Best Side Two Album Closers: How Great Albums End

Closing an album is harder than opening one. An opener must grab attention; a closer must earn and justify everything that preceded it. The greatest closing tracks do not merely end a record — they complete it, transforming a sequence of songs into a unified experience whose meaning only becomes fully apparent in its final moments. In the vinyl era, side-two closers carried particular weight: the last sounds before the needle hit the run-out groove, the final impression an album left in the listener’s mind. These are the tracks that demonstrate how the art of the ending is its own discipline.

The Resolution

Some closers provide resolution — the emotional or thematic payoff that the album has been building toward. “A Day in the Life” closes the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) with a composition that synthesizes the album’s ambitions — McCartney’s domestic vignette, Lennon’s surrealist narrative, orchestral chaos, and a final piano chord that sustains for over forty seconds, gradually fading into silence and then a brief loop of studio chatter. The chord’s sustained decay is itself a metaphor for ending — the slow resolution of everything the album has accumulated.

“All I Need” closes the main sequence of Radiohead’s In Rainbows (2007) — though “Videotape” follows as the actual final track — with a bass pulse that builds through sustained piano, orchestral swells, and glockenspiel into a climax of overwhelming emotional force. The track’s arc, from whispered confession to full-orchestra catharsis, enacts the album’s larger movement from intimacy to transcendence. “Videotape” then provides the true closing, its solo piano and faltering vocal returning the listener to earth.

“Eclipse” closes The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) with a choral crescendo that summarizes the album’s themes — everything under the sun is in tune, but the sun is eclipsed by the moon. The track resolves into the same heartbeat that opened the album with “Speak to Me,” creating a circular structure that implies the cycle of anxiety the album describes will repeat endlessly.

The Devastation

The most powerful closers are often the most devastating. “Decades” closes Joy Division’s Closer (1980) with six minutes of synthesizer-driven desolation, Ian Curtis’ vocal rising from a murmur to something approaching a cry of anguish. Given Curtis’ death before the album’s release, the track’s lyrics — “We knocked on the doors of hell’s darker chamber” — carry a weight that transcends the merely musical. It is one of the most harrowing closing tracks in recorded music.

“The Tourist” closes OK Computer (1997) with a deliberate deceleration — Jonny Greenwood’s chiming guitar, Thom Yorke’s plea to “slow down,” and a final bell strike that functions as both musical punctuation and metaphorical warning. After an album of anxious velocity, the closing track’s insistence on slowness is itself a resolution.

“The National Anthem” does not close Kid A — that role belongs to “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” a brief, devastating track built on a pump organ and Yorke’s vocal, processed to sound as though transmitted from a great distance. The track’s ending — a sustained chord that fades into silence, followed by several seconds of near-inaudible ambient sound — is one of the most carefully designed conclusions in modern rock.

“Street Spirit (Fade Out)” closes The Bends (1995) with an arpeggiated guitar figure that circles endlessly, Yorke’s vocal pleading “immerse your soul in love” over one of the band’s darkest arrangements. The song’s title tells you what it does — fades out — and the fade itself is the point: the song does not end but diminishes, as though the despair it describes simply recedes below the threshold of hearing.

The Transformation

Some closers transform the meaning of everything that preceded them. “Her Majesty” — the hidden track at the end of Abbey Road (1969) — undercuts the album’s operatic grandeur with twenty-three seconds of acoustic simplicity. But the true closer, musically, is the Abbey Road medley’s final moments: “The End,” with its drum solo, triple guitar exchange, and the couplet “And in the end / the love you take / is equal to the love / you make” — a statement so simple it either transcends or collapses under its own weight, depending on the listener’s disposition.

“Shine a Light” closes the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. (1972) with a gospel-influenced track that recontextualizes the album’s preceding chaos — the drug haze, the sexual excess, the loose, almost dissolute musicianship — as a search for spiritual redemption. Whether the redemption is achieved or merely yearned for is left ambiguous.

“Hurt” closes Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral (1994) with a startling vulnerability. After an album of industrial aggression, distorted vocals, and nihilistic fury, Trent Reznor strips everything away — acoustic guitar, quiet piano, a vocal of naked fragility — for a track that examines the wreckage that the album has documented. The contrast between the album’s overwhelming noise and the closer’s quietness is itself the emotional climax. Johnny Cash’s famous cover extended the song’s reach, but within The Downward Spiral’s context, “Hurt” is a structural masterstroke.

The Continuation

Some of the most effective closers refuse to provide resolution, instead suggesting that the album’s emotional or narrative arc continues beyond the final track. “European Son” closes The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967) with nearly eight minutes of amplified noise and feedback, the song’s opening dedication to Delmore Schwartz giving way to a sustained assault that feels less like an ending than an exit — the music doesn’t stop so much as the listener leaves the room.

“The Diamond Sea” closes Sonic Youth’s Washing Machine (1995) with nineteen minutes that move from song to extended guitar improvisation to pure noise to something approaching silence. The track’s duration — nearly half the album’s total — redefines the album’s proportions retrospectively, and its final minutes of quiet, shimmering feedback suggest a music that continues whether anyone is listening or not.

The Quiet Exit

Sometimes the most effective closing is the simplest. “I Know It’s Over” does not close The Queen Is Dead — that role belongs to “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others,” a joke that is also somehow moving, Morrissey’s final words on the album being a punchline that conceals genuine tenderness.

“Pink Moon” closes Nick Drake’s album of the same name (1972) with thirty seconds of unaccompanied vocal and piano — the briefest track on an already brief album, its extreme concision functioning as a final distillation. Everything inessential has been removed.

“Lucky” closes The Bends — no, “Street Spirit” does. But Radiohead’s closing track decisions are consistently instructive. Hail to the Thief ends with “A Wolf at the Door,” a track of paranoid spoken-word that refuses resolution, and Amnesiac closes with “Life in a Glasshouse,” a New Orleans jazz-funeral that transforms the album’s electronic coldness into something warmly human at the last moment.

The Craft

Great closing tracks share a quality of inevitability — when they arrive, they feel like the only possible ending, even if the listener could not have predicted them. This inevitability is the product of careful sequencing, thematic development, and the understanding that an album is not a collection of songs but a journey, and that the destination matters as much as the route. The best way to experience these tracks is in context: listen to the full album, arrive at the closing track having traveled the distance the artist intended, and notice how the ending changes everything that came before it.