Roger Waters has credited two landmark 1960s albums with reshaping his understanding of what a record could be, ideas that would later underpin Pink Floyd's own concept albums such as The Dark Side of the Moon. Before this era, LPs were typically loose collections of songs, but The Beatles and The Beach Boys pioneered the notion of an album as a unified, narrative-driven work, a shift that gave Waters and his generation, in his words, "permission to branch out".

Waters has singled out The Beatles' 1967 release Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds as the two records that "completely changed everything" for him. Recalling first hearing Sgt. Pepper's on the Howard Stern Show in 2012, he described pulling his car into a layby, listening in awe at how "complete and accomplished" it felt, packed with narrative ideas. Both albums proved commercially successful as well as artistically ambitious, demonstrating to the wider industry that conceptual, story-driven records could sell, paving the way for Pink Floyd's own experiments with albums as cohesive artistic statements.