Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
MusicHound
Pitchfork Media	9.2/10
Robert Christgau	B+
Rolling Stone	(favorable)
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
Smash Hits	9/10

Tusk is the twelfth album by British/American rock band Fleetwood Mac. Released in 1979, it is considered experimental, primarily due to Lindsey Buckingham's sparser songwriting arrangements and the influence of punk rock and new wave on his production techniques. Widely noted in the 1979 press for costing over $1 million to record (equivalent to $3,300,000 in 2016), it was the most expensive rock album made up to that point. Compared to 1977's Rumours which sold 10 million copies by March 1978, Tusk sold four million copies. Because of this, the album was regarded as a commercial failure by the label.

The band embarked on a 9-month tour to promote Tusk. They travelled extensively across the world, including the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Japan, France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and UK. In Germany they shared the bill with reggae superstar Bob Marley. It was on this world tour that the band recorded music for the Fleetwood Mac Live album, which was released in 1980.

The album polarized critics and the public alike upon its initial release, although the album has since been reevaluated over time and praised for its experimentation. In 2013, NME ranked Tusk at number 445 in their list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

" I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall when Warner Bros. put that on in their boardroom and listened to it for the first time."

Going into Tusk, Lindsey Buckingham was adamant about creating an album that sounded nothing like Rumours, despite encouragement from their label, Warner Bros., who wanted the band to follow up with a commercial record. "For me, being sort of the culprit behind that particular album, it was done in a way to undermine just sort of following the formula of doing Rumours 2 and Rumours 3, which is kind of the business model Warner Bros. would have liked us to follow."

Mick Fleetwood decided early on that Tusk was going to be a double album. After their label turned down Fleetwood's offer of buying a new studio to make the record, Fleetwood Mac used some of their royalties to construct their own studio, Studio D.

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Wikipedia