Guides/A Riffiter guide
Where to start with The Beatles
The most important band in pop history has a daunting catalog. Here is the door, and the path through it.
A starting path through The Beatles, the most influential band in popular music. Begin with Revolver and Rubber Soul, climb through Sgt. Pepper's, Abbey Road and the White Album, and bookend it with A Hard Day's Night and Let It Be. Seven albums that cover the whole arc.
There is no wrong Beatles album to start with, but there is an easiest one, and an order that makes the leap from cheerful pop group to studio visionaries feel like the adventure it was.
This is that path. Listen in this order and you watch four musicians invent half of what modern pop takes for granted, in barely seven years.
- 1
Revolver
★ 4.9 · 6—Start here. The moment the band stopped touring and started treating the studio as an instrument, with no song longer than it needs to be. Everything they became is already visible, and everything they were is still intact.
- 2
Rubber Soul
★ 4.8 · 3—The pivot record, where the lyrics grew up and the melodies turned inward. Folk, soul and a new seriousness arrive without losing an ounce of charm. The sound of a band realising it could be more.
- 3
Abbey Road
★ 4.8 · 6—Their last recorded album and their most polished, ending in a medley that ties the whole career into a bow. Side two alone is one of the great closing statements in pop. They went out at the very top.
- 4
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Be the first to rate—The album that convinced the world pop could be art, dressed as a fictional band's variety show. Maximal, strange and endlessly inventive, it is the sound of the 1960s deciding what they would be.
- 5
The Beatles (The White Album)
★ 4.7 · 3—Sprawling, contradictory and gloriously unfiltered, the White Album is four solo artists sharing a record. Take the whole messy thing on its own terms and it becomes the most human album they made.
- 6
A Hard Day's Night
★ 4.5 · 1—The early band at its sharpest: pure, ringing, irresistible pop from two of the best to ever do it. The first album of all-original songs, and proof the magic was there from the start.
- 7
Let It Be
★ 4.0 · 1—The end, captured as it happened: a band coming apart and still writing hymns. Rough and unguarded where Abbey Road is polished, it is the right place to say goodbye.
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