“Time of the Season” by The Zombies

"Time of the Season" closes out Odessey and Oracle, the Zombies' 1968 album, a hazy, finger-snapping come-on written by keyboardist Rod Argent and recorded at Abbey Road in September 1967. It's all whispered invitations, cool, breathy pauses and a groove that slinks like a cat.

Its road to the charts was a strange one. Columbia took the album on because new A&R man Al Kooper pushed for it, and the Date label ran several singles off it first, including "Butcher's Tale", which the company hoped would catch on as an antiwar song. "Time of the Season" went out only because Kooper kept insisting, first paired with the old UK B-side "I'll Call You Mine", and it flopped. More than a year after the record's release it finally caught fire in America, peaking at number one on the Cashbox chart while the Billboard Hot 100 had it at number three, and it has stayed among the band's best-known songs.

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