Hear Me Out: ‘Abbey Road’ is better than ‘Sgt Pepper’

Posted On September 11, 2025September 11, 2025

For any serious rock fan, picking the best album by The Beatles is like picking a favourite child.

Even if there are some that stand out above the rest, there are songs on each one of their classics that could stand alongside the greatest rock and roll songs of all time. But while the generally accepted crown jewel of their discography tends to come from their later period, Sgt Pepper might not be nearly as classic an album as what they would turn in at the very end of their career.

First off, this is not a condemnation of Sgt Pepper as an album. Considering the times that the band released it in, it was a revolutionary piece of musical art that deserved to be celebrated among the greatest albums of 1967, but when looking at it side by side with Abbey Road, there’s no question that the band’s unofficial swan song blows Sgt Pepper out of the water musically.

Because for one thing, all of the members of the group actually seemed to enjoy working on Abbey Road a bit more. Although John Lennon had choice words for every era of the band’s career in some respect, he could say that there were many highlights on Abbey Road that outshone what Sgt Pepper had done. Then again, if we’re talking about Sgt Pepper, more than likely it comes back around to Paul McCartney.

Regardless of who contributed to the album, Pepper really is Macca’s baby in many respects, and although some parts of it are all the better for it, there are times when songs don’t have the same staying power. Although ‘When I’m 64’ is a much better song than ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, it’s a lot easier to remember a tune centred around a happy-go-lucky murderer than a tune that feels like it was nostalgic even at the time.

But what sets Abbey Road apart from Sgt Pepper?

And in terms of innovation, Abbey Road has Pepper beat by a few miles. The Fabs had already ended ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ with a bang, and ‘A Day in the Life’ is a great way of them capitalising on all of their greatest strengths, but that innovation only got better on Abbey Road.

Despite ‘A Day in the Life’ being called their magnum opus by many, many of the best Beatles moments can be found in the medley on Abbey Road, almost as if they took the concept of experimenting on Sgt Pepper’s finale and stretched it out for one long suite.

It’s not like the rest of the band didn’t show up for Pepper, either. George Harrison and Lennon each brought fantastic songs to the table, and yet when looking at the material that they compiled for their swan song, each of them felt like different attempts to innovate again. ‘Within You Without You’ is a fantastic piece of Indian-inspired music for 1967, but Harrison’s divisions of metre on ‘Here Comes the Sun’ is a natural extension of that idea without the tablas and sitars at play.

Although a lot of this comes down to The Beatles working together, the real reason why Abbey Road works so well is that you can hear George Martin at work throughout the whole thing. We may have been looking at a different story here had Sgt Pepper included songs like ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, but his knack for production made Abbey Road something timeless, whether that’s the dirty groove of ‘Come Together’ or that gorgeous harpsichord supporting their voices on ‘Because’.

But the real X-factor behind Abbey Road is how much it’s gone on to influence bands compared to Pepper. Because outside of the conceptual idea and ‘A Day in the Life’, what songs on Pepper could be traced directly to bands years after the fact? ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ has a decent case because of its psychedelic connotations, but it’s not like people were suddenly itching to build their career off of ‘Lovely Rita’ in the same way that they did for Abbey Road’s songs.

I mean, think about it for a second. The entire course of heavy music was changed with ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’, the idea of mixing classical music with rock and roll was even further emphasised with ‘Because’, and the concept of progressive epics that took up an entire side of vinyl could be indebted to the Abbey Road medley at the end of the record.

Sgt Pepper does have its place in history as the moment when the band made a massive pivot towards making a soundtrack to the Summer of Love, but their objective to create a special record to leave their audience off with was the perfect way to bow out. The after-effects of an album like Pepper may have been the culmination of all of them on the same page, but even with them being at odds, The Beatles created the kind of album that not only works as a collection of songs but also as the perfect final bow that any band could ever hope to take.

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