Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Encyclopedia of Popular Music
Entertainment Weekly	B+
Mojo
NME	6/10
Pitchfork Media	8.7/10 (1998) 10/10 (2005)
Rolling Stone
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
Spin	7/10
Uncut

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is the second studio album by the American indie rock band Neutral Milk Hotel. It was released in the United States on February 10, 1998 on Merge Records and May 1998 on Blue Rose Records in the United Kingdom.

Jeff Mangum moved from Athens, Georgia to Denver, Colorado to prepare the bulk of the album's material with producer Robert Schneider, this time at Schneider's newly created Pet Sounds Studio at the home of Jim McIntyre.

The album was the sixth-best-selling vinyl album in 2008.NME named it the 98th greatest album of all time.

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is widely considered to be written about Anne Frank due to lyrics seemingly referring to her, such as lines referring to her birth and death dates. Though the group has never officially stated that the album is indeed about Frank, it is a popular theory among fans, and Jeff Mangum has mentioned the influence her diary, The Diary of a Young Girl, has made on his craft and outright referred to "Holland, 1945" being about her while performing live.

The album's cover was a collaboration between Mangum and R.E.M.'s staff designer, Chris Bilheimer. The general design reflects the taste of Jeff Mangum; Bryan Poole said that "Mangum was always into that old-timey, magic, semi-circus, turn-of-the-century, penny arcade kind of imagery." One particular piece Mangum showed to Bilheimer was an old European postcard with an image of people bathing at a resort, which was then cropped and altered. Bilheimer also designed a broadsheet-style lyrics sheet for the album, and inadvertently titled "Holland, 1945" in the process; Mangum wanted to use either "Holland" or "1945" for the song's title, and Bilheimer suggested he use both.

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