Revolver by The Beatles turns 60

Revolver, the album The Beatles released on August 5, 1966, has reached 60 years, Indie Hoy reported, marking the date with a list of five things about the record. It was the band's seventh studio album and, the outlet says, a turning point both in their own career and in popular music.

Revolver was the album that left behind the Fab Four's earlier boy-band image and pushed the group toward studio experimentation. It was also the last album The Beatles recorded before they stopped touring: exhausted by increasingly chaotic shows where screaming crowds drowned out the music, they played their final concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco on August 29, 1966, weeks after Revolver came out.

The closing track, "Tomorrow Never Knows," is considered one of the most radical recordings of its era. Written largely by John Lennon and inspired by The Psychedelic Experience, a reinterpretation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it broke with nearly every convention of pop songwriting at the time. Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr worked with producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick to build the track from tape loops, reversed guitars and a vocal run through a Leslie speaker normally reserved for Hammond organs, chasing a sound where, in Emerick's words, "no instrument sounded like itself."

George Harrison established himself as a songwriter in his own right on the album, opening it with "Taxman," a pointed critique of Britain's tax system unthinkable from him a few years earlier. He went further on "Love You To," largely abandoning rock structure for North Indian classical music after growing close to Ravi Shankar, bringing in sitar, tabla and tambura played by specialist musicians.

The cover, a black-and-white collage by the band's old Hamburg friend Klaus Voormann, replaced an earlier design planned by photographer Robert Freeman, who had shot the covers for With the Beatles, Beatles for Sale, Help! and Rubber Soul. And "Eleanor Rigby," written mainly by McCartney, was built entirely on a string octet, four violins, two violas and two cellos, arranged by Martin, with none of the four Beatles playing an instrument on the track; Martin pushed for a dry, aggressive sound by placing the microphones unusually close to the strings.

Revolver regularly ranks among the most influential rock albums ever made, and its 60th anniversary lands the same week Sam Mendes' four-film Beatles project moves into Abbey Road Studios, part of a wider run of Beatles-related milestones this year.