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
The Sisters of Mercy
A hallucinatory love-or-death lyric that fuses war imagery, colour synaesthesia and a near-mantric chant into a portrait of…
obsessive desire death and eros intertwined disorientation / altered perception
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
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
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
Small Faces
A brief, dreamy lullaby-like interlude from Small Faces that treats the act of falling asleep as a small psychedelic event. The…
sleep and dreaming altered perception childhood/innocence
The Teardrop Explodes
A woozy, fragmented meditation on identity and perception, where the speaker seems caught between paranoia and hope, unsure…
identity and doubling paranoia perception vs reality
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Michael Hurley
A loose, hummed talking-blues about brewing and drinking tea that uses the ritual as cover for loneliness, heartbreak, and a…
solitude heartbreak masked by ritual domestic comfort
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
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
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
Mick Jenkins
Mick Jenkins stacks luxury flexes against sharp social commentary, using the titular truffle as a pun that links cannabis, fine…
racial exclusion and surveillance wealth as armor and contradiction truth-telling and censorship
Ultravox
A hazy, fragmented meditation on dissociation and memory, where the narrator drifts between waking consciousness and a slowed,…
dissociation memory and longing intimacy at a distance
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
Echo & the Bunnymen
A late-period Bunnymen track built on a woozy, half-lucid confession of dependency, where the narrator can't tell if he's…
addiction and compulsion emotional dependency self-erasure
Deerhunter
A short, hazy closing-track meditation from Deerhunter's Cryptograms, built from fragments of waking disorientation and…
disorientation bodily/psychic contamination isolation and its release
An early Echo & the Bunnymen single that plays disorientation as both confession and performance, with a narrator who admits to…
disorientation self-doubt the performance of feeling
Built to Spill
A song that circles the word "strange" until it loses and regains meaning, using repetition to enact the disorientation it…
disorientation communication breakdown cosmic indifference
The Beta Band
A woozy, repetition-heavy confession of disorientation and self-deception, built around the image of a head injury and a lost…
disorientation self-deception loss of love
Goldfrapp
"Ocean" is a hypnotic, incantatory track built from a small set of fragmented phrases that circle rather than progress, evoking…
loss of self surveillance and pursuit toxic attachment
"Holes" is a hazy, impressionistic meditation on loss and the failure of memory to hold together, built almost entirely from…
memory and forgetting grief disorientation
Radiohead
An almost mantra-like opening track that trades verse-chorus songwriting for repetition and disorientation, using a handful of…
disorientation control versus chaos communication breakdown
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
Wipers
A short, circling punk song built around a single anxious question, using minimal lyrics to stage a crisis of belonging and…
alienation emotional uncertainty isolation
Bad Company
A road-worn narrator drifts through a neon city at night, half-thrilled and half-alienated by its speed and casual violence. Bad…
urban alienation spectacle and danger the outsider observer
Wilco
A short, disoriented piece about someone trying to locate himself through self-deception and memory failure, using the image of…
self-deception disorientation distorted memory
A short, hypnotic piece built almost entirely from repetition, this song stages a男 narrator's address to a woman he calls lost,…
identity and self-knowledge gendered condescension seduction as control
This is a late-vaulted Jim Morrison recording, released decades after his death as a posthumous single with the surviving Doors…
escapism aging and decline fame and image
Wire
A late-period Wire track that layers disjointed, almost cut-up imagery of travel, transaction, and identity around a repeated,…
transience precarity identity and recognition
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
"Zero" is a synth-driven dance-rock track that turns anonymity into a kind of dare, addressing an unnamed "you" who is stripped…
anonymity and erasure nightlife as survival identity as performance
Hot Chip
A melancholic synth-pop meditation on growing up and drifting apart, built from fragmented childhood vignettes that dissolve…
nostalgia alienation failed effort
The Jesus and Mary Chain
"Perfume" strips lyric-writing down to near nothing—a handful of repeated phrases, a cat noise, and a woozy declaration of being…
disorientation bodily sensation over meaning irony toward bliss
A hazy, semi-improvised meditation built from repeated, almost mantra-like fragments about self-discovery and forward motion.…
self-discovery disorientation emotional avoidance