Released on 26 May 1967, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the eighth studio album by the English rock band The Beatles. It is regarded by musicologists as an early concept album that advanced the roles of sound composition, extended form, psychedelic imagery, record sleeves, and the producer in popular music. Critics lauded the album for its innovations in songwriting, production and graphic design, for bridging a cultural divide between popular music and high art, and for reflecting the interests of contemporary youth and the counterculture.
The idea for the album came to Paul McCartney during a return flight to London when he started thinking about a song involving an Edwardian military band. That formed the impetus of the Sgt. Pepper concept and the album was then loosely conceptualised as a performance by the fictional Sgt. Pepper band, however, that idea was conceived only after the recording of the title track.
Sgt. Pepper is considered one of the first art rock LPs and a progenitor to progressive rock. It incorporates a range of stylistic influences, including vaudeville, circus, music hall, avant-garde, and Western and Indian classical music. It spent 27 weeks at number one on the Record Retailer chart in the United Kingdom and 15 weeks at number one on the Billboard Top LPs chart in the United States. In 1968, it won four Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year, the first rock LP to receive this honour; in 2003, it was inducted into the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress. It has topped several critics' and listeners' polls for the best album of all time, including those published by Rolling Stone magazine and in the book All Time Top 1000 Albums, and the UK's "Music of the Millennium" poll. More than 32 million copies had been sold worldwide as of 2011. It remains one of the best-selling albums of all time and was still, in 2018, the UK's best-selling studio album. A remixed and expanded edition of the album was released in 2017.