concept album

English

Etymology

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

Noun

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.

Translations

Further reading
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