In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is the second and final studio album by American rock band Neutral Milk Hotel, released on February 10th, 1998 on Merge Records.

The album is largely inspired by Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, a diary she kept while hiding during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Jeff Mangum wrote many of the lyrics about her, as he had just finished reading it. Regarding it, he said:

Then I spent two days reading it and completely flipped out … spent about three days crying … it stuck with me for a long, long time.

The music is very hard to categorize into a specific genre, but many have described it as indie rock, psychedelic folk and lo-fi, with influences from Eastern European choral music, Canterbury, musique concrète, drone music, free jazz, and Tropicália.

Paste magazine ranked this album as the second-best of the 1990s and Treble magazine ranked the album as the best of 1998.