Trilogy

Palmer said it had more overdubs than any other ELP album, and Lake found it unusually hard to make because it was so precise. The title track and Abaddon's Bolero proved so difficult live that they were dropped early in the tour, and the band resolved that the next record would be playable on stage. It was Eddy Offord's last album as their engineer. Lake later named it his favourite of their records, and said the band often chose titles after the fact; the word trilogy is never sung on it.

Hipgnosis designed the cover, a single bust combining the three members, with a gatefold photomontage shot in Epping Forest; Salvador Dali had been approached but wanted $50,000. It reached two in the UK and five in the US and went gold in both. The Observer's Tony Palmer heard extraordinary bombast and Christgau gave it a C minus, but in 2015 Classic Rock's Philip Wilding called 1972 the band's high-water mark. That year's deluxe edition added a new stereo mix, a 5.1 mix by Jakko Jakszyk and a previously unheard version of From the Beginning.