Rubber Soul is the sixth studio album by the English rock band the Beatles. It was released on 3 December 1965 in the United Kingdom on EMI's Parlophone label, accompanied by the non-album double A-side single "Day Tripper" / "We Can Work It Out". The original North American release, issued by Capitol Records, contains ten of the fourteen songs and two tracks withheld from the band's Help! (1965) album. Rubber Soul was described as an important artistic achievement by the band, meeting a highly favourable critical response and topping sales charts in Britain and the United States for several weeks.

The recording sessions took place in London over a four-week period beginning in October 1965. For the first time in their career, the Beatles were able to record an album free of concert, radio or film commitments. Often referred to as a folk rock album, particularly in its Capitol configuration, Rubber Soul incorporates a mix of pop, soul and folk musical styles. The title derives from the colloquialism "plastic soul" and was the Beatles' way of acknowledging their lack of authenticity compared to the African-American soul artists they admired. After A Hard Day's Night (1964), it was the second Beatles LP to contain only original material.

The songs demonstrate the Beatles' increasing maturity as lyricists, and in their incorporation of brighter guitar tones and new instrumentation such as sitar, harmonium 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 (1966) and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). The four songs omitted by Capitol, including the February 1966 single "Nowhere Man", later appeared on the North American release Yesterday and Today (1966).

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 creation 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 of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". In 2000, it was voted at number 34 in the third edition of Colin Larkin's book All Time Top 1000 Albums. The album was certified 6× platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in 1997, indicating shipments of at least six million copies in the US. In 2013, Rubber Soul was certified platinum by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) for UK sales since 1994.

Most of the songs on Rubber Soul were composed soon after the Beatles' return to London following their August 1965 North American tour. The album reflects the influence of their month in America. They set a new attendance record when they played to over 55,000 at Shea Stadium on 15 August, met Bob Dylan in New York and their longtime hero Elvis Presley in Los Angeles. Although the Beatles had released their album Help! that same month, the requirement for a new album in time for Christmas was in keeping with the schedule established with EMI in 1963 by Brian Epstein, the group's manager, and George Martin, their record producer.

In their new songs, the Beatles drew inspiration from soul music acts signed to the Motown and Stax record labels, particularly the singles they heard on US radio that summer, and from the contemporary folk rock of Dylan and the Byrds. Author Robert Rodriguez highlights the Byrds as having achieved "special notice as an American act that had taken something from the Brits, added to it, then sent it back". In doing so, Rodriguez continues, the Byrds had joined the Beatles and Dylan in "a common pool of influence exchange, where each act gave and took from the other in equal measure". According to music critic Tim Riley, Rubber Soul served as a "step toward a greater synthesis" of all the elements that throughout 1965 represented a "major rock 'n' roll explosion", rather than just the emergence of folk rock. Citing Dylan and the Rolling Stones as the Beatles' artistic peers during this period, he says that on Rubber Soul these two acts "inspire rather than influence their sound".

Two years after the start of Beatlemania, the band were open to exploring new themes in their music through a combination of their tiring of playing to audiences full of screaming fans, their commercial power, a shared curiosity gained through literature and experimentation with hallucinogenic drugs, and their interest in the potential of the recording studio. According to Ringo Starr, Rubber Soul was the Beatles' "departure record", written and recorded during a period when, largely through the influence of marijuana, "We were expanding in all areas of our lives, opening up to a lot of different attitudes." The album was especially reflective of John Lennon's maturation as a songwriter, as he was encouraged to address wider-ranging issues than before through Dylan's example. George Harrison's outlook had been transformed by his and Lennon's experiences with the hallucinogenic drug LSD; he said the drug had revealed to him the futility of the band's widespread fame by "open[ing] up this whole other consciousness".

Author Mark Prendergast recognises Rubber Soul as "the first Beatles record which was noticeably drug-influenced". Lennon called it "the pot album". Marijuana appealed to the band's bohemian ideal. Paul McCartney, who was the only Beatle still living in central London, said it was typical of a move away from alcohol and into "more of a beatnik scene, like jazz".