Third is a live and studio album by the English rock band Soft Machine, released as their third overall in June 1970 by CBS Records. It is a double album with a single composition on each of the four sides, and was their first album recorded with a four-piece line-up of keyboardist Mike Ratledge, and drummer and vocalist Robert Wyatt, saxophonist Elton Dean, and bass guitarist Hugh Hopper. Third marks a shift in the group's sound from their psychedelic origins towards jazz rock and electronic music. Lyn Dobson appears on saxophone and flute on "Facelift", recorded while he was a full member of the band (then a quintet), although he is credited as an additional performer. Jimmy Hastings (brother of Pye Hastings from Caravan) makes substantial contributions on flute and clarinet on "Slightly All the Time", free-jazz violinist Rab Spall (then a bandmate of Wyatt's in the part-time ensemble Amazing Band) is heard on the coda to "Moon in June", and Nick Evans (a member of the band during its short-lived septet incarnation) makes brief appearances on trombone in "Slightly All the Time" and "Out-Bloody-Rageous". According to Paul Stump's The Music's All that Matters: A History of Progressive Rock, Third was "unanimously acclaimed as the band's zenith." A retrospective review in Allmusic praised the exotic instrumentation and fusion of genres, and concluded, "Not exactly rock, Third nonetheless pushed the boundaries of rock into areas previously unexplored, and it managed to do so without sounding self-indulgent. A better introduction to the group is either of the first two records, but once introduced, this is the place to go." In the Q & Mojo Classic Special Edition Pink Floyd & The Story of Prog Rock (2005), the album came #20 in its list of "40 Cosmic Rock Albums".