YES
On its release—on 1st June 1967— Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was hailed by the New York Review of Books as a work that “heralded a new golden age of song.” The critic Kenneth Tynan was so blown away that he reckoned its arrival was “a decisive moment in the history of western civilisation.” The New Musical Express, meanwhile, expressed its pleasure in more level-headed terms. “No one can deny that the Beatles have provided us with more musical entertainment which will both please the ear and get the brain working a bit too.”