Psychedelic Rock
The 9 Best Psychedelic Rock
Tracks of All Time
Rock reorganised around the studio and the drug, from 1966: backwards tape, modal drones, guitars through everything available, and songs allowed to run as long as they liked. The permission slip krautrock and shoegaze both cashed.
- Origin
- San Francisco and London, 1966
- Tempo
- 80–150 BPM
- Also known as
- psych rock, acid rock, freakbeat, psychedelia
- Tracks
- 9
- Updated
- 2026-08-30
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Number 1: The Beatles / Tomorrow Never Knows
1966 · Parlophone
One chord, five tape loops, a drum pattern lifted from nowhere and a vocal sent through a rotating speaker. The most radical thing on any pop record of the decade, at the end of side two.
Also on Twice Over
Number 2: Pink Floyd / Interstellar Overdrive
1967 · Columbia
Nine minutes that begin as a riff and disintegrate into pure texture before reassembling. Barrett's Floyd were a genuinely improvising band and this is the surviving evidence.
Number 3: The Jimi Hendrix Experience / Purple Haze
1967 · Track
The tritone intro, the Octavia on the solo, and a guitarist who had obviously arrived from somewhere the rest of them had not. Still sounds like an event.
Number 4: The Byrds / Eight Miles High
1966 · Columbia
Coltrane's Impressions played on a twelve-string Rickenbacker, on a single, before anyone else had thought of it. Banned by American radio for a lyric about a flight.
Number 5: The Velvet Underground / Venus in Furs
1967 · Verve
An ostrich-tuned guitar, a viola drone and a subject nobody was putting on records. New York's answer to California, and considerably less interested in enjoying itself.
Number 6: Jefferson Airplane / White Rabbit
1967 · RCA Victor
A boléro that only ever gets louder, with a lyric that dares broadcasters to work out what it is about. Grace Slick's delivery is pure controlled threat.
Number 7: The Rolling Stones / 2000 Light Years from Home
1967 · Decca
From the album everyone agrees was a mistake, and it is superb — a Mellotron drifting over a rhythm section that has clearly stopped caring about the blues.
Number 8: Cream / Sunshine of Your Love
1967 · Reaction
The heaviest riff of the era and a drummer playing against it rather than with it. The point where psychedelia starts turning into something louder and less interested in colour.
Also on Sung to Someone
Number 9: Grateful Dead / Dark Star
1969 · Warner Bros.
Twenty-three minutes on record and considerably longer in a hall. A band treating a song as a location to be explored, which is either the best or the worst idea in this list.