10 Dark Horse Albums By Legendary Bands

Everything about Rush's rise to fame feels like it shouldn't really work on paper. After making some of the more adventurous prog rock on albums like Fly By Night, this Canadian trio was asked to make more radio-friendly songs, only to get famous anyway off the strength of the massive concept album 2112. Once they earned their right to be weird though, they really went down the rabbit hole on A Farewell to Kings.

Whenever you think of your typical prog rock album, something like this would normally come to mind, complete with songs about lofty tales of the Middle Ages and a weird 11 minute odyssey entitled Xanadu. Then again, this record actually shows the real pop appeal of Rush coming into sharper focus across its runtime. Being influenced by other prog acts, there's much more of a keyboard presence on this album as well as one hell of a single in Closer to the Heart, which became one of the band's more celebrated hits.

As for the rest of the album though, this deserves to be way more than just a stop gap, with the Cygnus-X1 suite being just the tip of the iceberg for the even more proggy musings that would surface on the next album Hemispheres. This might not be the most user-friendly of Rush albums to listen to, but what we have on display here is still some of the strongest prog rock you'll find in the '70s...or any decade for that matter.