Television
A downtown-New York nocturne about a night walk that tips into a heightened, almost hallucinatory perception of the city,…
urban nightlife altered perception desire and detachment
The Doors
A short, propulsive rock song built almost entirely around a single command repeated until it becomes a mantra. It uses images…
transcendence limits of perception desire and entrapment
The Cure
This is The Cure's cover of Jimi Hendrix's psychedelic classic, recorded as a B-side. Robert Smith takes a song built on…
disorientation altered perception romantic infatuation as intoxication
Queen
A groove-driven, riff-heavy jam built more on sensation than sense, "Dragon Attack" trades narrative for pure sonic and sexual…
sexual conquest altered perception surrender to instinct
Genesis
A slight, hazy pop song from Genesis's most commercial period, built on a chorus of impossible images and a coy premise about a…
romantic idealization altered perception the impossible/surreal
Animal Collective
A woozy meditation on connection and the strangeness of being alive, delivered with the giddy, slightly overwhelmed voice of…
interconnectedness altered perception wonder and overwhelm
The Flaming Lips
This is a cover of the Beatles psychedelic classic, and the Flaming Lips' version leans into the song's dreamlike dissolve…
altered perception longing for an unreachable figure dream logic
Lana Del Rey
This is Lana Del Rey's cover of Donovan's 1966 psychedelic classic, recorded for the horror anthology film it lends its title…
paranoia surveillance and being watched cultural anxiety
Mercury Rev
A hazy, druggy fable about pursuit and containment, where sunlit imagery of seduction and pleasure keeps curdling into images of…
intoxication and altered perception freedom versus entrapment instability of the self
The Who
A disoriented young man rides a commuter train while his mind fractures into fragments of memory, sexual anxiety, and social…
dissociation and identity collapse adolescent sexuality and shame class and Englishness
Mott the Hoople
A woozy, half-hallucinated love song addressed to a woman who dissolves into imagery as the singer describes her, until it…
obsessive love dissolution of identity intoxication/altered perception
Big Thief
A hazy address to an otherworldly presence that may be a lover, a hallucination, or an actual extraterrestrial, the song treats…
disappearance and loss altered perception vs. reality longing for transcendence
Portishead
A hazy meditation on the isolation of subjective perception, built from a handful of repeated fragments rather than a developed…
solipsism and isolation the unreliability of perception alienation within intimacy
A hazy, ritualistic song about a woman navigating fear and secrecy through altered states and mystical imagery. The Flaming Lips…
altered consciousness fear and avoidance ritual and mysticism
Shawn Colvin
A love song built almost entirely around a single sensory image: the sky looking different, bluer, since a new relationship…
new love transformed perception wonder and gratitude
Hüsker Dü
A rapid-fire punk song that opens Zen Arcade with a set of clipped, almost proverbial observations about perception, autonomy,…
moral ambiguity autonomy vs. imposed rules perception and empathy
Built to Spill
A woozy meditation on childhood perception, drinking, and loneliness, built around the image of the Big Dipper as an unreliable…
perception vs. reality loneliness alcohol and self-deception
Harry Nilsson
A small argument about the color of the sun spirals into a meditation on epistemic vertigo -- how do you trust anything,…
epistemological doubt trust and betrayal perception vs. reality
Yes
A meditation on perception and control dressed in nature imagery, "Perpetual Change" argues that human certainty about mastering…
illusion vs. perception hubris and control impermanence
Röyksopp
A hazy, dreamlike track that stages a search for revelation inside what feels like an altered or trance-like state, where…
altered states / intoxication longing for transcendence isolation and communion
Ride
Lannoy Point opens Ride's 2017 comeback album with a piece of philosophical pop that treats perception and belief as unstable…
perception vs belief impermanence environmental/civilizational collapse
Arca
Thievery is an instrumental piece from Arca's Xen expanded edition, part of a body of work built around a shape-shifting…
identity and alter-ego bodily transformation violation and extraction
Caroline Polachek
A hypnotic mantra built around an untraceable character called Bunny, who functions as an alter ego for elusiveness itself. The…
elusiveness and self-protection commodification of intimacy alter-ego/persona play
Tyler, The Creator
A dense, deliberately abrasive verbal assault built on non sequitur, shock imagery, and sudden lurches into confession. Beneath…
alter-ego and fractured identity provocation as defense mechanism absent father
T. Rex
Monolith is a brief, riddling meditation on time, fate, and human blindness, delivered in Marc Bolan's characteristic style of…
fate and determinism time as a ruling force obscured perception
Interpol
A drive down a California highway becomes the frame for a meditation on self-improvement, ambition, and the gap between stated…
self-reinvention ambition versus stagnation perception and denial
Madonna
A meditation on emotional guardedness set to icy, spiritually-inflected electronica, the song addresses a lover whose…
emotional withholding spiritual awakening vulnerability vs. self-protection
The Chemical Brothers
An instrumental-led score piece built around a largely spoken/sung verse that imagines consciousness dissolving into water,…
loss of control altered consciousness transformation/adaptation
Sandy Denny
A brief, loosely sketched vignette about a woman who sleeps late and drifts through her days, addressed by a narrator who can't…
idleness and withdrawal ambiguous judgment vs. affection female eccentricity
A short, circling meditation on how received wisdom persists even when it no longer fits reality. Built to Spill uses plain,…
conformity vs. change epistemic humility the persistence of habit
The xx
A short, spare meditation on the way absence corrodes trust in a relationship, where the beloved's reality becomes…
insecurity in intimacy fear of abandonment the unreliability of perception
A song built around an irritation so small it borders on absurd — an inaudible, nagging sound only the speaker can perceive —…
suppressed anger perception and isolation paranoia or hypersensitivity
The War on Drugs
The title track from The War on Drugs' 2014 breakthrough is a hazy, half-legible meditation on disorientation and emotional…
disorientation emotional isolation memory and nostalgia
Unwound
A short, mantra-like song that treats a yoga pose associated with total relaxation and imitation of death as a metaphor for…
nihilism dissociation distrust of perception
Carly Simon
A pep talk in song form, urging a woman to stop measuring her steady, familiar relationship against fantasies of glamour and…
long-term love vs. novelty contentment reframed as romance self-perception
Ella Fitzgerald
Irving Berlin's standard is a compact declaration of romantic relief, built almost entirely on the pun between 'blue' as color…
romantic joy transformation of perception time and its acceleration in love
Magazine
A tense, self-lacerating address to a phantom or projection—Devoto's title borrows the Tibetan Buddhist concept of a 'tulpa,' a…
obsession and self-deception desire mixed with fear the unreliability of perception
Black Sabbath
This closing track from Paranoid pairs a lurching instrumental jam with a half-comic, half-paranoid account of drug-induced…
drug paranoia unreliable perception self-deception
Sonic Youth
Sonic Youth's "Schizophrenia" builds a fractured character sketch around a woman whose mental illness is treated with unsettling…
mental illness and stigma unreliable perception family cruelty
Boards of Canada
An instrumental piece from Boards of Canada's third album that trades on the gap between its title's cheerful theatrical…
nostalgia childhood media artifice versus memory