The Piper at the Gates of Dawn | Ummagumma | Atom Heart Mother | Meddle | Obscured by Clouds | The Dark Side of the Moon
Wish You Were Here | Animals | The Wall | The Final Cut | A Momentary Lapse of Reason | The Division Bell | The Endless River
- Awesome Music: "Not Now John" is probably the only song on the album unanimously liked by anyone, mainly because it's one of their hardest songs.
- Broken Base: You can find just as many people, fans and critics alike, who label The Final Cut as Pink Floyd's best album as you can find people who label it as their worst. It's also one of their lowest-selling post-Dark Side releases.
- Fanon: Though Roger Waters has never confirmed or denied this, many fans believe that the Title Track is a Fully Absorbed Finale to The Wall, told once again from Pink's perspective. This is due to the implication where the song's narrator mentions "tell[ing] you what's behind the Wall" before the word is muffled by a gunshot sound effect. As a result, fans cling to the theory that Pink began to seek therapy and help for his problems after a failed suicide attempt.
- Franchise Original Sin: The album was criticized, by David Gilmour, especially, for reworking material rejected from the previous album, though this was hardly the first time Pink Floyd had done so. "Dogs" and "Sheep" were from Animals were based on tracks that were dropped from Wish You Were Here. Reworking songs rejected from previous albums is par for the course for many artists.
- Harsher in Hindsight: Post-9/11, someone screaming "Get your filthy hands off my desert!", followed by a plane flying over and an explosion being heard can be eerily prophetic and disturbing.
- Never Live It Down: The album is infamous for its credit, "By Roger Waters, Performed By Pink Floyd."
- Tear Jerker:
- "The Final Cut". Especially if you've attempted suicide or had suicidal thoughts.
- "The Gunner's Dream," which is the dying thoughts of a warplane gunner as the plane plummets to the ground.
- They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
- Much of the reason for its divisiveness is because of how different the sound of the album is to the rest of the band's discography, going for a more simple style with less instrumentation and more focus on the lyrics. Wikipedia even refuses to classify it as Progressive Rock, marking it down as art rock instead (that said, the site also treats The Wall as an art rock album first and a prog rock album second, but they at least called it prog in some capacity).
- The anti-war message was also poorly-received by the British public in light of the jingoistic mood in the wake of The Falklands War, similarly to how the Dixie Chicks angered Americans in the run-up to the Iraq War with anti-war messages two decades later. While public opinion would later turn against the Iraq War, the Falklands conflict had enough popular support that Thatcher's party rode it to a Landslide Election the year this album was released. Meanwhile, the Falklands conflict was simply irrelevant to the American public, who found the album's message overly preachy.
- Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Critics, fans, and the other members of Pink Floyd have criticized the album for Roger Waters' relentlessly bleak lyrics, stating that the overbearing darkness of the album makes it difficult to stay invested. This is the album where one of the songs ("The Fletcher Memorial Home") is basically just listing off politicians Waters didn't like (every single one of whom are now dead, rendering the song extremely dated). It's also one of the band's lowest-selling post-Dark Side releases.
- Unintentional Period Piece:
- "Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert" references several geopolitical hotspots in the early '80s: The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, the war in Lebanon and The Falklands War.
- "The Fletcher Memorial Home" references many politicians. Some of them, like Leonid Brezhnev and Joseph McCarthy were already dead at the time of recording. Haig had stepped down as Secretary of State in 1981, while Begin would do the same in 1983, the year this album was released. As of 2014, with the death of Ian Paisley, all the politicians referenced in this song have died, making the song extremely dated.
- Waters' lyrical attacks on Margaret Thatcher all through the album and the fear of nuclear war in "Two Suns in the Sunset" date The Final Cut to the early '80s.
- Vindicated by History: When it first released, the album hugely polarized fans and critics and became the band's lowest-selling album since their pre-The Dark Side of the Moon days. While its hair-splitting certainly hasn't dissipated altogether since 1983, it's at least cooled down in the album's favor to a noticeable degree, particularly after the retroactive addition of "When the Tigers Broke Free" from Pink Floyd -- The Wall in 2004 and Roger Waters' performances of songs from the album in solo shows. The fact that Waters' solo album Amused to Death ended up being a Spiritual Successor to The Final Cut and saw its own positive reappraisal at around the same time also worked in this record's favor. Retrospective reviews have praised the quality of Waters' songwriting on the album, and the growing relevance of its anti-jingoism message in the age of The War on Terror have led many to view it in a much better light.
