalism, taking some (very loose) inspiration from Animal Farm and the Punk Rock movement.
  • The Wall (1979) follows the main character's Sanity Slippage and descent into drug abuse.
• Queen II by Queen, loosely. It has a "white" side consisting of emotional songs, and a "black" side consisting of dark fantasy. Additionally, each side contains a song with a queen of the corresponding colour in the title; and on a more meta level, the first side is primarily written by Brian May (except one song by Roger Taylor) and the second side is entirely written by Freddie Mercury.
• Rush's first concept album was Hemispheres.
• A very out-there example with Saga's The Chapters. This was an experiment that began in 1978 and ended in 1981. The Chapters are eight songs, all released across four different albums and out of order. But if played together, it chronicles the life of Albert Einstein.
• Band on the Run by Paul McCartney and Wings.
• The Kinks continued to enjoy success with concept albums during the early 1970s, with albums such as Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One, Muswell Hillbillies, Everybody's in Show-Biz. However, in the mid 1970s, they came to be seen as overindulgent excess on the part of Davies, transforming from coherent collections of songs connected by a loose theme into full-blown musical theater type productions with stories and characters that were difficult to appreciate out of context.
  • The massive Preservation project encompassed three LPs (Act 1, released as a single album, and Act 2, released as a double album); it was not well-received by critics and sold poorly. Follow-up albums A Soap Opera and Schoolboys in Disgrace met with a similar reception.
  • By the time the band changed labels from RCA to Arista in 1977, one condition of their new contract was that no more concept albums would be produced.
• Miles Davis' Bitches Brew album was an experiment with an abstract fusion of jazz and rock, heavily using electronic instruments.
• Blows Against the Empire, the first solo album by Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane was the first album released under the name "Jefferson Starship" (though the band itself wouldn't be formed for another four years), is about hippies going into space in search of freedom.
• The Tubes album Remote Control is about a TV-obsessed man who wants to know what the real world is like, but finds that life is harder than what television makes it out to be. The last songs of the album describe the man attempting to hook up with a woman he's fallen in love with, getting rejected, and then committing suicide because he can't handle the emotional stress.
• Steppenwolf came up with a few. Monster was a political statement about the times (1970). For Ladies Only was intended as a statement about feminism, but it didn't really come off that way. The cover art didn't help.
• Kraftwerk's Autobahn = highways, Radio Activity = radio and nuclear power, Trans-Europe Express = trains, The Man-Machine= robots.
• Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick is sort of a parody of the concept album; the album, a single 43-minute suite with only one track division (where one would have had to switch sides on the original vinyl release), is presented as being an epic poem written by a preteen boy from a country town, expressing his wangst about growing up British in The '70s. It was written because too many people kept calling the previous album, Aqualung, a concept album, so Ian Anderson wrote the completely over the top Thick as a Brick to show them what a concept album actually was.
  • The aforementioned Aqualung could be seen as two concept albums in one. The first LP side is a series of character sketches, and the songs on the second side have a pro-God, anti-Church message.
    • Word of God claims this wasn't the case, and that the mis-labeling of Aqualung as a concept album led Ian Anderson to write Thick as a Brick as a Stealth Parody of Concept albums.
  • A Passion Play is another, involving the afterlife and morality. A man dies (or at least has a near death experience), is judged worthy of being sent to Heaven, finds it mundane and too goody-goody to his liking, requests to go to Hell instead, but finds Hell equally mundane and too terrifyingly evil for his tastes. He opts to Take a Third Option on Earth, feeling "neither am I good nor bad".
  • As is the sadly underappreciated Songs from the Wood, a celebration of Celtic neopaganism and British folklore.
  • Many of Jethro Tull's albums have "themes", for example Heavy Horses could be seen as some sort of sequel to Songs From the Wood, this time centered more on modern British countryside living.
  • Too Old to Rock 'n' Roll: Too Young to Die! is conceptual, based on an aborted TV special, the concept being about an old rock star who is unable to adapt to modern trends.
• Donald Fagen's 1982 concept album The Nightfly is a look back at the world of the 50s and early 60s in which he grew up. This was later followed by Kamakiriad, a middle-aged man's odyssey by car, and Morph the Cat, focused on mortality with a side of dystopia — ending up as a concept trilogy spanning adolescence to old age.
• Willie Nelson's Red Headed Stranger is considered the first country music concept album. Its songs span the life of the eponymous Anti-Hero from fictional Blue Rock, Montana.
• The Enid's In the Region of the Summer Stars has a vaguely Tarot-related concept. The follow-up, Aerie Faerie Nonsense, is largely based on Robert Browning's poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came".
• Scottish folk/folk-rock singer Al Stewart has dabbled in the concept album, often dealing with historical themes such as European history 1918-1938 (Between the Wars). Albums such as Past, Present, and Future and Time Passages are a few examples.
• Spinal Tap's 1975 album The Sun Never Sweats was based around re-telling stories from British legend and mythology, and glorifying the British Empire. (The title track comes from Smalls' mis-hearing of the old saying 'The sun never sets on the British Empire'). Rather than being motivated by any artistic or political convictions, the band were just trying to cash in on the wave of nationalistic pride/chauvinism sweeping Britain at the time. ^note These are not real albums, but fictional in-universe albums from the movie.
  • The religion inspired Spinal Tap concept album 'The Gospel According to Spinal Tap' which prompted the review 'On what day did God create Spinal Tap and couldn't he have rested on that day also?"
• Rick Wakeman's The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, and possibly Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
• Lou Reed created Berlin, a concept album taking place in Berlin.
• Motel Shot by Delaney & Bonnie is an attempt to recreate the feeling of a late-night jam session on record.
• While not described as this, Madhouse by the Disco group The Silver Convention is suggested to be such by the liner notes written by co-producer Michael Kunze, who used the song titles to describe an All Just a Dream story by the protagonist. Apart from that, the four songs on side one are linked thematically, starting with the Title Track.
• That Supertramp's Crime of the Century is a concept album is not in debate (Word of God confirms this, for example), but is it about insanity or man's inhumanity against man, or just a story? Arguments can go either way on this.
• Gentle Giant had four, of varying themes:
  • The first was Three Friends, about three people who grow up in school together but are unable to understand each other when they diverge in their own careers.
  • In A Glass House is about types of people that should not throw stones.
  • The Power And The Glory tells the story of a Full-Circle Revolution.
  • Interview is an album full of songs about rock stardom, with periodic Studio Chatter between the members of the band and an "interviewer".
• Eldorado, by Electric Light Orchestra, involves a man who travels to the titular city in a dream.
• David Bowie had a lot of these in The '70s and even a few after that. Young Americans (1975) might or might not be one of the exceptions, but makes up for it by being a truly epic New Sound Album featuring some of the best blue-eyed Soul ever made. He also would write a Rock Opera with Outside in 1995.
  • The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972) — The tragic saga of a messianic rock star.
  • Aladdin Sane (1973) — The mental and emotional decline of a Ziggy Expy as he travels across America.
  • Diamond Dogs (1974) — Bowie wanted to mount a musical adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but he couldn't get the rights from Orwell's widow. Several of the songs he wrote for that project were incorporated with other songs to tell a tale of The Apunkalypse; the subsequent tour initially featured a huge "Hunger City" set to further carry out the theme.
  • Station to Station (1976) — The world of The Thin White Duke, a cocaine-addled European aristocrat who has a taste for fascism.
  • Low (1977) — Bowie's depression and recovery from the "Thin White Duke" period during his return to Europe (his previous two albums were recorded in the US: Young Americans in Philadelphia and New York, Station to Station in Los Angeles). It particularly reflects his withdrawal from cocaine and his attempt to become David Bowie again after five years of being somebody else.
• Emerson, Lake & Palmer produced at least two and arguably more (Tarkus and Brain Salad Surgery). Both are to do with war.
• Eagles' Desperado, with an Old West theme.
  • Hotel California is not only a concept album, it's an indictment of an industry and a lifestyle.
• On The Heart of Saturday Night, Tom Waits sings the otherwise unrelated stories of several people all passing through the same small California town in the middle of the aforementioned night. The cover art is something of a Shout-Out to Sinatra's In the Wee Small Hours.
• Alice Cooper released five concept albums during the '70s:
  • First was School's Out (Mostly songs about the teen experience), with the original band.
  • Then solo: Welcome To My Nightmare (About the nightmares of a disturbed man named Steven).
  • Goes To Hell (Alice is sent to hell and tries to convince the Devil he doesn't belong there).
  • Lace and Whiskey(Where he takes on the persona of a hard drinking PI from old movies).
  • From The Inside (About Alice's time spent in a mental institution trying to cure his alcoholism).
• Many of the Sesame Street cast's early albums revolved around an overarching theme. For example, Happy Birthday from Sesame Street (the cast celebrates the listener's birthday), Big Bird Leads The Band (the titular bird learns about how an orchestra works), The Sesame Street Fairy Tale Album (the cast gets together and tells fairy tales), What Time Is It On Sesame Street (a bundle of tracks about various times of the day) and Numbers (ten tracks about the numbers 1-10) — keep in mind that these were all in the same year. Leads The Band got a Spiritual Successor in the form of Elmo and the Orchestra (2001), where Elmo learns about how an orchestra works from Big Bird and a bird orchestra.
• Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell has central themes about youth, motorcycles and sex, while telling the story of a boy who dies in a motorcycle crash because he was too busy thinking about a girl to notice a curve, and thinks back on his life while he dies and gets condemned to Hell.
• Donna Summer:
  • Four Seasons of Love tells the story of a love affair through songs set in each of the four seasons.
  • Once Upon a Time has a loose storyline based on Cinderella.
  • I Remember Yesterday features songs which pastiche the music of the 1940s, 50s and 60s, with the second side featuring songs in a contemporary style, and concluding with "I Feel Love" representing the future.
• As well as making the aforesaid albums with Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder also produced a couple for Roberta Kelly: the astrology-themed Zodiac Lady, and an album of God-Is-Love Songs, Gettin' the Spirit.
• Although Moroder wasn't involved, members of his Production Posse were behind Dee D. Jackson's disco concept album Cosmic Curves which follows a woman travelling the galaxy in search of emotional connection in a future where such a thing is unknown.
• Yellow Magic Orchestra:
  • Yellow Magic Orchestra (1978) is a parody of western Orientalism, exotica music, and disco, commenting on the intersection of all three in the United States at the time.
  • Solid State Survivor (1979) is a proto-cyberpunk album (often called the Ur-Example for cyberpunk) based around portraits of technological advancement and abuse.
• Klaus Schulze's X is an album of six "musical biographies" evoking both contemporary and historical intellectuals whose works influenced the artist.
• Gryphon: Their 1974 album Red Queen to Gryphon Three is about a chess game. It helps that the tracks are named "Opening Move", "Second Spasm", "Lament" and "Checkmate".
• Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971) by Serge Gainsbourg, which was about an illicit romance developing between the middle-aged narrator and 15-year-old girl Melody Nelson. It is considered both his masterpiece and the zenith of French rock music.

1960s

• The most famous example is The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, released in June 1967, with the envisioned concept of a live performance by the fictional band, because the Beatles themselves no longer wanted to do live performances. Ironically, the end result is hardly a concept album; the concept of Sgt. Pepper's band is used only for the first two tracks and the reprise of the title track. (John Lennon admitted this in a 1980 interview.) It's more known for inspiring the concept of a concept album, even if the idea didn't quite survive in the final product.
  • Some theorise that Abbey Road is secretly a concept album. There isn't one big idea joining all the songs, but there are a lot of small lyrical and musical cross-references between them — a specific example is repeated references to royalty ("Her Majesty", "Mean Mr Mustard", "Sun King") and the medley on side two.
• Frank Zappa's concept albums in the 1960s: Freak Out! (1966), Absolutely Free (1967), Lumpy Gravy (1968), We're Only in It for the Money (1968), the latter being a scathing parody of Sgt. Pepper, right down to the album art.
• Sgt. Barry Sadler's Ballads of the Green Berets album is an album of songs about war in general and Vietnam specifically, many written or co-written by Barry himself.
• As they had both hippie and heavy metal periods, Spinal Tap's fictional back catalogue inevitably includes a couple of half-arsed concept albums: The band's second album, We Are All Flower People, included a set of tracks about a young man who dreams of wearing wings and flying, and plans to sell seats on himself to finance the project; when the album failed to sell, Tap's record label re-issued the album minus the original title track as the concept album The Incredible Flight of Icarus P. Anybody. (Derek Smalls claimed the idea was later stolen by 'you know Moody who'.)
• John Coltrane did this a lot (in fact, concept albums are part of the expected career path of any prominent jazz musician). Giant Steps was the pinnacle of Coltrane's developed style, "sheets of sound", while A Love Supreme was a four-part suite about Coltrane's spirituality, broken up by movement into the record's four tracks.
• Ray Davies of The Kinks was excessively fond of concept albums; practically everything recorded by the band between 1967 and 1976 was a concept album. This was an asset in their earlier days; the first few albums of this period were some of the most acclaimed music of the band's career (the ones released in the 1960s were The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, Arthur).
• The first few albums by The Moody Blues^note  First of the "core seven", anyway, ignoring 1965's The Magnificent Moodies. were all concept albums.
  • Days of Future Passed describes the passage of an average day, with each song representing a different time of day.
  • In Search of the Lost Chord chronicles a search for mystical enlightenment.
  • On The Threshold of a Dream explores the barriers between dreams and reality that exist within the human psyche.
  • To Our Children's Children's Children is about space travel; more directly, it attempts to chronicle the thoughts and feelings that would pass through the head of a typical space traveller.
• The oft forgotten S.F. Sorrow by the '60s British group, The Pretty Things. S.F. Sorrow tells the story of Sebastian F. Sorrow, who endures World War I, and then returns to his love, who is killed in a dirigible accident. Sorrow falls into a severe state of depression, and is then taken on a journey by the mythical Baron Saturday. The Baron throws Sorrow into a room of mirrors, where he sees the horrible truths and revelations of his life, ending with Sorrow secluding himself from society and building a mental and emotional wall. And this was ten years before Roger Waters had even thought of The Wall yet. Notable for being considered one of the first Rock Operas. Produced at Abbey Road, during the same time The Beatles were recording Sgt. Pepper's and Pink Floyd were recording The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
• Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis has a Spanish atmosphere and all the tracks' titles refer to the country in one way or another.
• The Who's The Who Sell Out, released the same year as Sgt. Pepper, is made to sound like a British pop pirate radio station of the time - complete with faux-ads for Heinz baked beans, the Charles Atlas course, and a London car dealership. The band would later take Concept Album one step further by starting the Rock Opera with Tommy and Quadrophenia.
• Japan's first concept album was by The Tigers, Human Renascence, and was entirely based on the concept of the Tigers dressing regally, so composers Koichi Sugiyama and Kunihiko Murai decided to make an entire album based on their image as royalty, complete with rather large orchestral arrangements, which made most of the songs notoriously difficult for the band to perform live.
• The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds and Smile, arguably. The first one is a cycle of songs relating to romantic relationships which can be seen to tell a story of infatuation leading to disillusionment (although Wilson denies there was a consciously intended storyline behind the songs, many critics and listeners have interpreted one as existing anyway), while the second one is apparently a psychedelic journey through American history and across the continent. Smile's Word Salad Lyrics don't really help much with discerning what the concept is beyond that, though.
  • Little Deuce Coupe is considered an early example of a concept album, as all the songs (save one) are about cars.
• Ark 2, the only album released by Flaming Youth (Phil Collins' first band) is about humanity evacuating into space because Earth is dying.
• Andy Williams' Under Paris Skies is a collection of English translations of French popular songs, with the exception of one song which he sang in iffily-accented French.
• The Baja Marimba Band's For Animals Only is a collection of songs like "Puff the Magic Dragon" and "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window".
• Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass' Whipped Cream & Other Delights is a collection of songs with titles that refer to food or drink.

1940s and 1950s

• The earliest example of a concept album so far is Dust Bowl Ballads (1940) by Woody Guthrie. All the songs are built around one narrative and one theme: the hardships of the local population during The Great Depression, specifically in Oklahoma, where both economic recession and dust storms hit everybody hard.
• Another early example is Frank Sinatra's In the Wee Small Hours from 1955. The songs, all ballads, were specifically recorded for the album, and organized around a central mood of late-night isolation and aching lost love, with the album cover strikingly reinforcing that theme. The centrality of lyrical theme and musical mood (rather than by a narrative like Dust Bowl Ballads) gives it a strong case for being the first concept album as currently understood. Since concept albums are most often associated with various rock genres (if asked, many will name The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band as the first of the kind, which is all kinds of wrong), people tend to ignore In the Wee Small Hours, making this trope Older Than They Think.
• Songwriter/arranger/producer Gordon Jenkins (who often worked with Frank Sinatra) recorded several "suites" (Manhattan Tower, California, Seven Dreams) in the 1940s and 1950s that mixed songs, instrumental passages and narration, which can be seen as early concept albums. Seven Dreams is best known now because Johnny Cash used one of its songs as the basis for "Folsom Prison Blues".
• "Milestones" by Miles Davis was an album-long experiment with modal harmonies.
• Time Out a 1959 Jazz release by the Dave Brubeck Quartet (the originators of the "cool" West Coast jazz so beloved of midcentury intellectuals), featured songs all in unusual time signatures. The first song, "Blue Rondo ala Turk" is in 9/8, played as "1-2-1-2-1-2 1-2-3". The third song, saxophonist Paul Desmond's famous "Take Five", is in 5/4. "Kathy's Waltz" is in 3/4, but the drums and piano solo are in 4/4. And so on.
  • Brubeck and Desmond continued writing stuff in this vein for a while, enough to make up two sequel albums, Time Further Out and Time in Outer Space, one of which features a composition by Desmond called "Eleven Four."
• Sun Ra, who started performing as early as 1934 but only gained notability from the late 1950s on, made many albums which mixed space travel imagery with Egyptian Mythology, like The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra. All of them are in that regard concept albums because they are built around the same theme.
• Duke Ellington's Black, Brown and Beige was, in Duke's own words, "a tone parallel to the history of the Negro in America." The studio album was released in 1958—and this was a truncated revision of an even longer "jazz symphony" that Duke performed live in 1943.
• The Four Freshmen often recorded albums centered around a musical concept, like Four Freshmen and Five Trombones, or a lyrical theme, like Voices in Latin and Voices in Love.

Older Than Radio

• Perhaps this is Older Than Radio and only needed recording technology to catch up with what was already there. An example from the 1830s is Hector Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique, which the composer quite explicitly wrote to chronicle the descent of one man (possibly an Author Avatar) into depression and suicidal despair for unrequited love of a woman. The first movement (track?) is a calm peaceful pastoral scene; the second a nightmarish stately ball where he glimpses the woman and falls in love as the waltz theme swirls out of control; the third a lonely melancholy walk; the fourth a "trial" of his sanity and his passage to the guillotine, having been found guilty; the fifth a macabre Dance of The Dead and Black Mass.
• This is indeed much older than the modern incarnation of albums. Before albums we had symphonies, concertos, sonatas and suites. Any one of those could revolve around a concept. They were at the very least pieces of music that went in a specific sequence and went well together, but may actually had concepts or stories to tell as well. Listen to Antonio Vivaldi's The Four Seasons (1720s!) or George Frederic Handel's Messiah (1740s). Suites in the more modern sense of the word (originating around the early 1900s) are probably the best precursor to the concept album. Unlike sonatas, concertos or symphonies a suite has no requirements on structure or instruments beyond having multiple pieces. Many suites were selections from ballets, plays, operas or even film, but they didn't have to be. Gustav Holst's The Planets (1920s) is just a collection of pieces about each planet in an astrological sense. Had it come two or three decades later it would certainly have earned the label of a concept album.

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