from Bill Haley to Beyoncé, Bob Stanley identifies A Hard Day's Night as the album that best captures the band's early-career appeal. He writes: If you had to explain the Beatles' impact to a stranger, you'd play them the soundtrack to A Hard Day's Night. The songs, conceived in a hotel room in a spare couple of weeks between up-ending the British class system and conquering America, were full of bite and speed. There was adventure, knowingness, love, and abundant charm. A Hard Day's Night was included in the list of "100 Essential Rock Albums" compiled by musicologists Charlie Gillett and Simon Frith for ZigZag magazine in 1975, and is one of the "Treasure Island albums" featured in Greil Marcus's 1979 book Stranded. In 2000, Q magazine placed A Hard Day's Night at number 5 on its list "The 100 Greatest British Albums Ever". That same year, it appeared at number 22 in Colin Larkin's book All Time Top 1000 Albums. In 2012, Rolling Stone ranked it 307th on the magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. In the 2020 revision, it rose to number 263. A Hard Day's Night has also appeared in critics' lists of the best albums of all time published by the NME, in 1974 (at number 33), 1985 (number 73) and 2013 (number 195); Mojo, in 1995 (number 81); and Uncut, in 2016 (number 149). It was a featured album in The Mojo Collection: The Greatest Albums of All Time, Tom Moon's book 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die and Robert Dimery's 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, and was selected as one of the "Most Significant Rock Albums" in the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Rock History. Based on the album's appearances in professional rankings and listings, the aggregate website Acclaimed Music lists A Hard Day's Night as the most acclaimed album of 1964, the 45th most acclaimed album of the 1960s and the 222nd most acclaimed album in history. Reissues On 26 February 1987, A Hard Day's Night was officially released on compact disc in mono, along with Please Please Me, With the Beatles, and Beatles for Sale. Having been available only as an import in the US in the past, the 13 track UK version of the album was also issued in the US on LP and cassette on 21 July 1987. Stereo mixes of "A Hard Day's