John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

Released in the UK and US on the same day as Yoko Ono's companion album Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band, it was recorded at Abbey Road with Lennon, Ringo Starr on drums and Klaus Voormann on bass as the core group. Lennon asked Phil Spector, who had produced "Instant Karma!", to co-produce, but Spector was absent for much of the sessions and mixed the album over three days toward the end of October. Lennon and Ono finished all work by 27 October.

The primal therapy pushed him toward themes of child-parent relationships and psychological suffering. Mother opens with a tolling funeral bell. Working Class Hero is Lennon alone with an acoustic guitar. In "God" he lists things he does not believe in, including Jesus, Hitler, Buddha, Elvis, "Zimmerman" and Beatles, and says he believes only in himself and Ono. "Look at Me" dates from the White Album period of 1968, and "My Mummy's Dead" is partly set to the tune of "Three Blind Mice". Lennon said in 1970: "God is a concept by which we measure our pain."

The album reached number 8 in Britain and number 6 in the United States, and was number 1 in the Netherlands for seven weeks. Several US radio stations banned "Working Class Hero" for its strong language, and in Britain EMI used asterisks for the word in the printed lyrics. "Mother", edited to under four minutes, was the US single on 28 December 1970.

Reviews at the time were mixed overall. Andy Gray of the NME wrote that he had rarely heard so much anguish and suffering put into a track as in "Mother". Greil Marcus wrote that Lennon's singing in the last verse of "God" "may be the finest in all of rock". Rolling Stone placed the album fourth in a 1987 list of the best albums of the previous twenty years and number 23 in its 2012 list of 500 greatest albums, and Pitchfork put it 60th among its top albums of the 1970s. A remix with two bonus tracks, "Power to the People" and "Do the Oz", appeared in 2000, and an eight-disc Ultimate Collection in 2021.