Fleetwood Mac: Future Games (Rhino Reserve series, Start Your Ear Off Right 2026) [RHINO]

Why you'll love it

This Rhino Reserve pressing was cut from the original analog masters by Matthew Lutthans at The Mastering Lab, pressed on 180g vinyl at Fidelity Record Pressing and dressed in the original yellow cover with red lettering. Future Games was the first album with both Christine McVie as a full member and guitarist Bob Welch.

This edition

• Rhino Reserve series
• 180g vinyl
• Cut from the original analog masters
• Original yellow cover with red lettering
• Stereo mix

About the album

Long before Rumours, Fleetwood Mac spent a few years quietly reinventing themselves, and this is where the soft-focus California sound first peeks through. Bob Welch was living in Paris when the band's secretary, Judy Wong, put his name forward; after a few days at the band's communal house in Hampshire, he was in.

Recorded at Advision Studios in London in the summer of 1971, the album trades the old Chicago blues for long, dreamy, melodic jams. Danny Kirwan's "Woman of a Thousand Years" and "Sands of Time" are beautifully played, Welch's eight-minute title track drifts like a warm fog, and Christine McVie's "Morning Rain" and "Show Me a Smile" hint at the songwriter who'd help take the band to the top of the charts a few years later. Kirwan, by all accounts, was a stickler in the studio and wanted every take played perfectly, start to finish.

Future Games did better in America than any Fleetwood Mac album before it and went gold there in 2000. That's 29 years to gold, a show of patience we rather admire and rarely see at our till.

Also at Kops: more Fleetwood Mac on vinyl · browse Rock

Tracklist

Listen

On Reprise / Rhino (cat# RES1 6465), a reissue of the 1971 album.