concept album

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English[edit]

Etymology[edit]

First applied to the albums Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Their Satanic Majesties Request, both released in 1967.

Noun[edit]

concept album (plural concept albums)

  1. An album of music where the content follows an overall theme or narrative.
    • 1967 December 9, “New Stones LP ‘Landmark’”, in Record World, →ISSN, page 22:
      Rather than merely a collection of unrelated songs, their new LP (which was nine months in the making) is a concept album, “an integrated and ethereal experience with a cosmic quality.”
    • 1996, Edward Macan, Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture, page 13:
      […] while the consistent use of lengthy forms such as the programmatic song cycle of the concept album and the multimovement suite underscores the hippies' new, drug-induced conception of time.
    • 2010, Marianne Tatom Letts, Radiohead and the Resistant Concept Album, page 19:
      Moore relates the concept album to the ideals of progressive rock in the 1970s, building on Sgt. Pepper 's appeal to unity at the album level (through packaging, characters, and a simulated stage performance) and articulating a "desire to establish a degree of aesthetic [that is, musical] unity greater than that of the individual song," […]
    • 2023, Eric Wolfson, Fifty Years of the Concept Album in Popular Music: From The Beatles to Beyoncé, Bloomsbury, →ISBN, page 2:
      They gave the Beatles' ‘Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band’ as an example of a concept album.

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