Revolver by The Beatles

Revolver, the Beatles' seventh album, came out on Parlophone on 5 August 1966, and it's the sound of four Beatles discovering that the studio itself is an instrument. George Martin produced at Abbey Road, and with no intention of ever playing these songs live, the band went to town: automatic double tracking, varispeed, tapes run backwards, microphones jammed right up against the instruments, and instruments well outside their usual live setup.

The range is dizzying. "Tomorrow Never Knows" floats on a heavy Indian drone and a whirl of tape loops, like a trip broadcast from another dimension. "Eleanor Rigby" is a portrait of loneliness backed by nothing but a string octet, "Love You To" dives headlong into Hindustani classical music, and in between there's the soul punch of "Got to Get You into My Life", the sour bite of "Taxman", the dreamy "Here, There and Everywhere" and the singalong nonsense of "Yellow Submarine". LSD, Eastern thought and the avant-garde all seep in, and the songs muse on death and on rising above material things. John Lennon, George Harrison, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr sound like a band let off the leash, fresh from a three-month break taken at the start of the year.

It topped the UK chart for seven weeks and the US chart for six, even though Capitol trimmed the American version down to 11 songs. British critics raved, while American ones were more wary. Klaus Voormann's drawing-and-collage cover won a Grammy, and many critics now rate Revolver above Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band as the best Beatles album of them all.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.