concept album

plural concept albums

1. An album of music where the content follows an overall theme or narrative.

   They gave the Beatles' ‘Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band’ as an example of a concept album.

   2023, Eric Wolfson, Fifty Years of the Concept Album in Popular Music: From The Beatles to Beyoncé, Bloomsbury, →ISBN, page 2

   3 more examples

   Rather than merely a collection of unrelated songs, their new LP (which was nine months in the making) is a concept album, “an integrated and ethereal experience with a cosmic quality.”

   1967 December 9, “New Stones LP ‘Landmark’”, in Record World, →ISSN, page 22

   […] while the consistent use of lengthy forms such as the programmatic song cycle of the concept album and the multimovement suite underscores the hippies' new, drug-induced conception of time.

   1996, Edward Macan, Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture, page 13

   Moore relates the concept album to the ideals of progressive rock in the 1970s, building on Sgt. Pepper 's appeal to unity at the album level (through packaging, characters, and a simulated stage performance) and articulating a "desire to establish a degree of aesthetic [that is, musical] unity greater than that of the individual song,"[…]

   2010, Marianne Tatom Letts, Radiohead and the Resistant Concept Album, page 19