Abbey Road incorporates styles such as rock, pop, blues, singer-songwriter, and progressive rock, and makes prominent use of the Moog synthesizer and guitar played through a Leslie speaker unit. It is also notable for having a long medley of songs on side two that have subsequently been covered as one suite by other notable artists.
The album's cover, featuring the group walking across a zebra crossing outside Abbey Road Studios, has become one of the most famous and imitated in the history of recorded music.
After the recording sessions for the proposed Get Back album, Paul McCartney suggested to music producer George Martin that the group get together and make an album "the way we used to do it", free of the conflict that had begun during sessions for The Beatles (also known as the "White Album"). Martin agreed, but on the strict condition that all the group – particularly John Lennon – allow him to produce the record in the same manner as earlier albums and that discipline would be adhered to. No one was entirely sure that the work was going to be the group's last, though George Harrison later recalled that "it felt as if we were reaching the end of the line"
During the sessions, Lennon expressed a desire to have all of his songs on one side of the album, and McCartney's on the other. The album's two halves represented a compromise: Lennon wanted a traditional release with distinct and unrelated songs, while McCartney and Martin wanted to continue their thematic approach from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by incorporating a medley.
Lennon ultimately said that he disliked Abbey Road as a whole and felt that it lacked authenticity, calling McCartney's contributions "[music] for the grannies to dig" and not "real songs",and describing the medley as "junk ... just bits of songs thrown together".
In the image selected by McCartney, the group walk across the street in single file from left to right, with Lennon leading, followed by Starr, McCartney, and Harrison. McCartney is out of step with the others. Except for Harrison, the group are wearing suits designed by Tommy Nutter. A white Volkswagen Beetle is to the left of the picture, parked next to the zebra crossing, which belonged to one of the people living in the block of flats across from the recording studio. After the album was released, the number plate (LMW 281F) was repeatedly stolen from the car.
The Get Back project (by now retitled Let It Be) had been re-examined, with overdubs and mixing sessions continuing into 1970. Therefore, Let It Be became the last album to be finished and released by the Beatles, although its recording had begun before Abbey Road.
Shortly after the album's release, the cover became part of the "Paul is dead" theory that was spreading across college campuses in the US. According to followers of the rumour, the cover depicted the Beatles walking out of a cemetery in a funeral procession.
The procession was led by Lennon dressed in white as a religious figure; Starr was dressed in black as the undertaker; McCartney, out of step with the others, was a corpse; and Harrison dressed in denim was the gravedigger. The left-handed McCartney is holding a cigarette in his right hand, indicating that he is an impostor, and part of the number plate on the Volkswagen parked on the street is 281F (misread as 28IF), meaning that McCartney would have been 28 if he had lived – despite the fact that he was only 27 at the time of the photo and subsequent release of the record. The escalation of the "Paul is dead" rumour became the subject of intense analysis on mainstream radio and contributed to Abbey Road's commercial success in the US. Lennon was interviewed in London by New York's WMCA, and he ridiculed the rumour but conceded that it was invaluable publicity for the album.
