Often referred to as a folk rock album, Rubber Soul incorporates a mix of pop, soul and folk musical styles. The title derives from the colloquialism "plastic soul", which referred to soul played by English musicians. After the British version of A Hard Day's Night, it was the second Beatles LP to contain only original material. For the first time in their career, the band were able to record the album over a continuous period, uninterrupted by touring commitments. The songs demonstrate the Beatles' increasing maturity as lyricists and, in their incorporation of brighter guitar tones and new instrumentation such as harmonium, sitar and fuzz bass, the group striving for more expressive sounds and arrangements for their music. The project marked a progression in the band's treatment of the album format as an artistic platform, an approach they continued to develop with Revolver and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The North American version of Rubber Soul contained ten of the fourteen new songs, supplemented by two tracks withheld from the band's Help! album. The four songs omitted by Capitol, including the February 1966 single "Nowhere Man", instead appeared on the North American-only release Yesterday and Today.
Rubber Soul was highly influential on the Beatles' peers, leading to a widespread focus away from singles and onto creating albums of consistently high-quality songs. It has been recognised by music critics as an album that opened up the possibilities of pop music in terms of lyrical and musical scope, and as a key work in the development of styles such as psychedelia and progressive rock. Among its many appearances on critics' best-album lists, Rolling Stone ranked it fifth on the magazine's 2012 list "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". The album was certified 6× platinum by the RIAA in 1997, indicating shipments of at least six million copies in the US. In 2013, after the British Phonographic Industry changed its sales award rules, the album was certified platinum.
In the United States, Capitol Records removed four tracks from the British LP's running order and set them aside for the Beatles' next North American album, Yesterday and Today. The four songs – "Drive My Car", "Nowhere Man", "What Goes On" and "If I Needed Someone" – were replaced with two tracks that had appeared on the UK Help! album, but not its US counterpart: "I've Just Seen a Face" and "It's Only Love". The total time was 28:55, nearly seven minutes shorter than the British version.
Through the mix of predominantly acoustic-based songs from the two releases, according to author Kenneth Womack, Capitol's Rubber Soul "takes on a decidedly folk-ish orientation". Capitol sequenced "I've Just Seen a Face" as the opening track, an act that Ian MacDonald cites as the record company "conspiring" to present Rubber Soul as a folk-rock album. Author Jonathan Gould writes that the omission of songs such as "Drive My Car" provided a "misleading idea" of the Beatles' musical direction and "turned the album title into an even more obscure joke", since the result was the band's least soul- or R&B-influenced album up to this point. The stereo mixes used by Capitol contained two false starts at the beginning of "I'm Looking Through You", while "The Word" also differed from the UK version due to the double-tracking of Lennon's lead vocal, the addition of an extra falsetto harmony and the panning treatment given to one of the percussion parts over the song's instrumental break.
Rubber Soul was the group's first release not to feature their name on the cover, an uncommon tactic in 1965. The "stretched" effect of the cover photo came about after photographer Bob Freeman had taken some pictures of the group wearing suede leather jackets at Lennon's house. Freeman showed the photos by projecting them onto an album-sized piece of cardboard to simulate how they would appear on an album cover. The unusual Rubber Soul album cover came to be when the slide card fell slightly backwards, elongating the projected image of the photograph and stretching it. Excited by the effect, they shouted, "Ah! Can we have that? Can you do it like that?", to which Freeman said he could. The distinctive lettering was created by photographer Charles Front, who recalled that his inspiration was the album's title: "If you tap into a rubber tree then you get a sort of globule, so I started thinking of creating a shape that represented that, starting narrow and filling out." The rounded letters used on the sleeve established a style that became ubiquitous in psychedelic designs and, according to The Guardian, "a staple of poster art for the flower power generation".
McCartney conceived the album's title after overhearing a musician's description of Mick Jagger's singing style as "plastic soul". Lennon confirmed this in a 1970 interview, stating: "That was Paul's title ... meaning English soul. Just a pun."
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