History Main / ConceptAlbum

* DavidBowie's ''The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars''.
** ''Diamond Dogs'' was intended to be a musical adaptation of ''1984'', but Bowie couldn't get the rights from Orwell's widow. The song titles give the game away. Pretty much all of Bowie's albums from ''The Man Who Sold The World'' through ''Station To Station'' can be regarded as concept albums; ''Young Americans'' might or might not be an exception, but makes up for it by being a truly ''epic'' NewSoundAlbum featuring some of the best blue-eyed Music/{{soul}} ever made.
** As is his woefully overlooked and very creepy late 90s album, "Outside," which was actually supposed to be the first in a trilogy that didn't end up happening.

* ''A Grand Don't Come For Free'' by The Streets follows an individual who manages to misplace £1000 in the first song. Over the album he meets a girl, has encounters with gambling and taking drugs, argues with the girl, goes on holiday, finds out the girl is cheating on him and loses the girl before the album offers two possible endings where 1. the protagonist angrily shuns his friends and gets into a fight with a TV repairman, winding up angry and miserable or 2. reconciles with a friend, finds the money he lost and meets another girl with the suggestions of a future relationship, but acknowledging that you cant wholly rely on others in tough times when they have their own problems to deal with.

* ''Razia's Shadow'' by Forgive Durden (and tons of guest vocalists from other bands) is a full-cast album musical following the [[EveryoneIsJesusInPurgatory allegorical]] story of a world split between light and darkness through the actions of a rebellious angel, and the forbidden love between a man from the "dark" and a woman from the "light" that is prophesied to reunite the two halves.

* ''Addicted to Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre's Twentieth Century'' by The World/Inferno Friendship Society is a concept album about, well, the life and times of PeterLorre. It follows him from being a starving actor in Weimar-era Berlin, to fleeing to Hollywood where he hopes to make it big while struggling with a morphine addiction. The band's performed it live as a semi-musical several times, and has announced that their next album will also be a concept album: a punk version of ''APrairieHomeCompanion''.

* TheDecemberists have The Hazards of Love.

* Janelle Monae's ''Metropolis'' is a set of concept [=EPs=] that deal with a RobotGirl's tragic love for a human. The first, "The Chase", was released in 2007, and the next three are upcoming releases.

* Rock Plaza Central's 2006 ''Are We Not Horses?'' is a song cycle about a race of six-legged mechanical horses being used as cannon fodder in the final battle between Heaven and Hell (and is a direct sequel to their earlier ''The World Was Hell For Us'', OrSoIHeard).

* Another example dating back to the 1950s was ''archy and mehitabel'', based on the poems of Don Marquis. It became the Broadway musical ''Shinbone Alley'' (co-written by MelBrooks) in 1957, which was made into an animated movie in 1971. (The ConceptAlbum and movie both featured the voices of Carol Channing and Eddie Bracken; the Broadway production had Bracken in the cast but replaced Channing with Eartha Kitt.)

* The InsaneClownPosse have spent the better part of their career doing a concept album ''cycle'' - the Dark Carnival. The concept was that the first six (later seven) albums ("the Joker Cards") were harbingers of TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt, to be revealed one by one. The last two albums, ''The Wraith'' and ''Hell's Pit'', were based around {{Heaven}} and {{Hell}} respectively. They returned to this concept in 2009, with ''Bang! Pow! Boom!'', about a continuous explosion which cleanses evil souls from the carnival grounds.

* Savatage's ''Dead Winter Dead'' tells the story of two young fighters in the Bosnian War, a Muslim girl and a Serb boy, who join their sides armies to fight for their homes, but eventually meet and run off together, realizing that the neither of them really want to fight. They also have ''The Wake of Magellan'', a tale about an old sailor who attempts to kill himself by sailing out to sea and not returning. Before he dies, he gets caught in a storm and finds a young sailor who was drowning. After rescuing him, he can no longer bring himself to commit suicide and returns to shore with the young sailor. ''Streets - A Rock Opera'' tells of the rise and fall of rock-star "DT Jesus".

* {{Coldplay}}'s ''Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends'', which is thoroughly cohesive and even cyclical but gives each song individual power, part of the reason it's probably the most pop-culturally viable ConceptAlbum in years (the other part being that, rather than an exact story, the album is basically about [[SlidingScaleOfIdealismVsCynicism the highs and lows of life]]). This coming from ''Coldplay'' of all bands [[CrowningMusicOfAwesome blew everyone's mind]] and won them several Grammys.

** Most of their albums also feature lyrical themes, sometimes to the point where one wonders if they're not a Concept Band (if there is such a thing).

* The Who's ''The Who Sell Out'', released the same year, is made to sound like a British pop pirate radio station of the time - complete with faux-ads for Heinz baked beans, the Charles Atlas course, and a London car dealership.

* ''OK Computer'' by Radiohead has been referred to as a concept album by their fans, despite Radiohead themselves saying this wasn't what they were trying to do.

* Blue Öyster Cult's ''Imaginos''.

* Jethro Tull's ''Thick as a Brick'' is sort of a parody of the concept album; the album, a single 42-minute suite with only one track division (where one would have had to switch sides on the original vinyl release), is presented as being an epic poem written by a preteen boy from a country town, expressing his {{Wangst}} about growing up British in TheSeventies. It was written because too many people kept calling the previous album, ''Aqualung'', a concept album, so Ian Anderson wrote the completely over the top ''Thick as a Brick'' to show them what a concept album actually was.

* Lou Reed and John Cale did ''Songs For Drella'' together, a concept album that is essentially a biography of Andy Warhol. It's pretty accurate too.

** ''Diamond Dogs'' was intended to be a musical adaptation of ''1984'', but Bowie couldn't get the rights from Orwell's widow. The song titles give the game away. Pretty much all of Bowie's albums from ''The Man Who Sold The World'' through ''Station To Station'' can be regarded as concept albums; ''Young Americans'' might or might not be an exception, but makes up for it by being a truly ''epic'' NewSoundAlbum.

** ''Diamond Dogs'' was intended to be a musical adaptation of ''1984'', but Bowie couldn't get the rights from Orwell's widow. The song titles give the game away. Pretty much all of Bowie's albums from ''The Man Who Sold The World'' through ''Station To Station'' can be regarded as concept albums.

** Not Cave's first concept album either. Guess what type of songs comprise the [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin Murder Ballads]] album, for example.

**Also "The Crane Wife," in a looser sense, as an interpretation of the Japanese folk tale.