Houses of the Holy

The band took the Rolling Stones' mobile studio to Mick Jagger's Stargroves in April 1972, with Eddie Kramer engineering. Page and Jones had both installed home studios, so they arrived with finished arrangements: Page's complete version of The Rain Song and the layered Over the Hills and Far Away, and Jones's reworked No Quarter. The rest was written in jam sessions. Further recording took place at Olympic in May and at Electric Lady in New York during the 1972 North American tour, where a set of rock 'n' roll covers was cut and remains unreleased.

The Song Remains the Same began as a Page instrumental called The Overture, with a working title of The Campaign. The Rain Song came from Page's home studio after George Harrison complained that the band never did ballads, and its opening chords match Harrison's Something. The Crunge was written by Bonham from a Stargroves jam and parodies James Brown. Bonham combined reggae with 1950s doo-wop to make D'yer Mak'er, which Jones disliked. The rest of the band vetoed a UK single, but in the US it became a top 20 hit. The title song was left off and released on Physical Graffiti in 1975, along with The Rover and Black Country Woman. Walter's Walk waited for Coda.

The cover is a collage of photographs taken by Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis at Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland, using two child models, Stefan and Samantha Gates. It was inspired by Arthur C. Clarke's novel Childhood's End. The band had fired Storm Thorgerson after his first design, which showed a tennis racket. It is the only Led Zeppelin album with complete printed lyrics.

Gordon Fletcher in Rolling Stone called it one of the dullest and most confusing albums he had heard that year, but it topped the UK chart, spent 39 weeks on the Billboard 200 including two at number one, and ranked number four on Billboard's 1973 year-end albums chart. The RIAA gave it a Diamond certification in 1999. Rolling Stone ranked it 149th in 2003 and 278th in 2020. Pitchfork's Mark Richardson called it perhaps the band's most impressive album on a purely sonic level.