Suggestions
Suggestions
Psychedelic rock is rock made to sound the way an LSD trip feels. British and American bands built it in the mid-1960s out of electric guitars run through fuzz, wah-wah and feedback, organs and the Mellotron, sitar and tabla taken from Indian music, drones and modal melodies, solos stretched into long jams, and studio tricks such as backwards tape, flanging and heavy reverb.
The Texas band the 13th Floor Elevators printed the words “psychedelic rock” on their business cards in January 1966, and the style peaked between 1967 and 1969, the years of the Summer of Love and Woodstock. In the 1970s many of its British bands were making progressive rock, it fed into heavy metal, and it has come back in new forms since the late 1970s. In the 1990s the Californian bands Kyuss and Sleep crossed it with doom metal, slowed it down and tuned low, and that became stoner rock.
Seattle’s Critté mixed it with electronics and space rock for their 2017 video “Spaced Out”, and Brooklyn’s Mountain God pulled it toward doom and sludge on “Bread Solstice”, released the same year and discussed in an interview. Seattle’s Screen Frogs mixed it with garage rock and krautrock on “Subterranean Wreckage Amidst Stolen Hues”, an album they broke down in 2024, with zurna and flute on one of its tracks. The Blue Marmalades recorded their EP “River” in a barn outside Annecy, and said in 2026 that the psychedelic effects they added in the studio could not yet be played on stage.