Meddle is the sixth studio album by the English rock band Pink Floyd, released by Harvest Records on 5 November 1971 in the United Kingdom.

As with several previous albums, the cover was designed by Hipgnosis, and has been explained by its creator Storm Thorgerson – who was unhappy with the final result – to be an ear underwater.

[5] At the time, EMI was equipped only with eight-track multitrack recording facilities, which the band found insufficient for the increasing technical demands of their project.

They transferred their best efforts, including the opening of what became "Echoes", to 16-track tape at smaller studios in London (namely AIR, and Morgan in West Hampstead) and resumed work with the advantage of more flexible recording equipment.

They also spent several days at AIR attempting to create music using a variety of household objects, a project which would be revisited between their next albums, The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) and Wish You Were Here (1975).

[12] New 2016 stereo and 5.1 mixes of the album were inadvertently released as hidden tracks on the Reverber/ation Blu-ray disc in The Early Years 1965–1972 box set.

[14] The largely instrumental "One of These Days" is followed by "A Pillow of Winds", which is distinguished by being one of the few quiet, acoustic love songs in the Pink Floyd catalogue.

The title of "A Pillow of Winds" was inspired by the games of Mahjong that Roger Waters, Nick Mason, and their wives Judith Trim and Lindy Rutter played while in the south of France.

fans in the Anfield Kop singing club anthem "You'll Never Walk Alone", which brings the song to an end in a heavily reverberated fade-out.

"San Tropez", by contrast, is a jazz-inflected pop song with a shuffle tempo, written by Waters in his increasingly deployed style of breezy, off-the-cuff songwriting.

First performed as "Return of the Son of Nothing" on 22 April 1971 in Norwich,[18] the band spent about three months on the track in three studios (Morgan, AIR and EMI).

[17] Storm Thorgerson of the art-design group Hipgnosis originally suggested a close-up shot of a baboon's anus for the album cover photograph.

[35][36] Meddle was certified gold by the RIAA on 29 October 1973 and then double platinum on 11 March 1994, following the added attention garnered by the band's later successes in the United States.

"[46] Ed Kelleher of Circus called it "another masterpiece by a masterful group", noting "Fearless" as "fascinating" and praising "Echoes" as "a tone poem that allows all four band members much time to stretch their muscles".

In his critique of "Echoes", he believed the vocal melody imitates "Across the Universe" by the Beatles but over 23 minutes of music that flows with a "timeless calm" similar to "Interstellar Overdrive".

[39] Daryl Easlea of the BBC felt it was a similar, but more consistent and tuneful version of Atom Heart Mother, highlighted by "Echoes", which he said "dominates the entire work" and is "everything right about progressive rock; engaging, intelligent and compelling".

[49] In The New Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), Rob Sheffield said "Echoes" showed Pink Floyd to be a more developed group than before, "coloring the slow guitar ripples with deep-in-the-studio sonic details that only the truly baked would notice, much less appreciate.

"[45] Writing for AllMusic, editor Stephen Thomas Erlewine called Meddle the best album from their transitional years leading up to The Dark Side of the Moon, as it "spends most of its time with sonic textures and elongated compositions, most notably on its epic closer, 'Echoes'".

He noted a "uniform tone", but not song structure, and wrote of the album's significance in the band's catalogue: "Pink Floyd were nothing if not masters of texture, and Meddle is one of their greatest excursions into little details, pointing the way to the measured brilliance of [The] Dark Side of the Moon and the entire Roger Waters era.