Revolver (Beatles album) group collective since 1962, and gave them an unprecedented amount of time to prepare for a new album. Writing in "The Beatles Forever", Nicholas Schaffner cites 1966 as the start of the band's "'psychedelic' period" and adds: "That adjective implies not only the influence of certain mind-altering chemicals, but also the freewheeling spectrum of wide-ranging colors that their new music seemed to evoke." Music journalist Carol Clerk describes "Revolver" as having been "decisively informed by acid", following John Lennon and George Harrison's continued experimentation with the drug LSD since the spring of 1965.<ref name="Clerk/Uncut"> Available at Rock's Backpages (subscription required).</ref>
Revolver (Beatles album) 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.<ref name="Medsker/PM"></ref> In a 2007 appraisal of the band's albums, Henry Yates of "Classic Rock" magazine paired it with "Sgt. Pepper's" as the two "essential classics" in the Beatles' canon and described it as "Always the rock fraternity's favourite (and the blueprint for Noel Gallagher's career)". Writing in "Paste", Mark Kemp says that the album "completed [the Beatles'] transformation from the mop tops of three years earlier into bold, groundbreaking experimental