The album was the Beatles' final recording project before their retirement as live performers and marked the group's most overt use of studio technology to date, building on the advances of their late 1965 release Rubber Soul.

Regarded by some commentators as the start of the group's psychedelic period, the songs reflect their interest in the drug LSD, Eastern philosophy and the avant-garde while addressing themes such as death and transcendence of material concerns.

With no plans to reproduce their new material in concert, the band made liberal use of automatic double tracking, varispeed, reversed tapes, close audio miking, and instruments outside of their standard live set-up.

[31][nb 3] Of the two principal songwriters, Cleave found Lennon to be intuitive, lazy and dissatisfied with fame and his surroundings in the Surrey countryside, while McCartney conveyed confidence and a hunger for knowledge and new creative possibilities.

[55] From February through June, these musical acts included Stevie Wonder, Roy Orbison, the Lovin' Spoonful, the Mamas & the Papas,[56] Bob Dylan (with whom they socialised extensively), Luciano Berio and Ravi Shankar.

[126][132] Emerick also ensured a greater presence for Starr's bass drum, by inserting an item of clothing inside the structure, to dampen the sound,[87] and then moving the microphone to just 3 inches from the drumhead and compressing the signal through a Fairchild limiter.

[156] Echoing this point, music critic Tim Riley writes that, just as "embracing life means accepting death", the fourteen tracks "link a disillusioned view of the modern world ... with a belief in metaphysical transcendence".

[175][nb 14] While Lennon and Harrison supplied harmonies beside McCartney's lead vocal, no Beatle played on the recording;[177] instead, Martin arranged the track for a string octet,[178] drawing inspiration from Bernard Herrmann's 1960 film score for Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

[191] Partly influenced by Harrison's use of LSD,[192][193] the lyrics address the singer's desire for "immediate sexual gratification", according to Womack, and serve as a "rallying call to accept our inner hedonism and release our worldly inhibitions".

[205] On 1 June, the Beatles and some of their friends enhanced the festive nautical atmosphere by adding sounds such as chains, bells, whistles, tubs of water and clinking glasses,[206] all sourced from Studio 2's trap room.

[238][239] Along with "Good Day Sunshine", which similarly dispensed with guitar parts for Harrison and Lennon, Rodriguez cites the track as an example of McCartney eschewing the group dynamic when recording his songs, a trend that would prove unpopular with his bandmates in later years.

[254] Reising and LeBlanc cite the song as an early example of how from 1966 onwards the Beatles' lyrics "adopted an urgent tone, intent on channeling some essential knowledge, the psychological and/or philosophical epiphanies of LSD experience" to their increasingly aware audience.

[256][nb 20] Described by Riley as the album's "most derivative cut",[257] "Got to Get You into My Life" was influenced by the Motown Sound[258][259] and written by McCartney after he had seen Stevie Wonder perform at the Scotch of St James nightclub in February.

[284][286][nb 23] In his line drawings of the four Beatles (McCartney, Lennon, Harrison and Starr, clockwise from top-left), Voormann drew inspiration from the work of the nineteenth-century illustrator Aubrey Beardsley,[282] who was the subject of a long-running exhibition at London's Victoria and Albert Museum in 1966 and highly influential on fashion and design themes of the time.

[166] The photo was part of a series taken by Robert Whitaker during the filming at Abbey Road on 19 May and demonstrated the Beatles' adoption of fashions from boutiques that had recently opened in Chelsea, rather than the Carnaby Street designers they had favoured previously.

[298] Turner views the selection of attire as reflective of the Beatles "still dressing similarly yet with an individual stamp"; he identifies the choice of sunglasses as another example of a unified yet personalised look, whereby the styles ranged from oblong-shaped lenses, for Lennon, to an oval-shaped pair worn by Starr.

[312] In Britain, EMI gradually distributed the album's songs to radio stations throughout July[313] – a strategy that MacDonald describes as "building anticipation for what would clearly be a radical new phase in the group's recording career".

[335] Reporting on "Swinging London" for The Village Voice, Richard Goldstein said that, as if in response to the antagonism being shown towards the band in the US, "British youth has flipped completely over the new Beatle album, Revolver.

[349] The Beatles were presented with gold discs from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), recognising the album as a "million seller",[350] during their 24 August press conference at the Capitol Tower in Hollywood.

[366] The reviewer highlighted its "electronic effects", McCartney's "penchant for the classics" and Harrison's "stunning use of the sitar" as diverse elements that distinguished the LP as a group effort, such that the four band members' "individual personalities are now showing through loud and clear".

[372] In their joint review for Record Mirror, Richard Green and Peter Jones found the album "full of musical ingenuity" yet "controversial", and added: "There are parts that will split the pop fraternity neatly down the middle.

[380] KRLA Beat's reviewer described Revolver as "a musical creation of exceptional excellence" but lamented that, amid the continued acclaim for Rubber Soul, "it is receiving only a fraction of the attention and respect due", and some Americans were overly focusing on the band's "political views".

[145] Writing for PopMatters that year, David Medsker said that Revolver showed the four band members "peaking at the exact same time", and he deemed it to be "the best of the bunch, the letter that went unanswered" among a series of reciprocally influential musical statements exchanged between the Beatles and the Beach Boys over 1965–67.

[123] Scott Plagenhoef of Pitchfork views Revolver as a "sonic landmark" that, in its lyrics, "matur[ed] pop from the stuff of teen dreams to a more serious pursuit that actively reflected and shaped the times in which its creators lived".

"[406] MacDonald highlights "the radically subversive" message of "Tomorrow Never Knows" – exhorting listeners to empty their minds of all ego- and material-related thought – as the inauguration of a "till-then élite-preserved concept of mind-expansion into pop, simultaneously drawing attention to consciousness-enhancing drugs and the ancient religious philosophies of the Orient".

[410] He says it established rock 'n' roll as an art form and identifies its "trailblazing" quality as the impetus for Pink Floyd's The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and for Brian Wilson to complete the Beach Boys' "mini-symphony", "Good Vibrations".

[12] MacDonald cites Revolver as a musical statement that, further to the Rubber Soul track "The Word" and "Rain", helped guide the counterculture towards the 1967 Summer of Love due to the widespread popularity of the Beatles.

[417] As with Rubber Soul, Walter Everett views the album's "experimental timbres, rhythms, tonal structures, and poetic texts" as the inspiration for many of the bands that formed the progressive rock genre in the early 1970s.

[419][nb 34] Rolling Stone attributes the development of the Los Angeles and San Francisco music scenes, including subsequent releases by the Beach Boys, Love and the Grateful Dead, to the influence of Revolver, particularly "She Said She Said".

[429] Sheffield cites the album's 1987 CD release, with the full complement of Lennon compositions, as marking the start of a process whereby Revolver "steadily climbed in public estimation" to become recognised as the Beatles' finest work.