Aftermath is the fourth studio album by the English rock band the Rolling Stones. The group recorded the album at RCA Studios in California in December 1965 and March 1966, during breaks between their international tours. It was released in the United Kingdom on 15 April 1966 by Decca Records and in the United States in late June by London Records. It is the band's fourth British and sixth American studio album, and closely follows a series of international hit singles that helped bring the Stones newfound wealth and fame rivalling that of their contemporaries the Beatles.
Aftermath is considered by music scholars to be an artistic breakthrough for the Rolling Stones. It is their first album to consist entirely of original compositions, all of which were credited to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. The band's original leader Brian Jones reemerged as a key contributor and experimented with instruments not usually associated with popular music, including the sitar, Appalachian dulcimer, Japanese koto and marimbas, as well as playing guitar and harmonica. Along with Jones' instrumental textures, the Stones incorporated a wider range of chords and stylistic elements beyond their Chicago blues and R&B influences, such as pop, folk, country, psychedelia, Baroque and Middle Eastern music. Influenced by intense love affairs, tensions within the group and a demanding touring itinerary, Jagger and Richards wrote the album around psychodramatic themes of love, sex, desire, power and dominance, hate, obsession, modern society and rock stardom. Women feature as prominent characters in their often dark, sarcastic, casually offensive lyrics.
The album's release was briefly delayed by controversy over the original packaging idea and title – Could You Walk on the Water? – due to the London label's fear of offending Christians in the US with its allusion to Jesus walking on water. In response to the lack of creative control, and without another idea for the title, the Stones bitterly settled on Aftermath, and two different photos of the band were used for the cover to each edition of the album. The UK release featured a run-time of more than 52 minutes, the longest for a popular music LP up to that point. The American edition was issued with a shorter track listing, substituting the single "Paint It Black" in place of four of the British version's songs, in keeping with the industry preference for shorter LPs in the US market at the time.
Aftermath was an immediate commercial success in both the UK and the US, topping the British albums chart for eight consecutive weeks and eventually achieving platinum certification from the Recording Industry Association of America. An inaugural release of the album era and a rival to the contemporaneous impact of the Beatles' Rubber Soul (1965), it reflected the youth culture and values of 1960s Swinging London and the burgeoning counterculture while attracting thousands of new fans to the Rolling Stones. The album was also highly successful with critics, although some listeners were offended by the derisive attitudes towards female characters in certain songs. Its subversive music solidified the band's rebellious rock image while pioneering the darker psychological and social content that glam rock and British punk rock would explore in the 1970s. Aftermath has since been considered the most important of the Stones' early, formative music and their first classic album, frequently ranking on professional lists of the greatest albums.
Background In 1965, the Rolling Stones' popularity increased markedly with a series of international hit singles written by the band's lead singer Mick Jagger and their guitarist Keith Richards.; . This success attracted the attention of Allen Klein, an American businessman who became their US representative in August while Andrew Loog Oldham, the group's manager, continued in the role of promoter and record producer.; ; . One of Klein's first actions on the band's behalf was to force Decca Records to grant a $1.2 million royalty advance to the group ($12,182,819 in 2025), bringing the members their first signs of financial wealth and allowing them to purchase country houses and new cars. Their October–December 1965 tour of North America was the group's fourth and largest tour there up to that point. According to the biographer Victor Bockris, through Klein's involvement, the concerts afforded the band "more publicity, more protection and higher fees than ever before".
By this time, the Rolling Stones had begun to respond to the increasingly sophisticated music of the Beatles, in comparison to whom they had long been promoted by Oldham as a rougher alternative.; ; . With the success of the Jagger-Richards-penned singles "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" (1965), "Get Off of My Cloud" (1965) and "19th Nervous Breakdown" (1966), the band increasingly rivalled the Beatles' musical and cultural influence. The Stones' outspoken, surly attitude on songs like "Satisfaction" alienated the Establishment detractors of rock music, which, as the music historian Colin King explains, "only made the group more appealing to those sons and daughters who found themselves estranged from the hypocrisies of the adult world – an element that would solidify into an increasingly militant and disenchanted counterculture as the decade wore on." Like other contemporary British and American rock acts, with Aftermath the Stones sought to create an album as an artistic statement, inspired by the Beatles' achievements with their December 1965 release Rubber Soul – an LP that Oldham later described as having "changed the musical world we lived in then to the one we still live in today".; .
Within the Stones, tensions were rife as Brian Jones continued to be viewed by fans and the press as the band's leader, a situation that Jagger and Oldham resented.; . The group dynamics were also affected by some of the band members' romantic entanglements. Jones' new relationship with the German model Anita Pallenberg, which had taken on sadomasochistic aspects, helped renew his confidence and encourage him to experiment musically, while her intelligence and sophistication both intimidated and elicited envy from the other Stones. Jagger came to view his girlfriend, Chrissie Shrimpton, as inadequate by comparison; while Jagger sought a more glamorous companion commensurate with his newfound wealth, the aura surrounding Jones and Pallenberg contributed to the end of his and Shrimpton's increasingly acrimonious relationship.; . Richards' relationship with Linda Keith also deteriorated as her drug use escalated to include Mandrax and heroin. The band's biographer Stephen Davis describes these entanglements as a "revolution under way within the Stones", adding that "Anita Pallenberg restored the faltering Brian Jones to his place in the band and in the Rolling Stones mythos. Keith Richards fell in love with her too, and their romantic triad realigned the precarious political axis within the Stones."
Writing and recording
Aftermath is the first Stones LP to be composed entirely of original material by the group. All the songs were, at Oldham's instigation, written by and credited to the songwriting partnership of Jagger and Richards. The pair wrote much of the material during the October–December 1965 tour and recording began immediately after the tour ended.; . According to the band's bassist Bill Wyman in his book Rolling with the Stones, they originally conceived Aftermath as the soundtrack for a planned film, Back, Behind and in Front. The plan was abandoned after Jagger met the potential director, Nicholas Ray, and disliked him. The recording sessions took place at RCA Studios in Los Angeles on 8–10December 1965 and, following promotion for their "19th Nervous Breakdown" single and an Australasian tour, on 6–9March 1966. Charlie Watts, the group's drummer, told the press that they had completed 10 songs during the first block of sessions; according to Wyman's book, at least 20 were recorded in March. Among the songs were four tracks issued on singles by the Rolling Stones in the first half of 1966, the A-sides of which were "19th Nervous Breakdown" and "Paint It Black". "Ride On, Baby" and "Sittin' on a Fence" were also recorded during the sessions but were not released until the 1967 US album Flowers.; .
Referring to the atmosphere at RCA, Richards told Beat Instrumental magazine in February 1966: "Our previous sessions have always been rush jobs. This time we were able to relax a little, take our time." The main engineer for the album, Dave Hassinger, was pivotal in making the group feel comfortable during the sessions, as he let them experiment with instrumentals and team up with session musicians like Jack Nitzsche to variegate their sound. Wyman recalled that Nitzsche and Jones would pick up instruments that were in the studio and experiment with sounds for each song. According to Jagger, Richards was writing a lot of melodies and the group would perform them in different ways, which were mainly thought out in the studio. In the recollection of the engineer Denny Bruce, the songs often developed through Nitzsche organising the musical ideas on piano. Wyman was later critical of Oldham for nurturing Jagger and Richards as songwriters to the exclusion of the rest of the band. The bassist also complained that "Paint It Black" should have been credited to the band's collective pseudonym, Nanker Phelge, rather than Jagger–Richards, since the song originated from a studio improvisation by himself, Jones and Watts, with Jones providing the melody line.; .
Jones proved important in shaping the album's tone and arrangements, as he experimented with instruments that were unusual in popular music, such as the marimba, sitar and Appalachian dulcimer. Davis cites the "acid imagery and exotic influences" on Rubber Soul, particularly George Harrison's use of the Indian sitar on "Norwegian Wood", as the inspiration for Jones' experimentation with the instrument in January 1966: "One night George put the massive sitar in Brian's hands, and within an hour Brian was working out little melodies." According to Nitzsche, Jones deserved a co-writing credit for "Under My Thumb", which Nitzsche recalled as being an unoriginal-sounding three-chord sequence until Jones discovered a Mexican marimba left behind from a previous session, and transformed the piece by providing its central riff. Wyman agreed, saying, "Well, without the marimba part, it's not really a song, is it?"
During the recording sessions, Richards and Oldham dismissed Jones' interest in exotic instrumentation as an affectation. According to the music journalist Barbara Charone, writing in 1979, everyone connected with the Stones credited Jones for "literally transforming certain records with some odd magical instrument". While Nitzsche was shocked at how cruelly they treated Jones, he later said that Jones was sometimes absent or incapacitated by drugs.; . Hassinger recalled seeing Jones often "laying on the floor, stoned or on some trip" and unable to play, but that his bandmates would wait for him to leave rather than entering into an argument as other bands would.
Because of Jones' distractions, Richards ended up playing most of the guitar parts for Aftermath, making it one of the first albums to have him do so. Richards later said he found the challenge musically rewarding but resented Jones for his unprofessional attitude when the band were under extreme pressure to record and maintain a hectic touring schedule.; . On some songs, Richards supported Wyman's bass lines with a fuzz bass part, which the music historians Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon suggest was influenced by Paul McCartney's use on the track "Think for Yourself" (from Rubber Soul). Aftermath was also the first Stones LP to be released with the majority of its tracks in true stereo, as opposed to electronically created stereo.