The Zombies

The Zombies are an English rock band formed in St Albans, Hertfordshire, in the early 1960s, and one of the more musically sophisticated groups to emerge from the British Invasion. Built around the songwriting partnership of keyboardist Rod Argent and bassist Chris White, along with the distinctive, jazz-inflected voice of singer Colin Blunstone, the band stood apart from their peers through their use of minor-key melodies, unusual chord progressions, and electric piano textures rather than straightforward guitar rock.

Their early singles «She’s Not There» and «Tell Her No» became transatlantic hits, but by the time the band recorded what would become their masterpiece, the album Odessey and Oracle, they had already broken up, having found little continued success in Britain. It was from that album that «Time of the Season» emerged as a posthumous, and enormous, hit in the United States, giving the group an unusual afterlife as a band whose commercial peak arrived only after its dissolution.

Over time, Odessey and Oracle has come to be regarded as one of the finest and most influential albums of the 1960s, admired for its intricate harmonies, melancholic songwriting, and baroque pop arrangements. Argent and Blunstone would go on to reunite The Zombies decades later, and the band's catalog has continued to earn new generations of admirers well beyond its original British Invasion context.