Please Please Me | With the Beatles | A Hard Day's Night | Beatles for Sale | Help! | Rubber Soul | Revolver
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band | Magical Mystery Tour | The White Album | Yellow Submarine | Abbey Road | Let It Be
Past Masters | The Beatles Anthology | The Beatles: Get Back
- Awesome Music: Enough so that three days after it was released, Jimi Hendrix covered the title song live in concert. The album is still considered the high water mark of popular music. A splendid time is guaranteed for all.
- Genre Turning Point: Not only did this album help make Psychedelic Rock mainstream, it was one of the first albums to really use the recording studio as an instrument with all the tape manipulation and sound effects that went into the production. It also cemented rock music's shift from a single-oriented genre to an album-oriented one with a unifying concept stretching across the entire LP. This album also marked the point that critics took popular music seriously as an art form.
- Harsher in Hindsight: Paul McCartney wrote "When I'm Sixty-Four" as a light-hearted song about a man who wonders if a woman will stay with him when he grows old. However, it takes a somber tone when taking into account the following:
- When Paul McCartney turned 64 in real life, his then-wife Heather Mills separated from him and they later divorced.
- Paul's first wife, Linda Eastman, died long before they reached 64.
- Neither John Lennon nor George Harrison would make it to 64, either, with John being murdered at age 40 and George dying from cancer at age 58.
- On a slightly more humorous note, over the course of his 64th year of life, Paul had that song played and sung to him so many times he jokingly said he regretted ever writing it.
- Hype Backlash: Somewhat inevitable when an album is so often regarded as the greatest of all time. Many first-time listeners unacquainted with the Beatles tend to feel that the album's dated at best, and even among those who are familiar with the Fab Four, you can find a few people who believe that, while Sgt. Pepper is fantastic, it's not as good as, say, Revolver, Rubber Soul, The White Album, and/or Abbey Road. Most people who experience this trope with Sgt. Pepper tend to feel as if The Dark Side of the Moon, Thriller, Pet Sounds or one of the aforementioned Beatles albums are more deserving of the "best album ever" title. Emblematic of this trend is the 2020 revision of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of all time. In the 2003 original and the 2012 revision, this album was proclaimed No. 1. By 2020, its placement had fallen to No. 24, and the highest ranked Beatles album, at No. 5, was Abbey Road. Even in its time, a number of listeners wondered what all the fuss was about: some noted critics at the time complained that the band had concentrated more on doing a Concept Album than doing a pure rock 'n' roll album.
- Nightmare Fuel: Try listening to "A Day in the Life" in earphones on a crowded city street, especially if it's the mono version.
- Spiritual Successor: The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour is stylistically comparable. Other artists have imitated and parodied the album many times, especially the cover.
- Tear Jerker: "She's Leaving Home".
