Ask most Beatles fans to name the best early album and they'll say Please Please Me — for the energy, the thirteen-hour session, the mythology. Ask them to name the most important and they'll say A Hard Day's Night — for the all-original songwriting, the film, the American conquest. With the Beatles, released between the two on 22 November 1963, tends to get lost in the middle.
It shouldn't. Here's the case for why With the Beatles is the most underrated album in the early Beatles catalogue — and why it repays closer listening than it usually gets.
1. It Arrived at the Exact Moment Beatlemania Peaked
With the Beatles was released on 22 November 1963 — the same day as the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas. In Britain, it arrived with 500,000 advance orders and knocked Please Please Me off the top of the UK charts. The same band. The same week. It remained at #1 for 21 weeks.
The context matters because it explains why the album is sometimes underestimated: it was so commercially dominant that it became part of the furniture. When something sells 500,000 copies before anyone has heard it, the critical conversation tends to focus on the phenomenon rather than the music. The music deserves better.
2. The Cover Changed Everything
Robert Freeman's half-shadow portrait — four faces, half in light, half in darkness, staring directly into the camera — is one of the most influential album covers ever produced. It established the principle that a record sleeve could be a work of art rather than a marketing tool. It influenced every serious album cover that followed.
The Please Please Me cover shows four young men grinning over a staircase railing. The With the Beatles cover shows four people who know exactly who they are. The shift between the two covers — released eight months apart — is one of the most dramatic visual transformations in pop history.
3. All My Loving Is One of the Great Early Beatles Songs
All My Loving is the song that opened The Beatles' first Ed Sullivan Show performance on 9 February 1964 — the broadcast watched by 73 million Americans. McCartney wrote the lyrics first, on a tour bus, before he had the melody — one of the few times he worked that way. The result is a song of extraordinary melodic invention: the triplet guitar figure, the three-part harmony, the key change that arrives exactly when you need it.
It is not the most celebrated song on the album. It should be.
4. George Harrison's First Songwriting Credit
Don't Bother Me — written by Harrison while ill in a hotel room in Bournemouth — is the first solo songwriting credit Harrison received on a Beatles album. It is a minor song by his later standards, but it is the beginning of a story that ends with Something and Here Comes the Sun. The With the Beatles album is where that story starts.
Harrison later said he wrote it partly to prove to himself that he could. He could. And the fact that it took until the second album for him to get a writing credit — when Lennon and McCartney had been writing together since 1957 — tells you something important about the internal dynamics of the band that would eventually produce All Things Must Pass.
5. The Covers Are Better Than They Get Credit For
Seven of the fourteen tracks on With the Beatles are covers, and this is usually cited as a weakness. It shouldn't be. The covers are extraordinary performances: Lennon's reading of Please Mister Postman is urgent and driving; his You Really Got a Hold on Me is one of the most emotionally committed vocal performances of his early career; Money (That's What I Want) closes the album with a ferocity that no other act of the era could have matched.
The covers also reveal something important about The Beatles' musical education. Please Mister Postman is Motown. You Really Got a Hold on Me is Smokey Robinson. Roll Over Beethoven is Chuck Berry. Devil in Her Heart is the Donays. The Beatles were not a rock and roll band who happened to like soul music — they were a band that had absorbed everything, from skiffle to Motown to Broadway (Till There Was You), and could perform all of it with equal conviction.
6. William Mann Heard Something Nobody Else Did
On 27 December 1963, music critic William Mann of The Times published a review of With the Beatles that caused a sensation. Mann — the paper's classical music critic — analysed the album in terms of its harmonic structure, comparing Not a Second Time to Mahler and identifying what he called "pandiatonic clusters" in the Beatles' chord progressions.
Lennon later said he had no idea what Mann was talking about. But the review mattered because it was the first time a serious critic had applied serious critical language to Beatles music — and it opened the door to the idea that this was music worth taking seriously. That conversation, which eventually produced the critical reassessment of the entire catalogue, began with With the Beatles.
7. It Set the Template for Everything That Followed
With the Beatles established the format that the band would use for the next three years: a mix of originals and covers, with the originals gradually crowding out the covers as the band's confidence grew. A Hard Day's Night (1964) was the first all-original album; by Rubber Soul (1965), the covers had disappeared entirely.
The trajectory from With the Beatles to Rubber Soul — two years, four albums, a complete transformation of what The Beatles were and what they were capable of — is one of the most extraordinary creative developments in the history of popular music. With the Beatles is where that trajectory begins.
The Verdict
With the Beatles is not the best early Beatles album. Please Please Me has the mythology; A Hard Day's Night has the songwriting purity; Beatles for Sale has the emotional honesty. But it is the most underrated — the one that gets passed over in favour of its neighbours, the one whose qualities are most consistently overlooked.
All My Loving. Don't Bother Me. Money (That's What I Want). Robert Freeman's cover. William Mann's review. 500,000 advance orders. The same day as Kennedy.
Pay attention to With the Beatles. It repays the effort.
Go deeper:
With the Beatles (1963) – The Complete Deep Dive | The Beatlemania Era (1963–1964) | Beatles Albums Complete Guide | Shop With the Beatles Merchandise
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