The cover, conceived by the bassist and lead songwriter, Roger Waters, and designed by their long-time collaborator Storm Thorgerson, shows an inflatable pig floating between two chimneys of Battersea Power Station.

By 1975, Pink Floyd's deal with Harvest Records' parent company, EMI, for unlimited studio time in return for a reduced percentage of sales had expired.

That year, Pink Floyd bought a three-storey block of church halls at 35 Britannia Row in Islington, north London.

[6] "Raving and Drooling" and "You've Got to Be Crazy", songs previously performed live and considered for Pink Floyd's 1975 album Wish You Were Here, reappeared as "Sheep" and "Dogs".

[9] Whereas the novella focuses on Stalinism, the album is a critique of capitalism and differs again in that the sheep eventually rise up to overpower the dogs.

[9][10] The album was developed from a collection of unrelated songs into a concept which, in the words of author Glenn Povey, "described the apparent social and moral decay of society, likening the human condition to that of mere animals".

Rotten since said this was a joke; he was a fan of several progressive rock bands, including Magma and Van Der Graaf Generator.

In 1977, Mason produced the Damned's second album, Music for Pleasure, at Britannia Row, after they failed to entice the retired Syd Barrett to the role.

[13] In his 2008 book Comfortably Numb, Mark Blake argues that "Dogs" contains some of Gilmour's finest work; although he sings only one lead vocal, his performance is "explosive".

Of the song's three pigs, the only one directly identified is the morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse, who is described as a "house-proud town mouse".

[16] "Sheep" contains a modified version of Psalm 23, which continues the traditional "the Lord is my shepherd" with words like "he maketh me to hang on hooks in high places and converteth me to lamb cutlets".

Described by the author Andy Mabbett as "in stark contrast to the heavyweight material between them",[18] the halves were influenced by Waters' relationship with his then wife.

Hipgnosis, designer of the band's previous album covers, offered three ideas, one of which was a small child entering his parents' bedroom to find them having sex: "copulating, like animals!

At the time, he lived near Clapham Common, London, and regularly drove past Battersea Power Station, which was approaching the end of its useful life.

[citation needed] Inclement weather delayed work, and the band's manager Steve O'Rourke neglected to book the marksman for a second day; the balloon broke free of its moorings and disappeared from view.

[29] Animals became the subject material for the band's In the Flesh Tour, which began in Dortmund on the same day the album was released.

The size of the venues was also an issue; in Chicago, the promoters claimed to have sold out the 67,000-person regular capacity of the Soldier Field stadium (after which ticket sales should have been ended), but Waters and O'Rourke were suspicious.

[32] The end of the tour was a low point for Gilmour, who felt that Pink Floyd had achieved the success they had sought and that there was nothing they could look forward to.

[33] In July 1977 – on the final date at the Montreal Olympic Stadium – a small group of noisy and excited fans in the front row of the audience irritated Waters to such an extent that he spat at one of them, which he later said he immediately regretted.

[34][35] Waters later spoke with the producer Bob Ezrin and told him of his sense of alienation on the tour, and how he sometimes felt like building a wall to separate himself from the audience.

[citation needed] NME called Animals "one of the most extreme, relentless, harrowing and downright iconoclastic hunks of music to have been made available this side of the sun",[46] and Melody Maker's Karl Dallas described it as an "uncomfortable taste of reality in a medium that has become in recent years, increasingly soporific".

[48] Critic Mike Cormack said "Shorn of the lush textures of Dark Side or Wish You Were Here, Pink Floyd here are forbidding, stripped-down and muscular.

[nb 7] In an April 2020 interview, Waters said he had pushed for the release of a remixed and remastered vinyl of Animals by James Guthrie, but that it had been rejected by Gilmour and Mason.