Days of Future Passed is the second album and first concept album by English rock band The Moody Blues, released in December 1967 on Deram Records. After two years performing as a struggling white R&B band, The Moody Blues were asked by their record label in September 1967 to record an adaptation of Antonín Dvořák's Symphony No. 9 as a stereo demonstration record. Instead, the band chose to record an orchestral song cycle about a typical working day.
Recording sessions for the album took place at Decca Studios in West Hampstead, London during May 9 to November 26, 1967. The band worked with record producer Tony Clarke, engineer Derek Varnals, and conductor Peter Knight. The album's music features psychedelic rockers, ballads by singer-songwriter and guitarist Justin Hayward, Mellotron played by keyboardist Mike Pinder, and orchestral accompaniment by the London Festival Orchestra.
Music writers cite the album as a precursor to progressive rock music. Bill Holdship of Yahoo! Music remarks that the band "created an entire genre here." Robert Christgau cites it as one of the essential albums of 1967 and finds it "closer to high-art pomp than psychedelia. But there is a sharp pop discretion to the writing and a trippy romanticism in the mirroring effect of the strings and Mike Pinder's Mellotron." Will Hermes cites the album as an essential progressive rock record and views that its use of the Mellotron, a tape replay keyboard, made it a "signature" element of the genre. Allmusic editor Bruce Eder calls the album "one of the defining documents of the blossoming psychedelic era, and one of the most enduringly popular albums of its era."
Read more about Days Of Future Passed: Background, Original Vs. Later Mix, Original Track Listing
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“The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.”
—Primo Levi (1919–1987)