Pink Moon is the third and final studio album by the English musician Nick Drake, released in the UK by Island Records on 25 February 1972.

Pink Moon, like Drake's previous studio albums, did not sell well during his lifetime, and its stripped-back, intimate sound received a mixed response from critics.

In 1971, he saw a psychiatrist and was prescribed antidepressants, which he was reluctant to take due to the stigma associated with depression and his fears concerning the medication's interaction with marijuana, which he smoked regularly.

"[5] Drake appeared to have made a decision before recording his third album that it would be as plain as possible and free of the numerous guest musicians that had been employed on Bryter Layter.

[8] After a brief hiatus in Spain spent at a villa belonging to Island Records' head Chris Blackwell,[9] Drake returned to London refreshed.

In only two late night sessions, with just his voice and acoustic guitar, Drake created what is considered by many to be one of the "most influential folk albums of all time".

So we ran off a safety copy to actually play, and I think twenty four hours later or so, it was put on the Reevox in the main room and we heard Pink Moon.

The recording, less than a minute long and featuring guitar with no vocals, was eventually included as a hidden track on UK editions of the Nick Drake compilation A Treasury (2004).

Island's creative director Annie Sullivan, who oversaw the shoot, recalled the difficulty in making a decision around the cover of the LP: "I remember going to talk to [Nick], and he just sat there, hunched up, and even though he didn't speak, I knew the album was called Pink Moon, and I can't remember how he conveyed it, whether he wrote it down ... he wanted a pink moon.

"[5] Island picked a piece of surrealist Dalí-esque art by Michael Trevithick, who was incidentally a friend of Drake's sister Gabrielle.

[citation needed] David Sandison stated that he found the original framed artwork for Pink Moon in among the debris of the basement room that Island later allocated to him as his office, and he took it home and hung it on the wall of his house for several years, before eventually presenting it to Drake's parents.

"[18] In the London edition of Time Out, Al Clark observed that Drake "writes striking and evocative songs and always has done, but most of the magic is in the delivery: a smoky, palpitating voice, reminiscent of the jazzier Donovan, gliding wistful words over the chord changes and creating moments of perfect stillness".

Clark stated that "several of the more substantial songs are very lovely", but concluded presciently, "Sadly, and despite Island's efforts to rectify the situation, Nick Drake is likely to remain in the shadows, the private troubadour of those who have been fortunate enough to catch an earful of his exquisite 3am introversions".

[19] Reviewing the album in the October 1972 issue of Creem, Colman Andrews described the songs as "not awfully good" and "weak", and that the music was "a triumph of style over sententiousness, of sound over sense" with "a lulling repetitiousness to a lot of what he sings", but that this was the point: "he knows precisely what emotional limits to impose upon his self-accompaniment.

Martin Aston of Q noted in 1990 that "the mood is even more remote [than Drake's first two albums] with – finally – a defeated strain in both throat and words, but several of his most elegant melodies".

The truth is that Pink Moon's excellence shines through, irrespective of the endless speculation [regarding Drake's state of mind during the making of the record and subsequent death].

[31] Critic and author Ian MacDonald, a contemporary of Drake's at Cambridge University, stated in Uncut that "what remains clear is that this is one of the premium singer-songwriter albums, nearly every one of its 11 tracks a timeless classic".

[29] Rolling Stone's Anthony DeCurtis observed that "by the time of these sessions, Drake had retreated so deeply into his own internal world that it is difficult to say what the songs are 'about'.

"[32] Three years later in the same magazine, James Hunter said of the 2003 North American reissue "The album unleashes a dramatic starkness and some breathtakingly pretty music".

[26] AllMusic's Ned Raggett wrote in his retrospective review that "Pink Moon more than anything else is the record that made Drake the cult figure he remains.

It's only then that the bone-dry resonance of the guitars registers as slightly alarming, and the backdrop of silence suggests both the purity of Drake's vision and also something darker: like someone who has dropped out of the world, mumbling prophecies ...

[43] Bethany Klein, a professor in the Department of Media and Communication at the University of Central England states, "The role of 'Pink Moon' in the success of "Milky Way" was interesting, in that it both added to the artistry of the commercial and was also protected by the visual artistry of the spot: because the ad 'worked' (it was an aesthetic success) the usual negative discourse surrounding the use of popular music in advertising was, if not stopped, at least reduced and accompanied by positive appraisals ...