Thick as a Brick is the fifth studio album by the British rock band Jethro Tull, released in March 1972. The album contains a continuous piece of music, split over two sides of an LP record, and is a parody of the concept albumgenre. The original packaging, designed like a newspaper, claims the album to be a musical adaptation of an epic poem by fictional eight-year-old genius Gerald Bostock, though the lyrics were actually written by the band's frontman, Ian Anderson.