Professional ratings
Retrospective reviews
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Chicago Tribune
Christgau's Record Guide	A+
Encyclopedia of Popular Music
Entertainment Weekly	A
PopMatters	9/10
The Rolling Stone Album Guide

The Basement Tapes is a studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan and the Band. It was released on June 26, 1975, by Columbia Records and was Dylan's 16th studio album. The songs featuring Dylan's vocals were recorded in 1967, eight years before the album's release, at houses in and around , where Dylan and the Band lived. Although most of the Dylan songs had appeared on bootleg records, The Basement Tapes marked the songs' first official release.

During his 1965-1966 world tour, Dylan was backed by a five-member rock group, the Hawks, who would later become famous as the Band. After Dylan was injured in a motorcycle accident in July 1966, four members of the Hawks came to Dylan's home in the Woodstock area to collaborate with him on music and film projects. While Dylan was out of the public's eye during an extended period of recovery in 1967, he and the members of the Hawks recorded more than 100 tracks together, incorporating original compositions, contemporary covers and traditional material. Dylan's new style of writing moved away from the urban sensibility and extended narratives that had characterized his most recent albums, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, toward songs that were more intimate and which drew on many styles of traditional American music. While some of the basement songs are humorous, others dwell on nothingness, betrayal and a quest for salvation. In general, they possess a rootsy quality anticipating the Americana genre. For some critics, the songs on The Basement Tapes, which circulated widely in unofficial form, mounted a major stylistic challenge to rock music in the late sixties.

When Columbia Records prepared the album for official release in 1975, eight songs recorded solely by the Band—in various locations between 1967 and 1975—were added to 16 songs taped by Dylan and the Band in 1967. Overdubs were added in 1975 to songs from both categories. The Basement Tapes was critically acclaimed upon release, reaching number seven on the Billboard 200 album chart. Subsequently, the format of the 1975 album has led critics to question the omission of some of Dylan's best-known 1967 compositions and the inclusion of material by the Band that was not recorded in Woodstock.

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Wikipedia