First released on December 3, 1965, Rubber Soul arrived at the end of a year in which The Beatles had already performed to more than 55,000 fans at Shea Stadium and were being consumed by a level of commercial and cultural frenzy that left almost no space for the kind of artistic reflection the record required. Recorded across four weeks in October and November 1965, it is the album where John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr stopped trying to make pop records and started making something more considered and more deliberate. Norwegian Wood. In My Life. Michelle. Nowhere Man. Drive My Car. These are not simply hit songs. They are the moment the long-form pop album became a serious artistic form, and the influence they had on every major album that followed — from Pet Sounds to Revolver to Sgt. Pepper’s to virtually everything that came after — is impossible to overstate.

The new special edition, newly mixed by producer Giles Martin and engineer Sam Okell directly from the original four-track master tapes using cutting-edge de-mixing technology developed at Peter Jackson’s WingNut Films Productions Ltd., presents the album with a clarity that the original recordings never had the technology to fully capture. The expanded editions add 24 early session recordings including 20 previously unreleased takes, three previously unreleased home demos, and Little Girl, a previously unheard John Lennon song outline never before released or even rumored to exist. The 4CD and 5LP Super Deluxe editions include an 88-page hardbound book with a new written introduction by Paul McCartney and a foreword compiled from John Lennon’s own words gathered across his life, including the years after The Beatles’ breakup.