Kendrick Lamar
This is Kendrick Lamar's opening salvo in his 2024 feud with Drake, a slow-building diss track that escalates from clinical…
authenticity vs performance cultural appropriation of Blackness manipulation and dishonesty
Crowded House
A loose, affectionate meditation on recognition and connection, built around a greeting that doubles as a pun on altered states.…
connection and recognition childlike wonder mental clarity versus chaos
Panic! at the Disco
A deliberately slight, sunny pop song built around a nonsensical time-of-day image that stands in for a euphoric, slightly hazy…
nostalgia altered perception of time young romance
Band of Horses
A short, impressionistic address to someone who has disappointed the speaker, built almost entirely on a single repeated vow of…
disillusionment small-town judgment moral reckoning
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
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
Jamiroquai
A loose, groove-driven celebration of a drug-induced euphoria dressed up in sci-fi imagery, where the pleasure of altered…
drug-induced euphoria escapism communion/companionship
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
Red Hot Chili Peppers
A breezy, loosely surreal invitation to escape, built on a chain of playful non-sequiturs rather than a traceable plot. The song…
escapism freedom/flight romantic invitation
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
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
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 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
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
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
Orbital
Halcyon and On and On is an instrumental electronic piece built almost entirely from a small set of looping synth phrases and a…
repetition and cyclicality altered states / drug culture euphoria and calm
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
Vic Chesnutt
Vic Chesnutt runs through three unrelated examples of seemingly mystical experience -- a manufactured celebrity, a drug-induced…
skepticism versus wonder manufactured identity and celebrity drug-altered perception
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
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 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
Ben Harper
This is Ben Harper's cover of the Beatles' 1967 psychedelic classic, recorded for the soundtrack to I Am Sam, a film about a…
dissociation and altered perception childhood memory as refuge uncertainty of identity
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
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
Violent Femmes
This is Violent Femmes' version of a song widely known from its Gnarls Barkley original, reframed through the band's folk-punk,…
mental illness and self-perception identity versus control nostalgia for altered states
Kasabian
L.S.F. is a dense, slogan-like rock track built from fragmented, almost hallucinatory phrases about chemical excess, paranoia…
drug use and altered states paranoia and impending danger collective identity vs individual dissolution
Röyksopp
A minimal, almost mantra-like dance-pop track that stages pure euphoria without ever complicating it. Röyksopp builds the song…
euphoria openness to experience nostalgia
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
Carly Rae Jepsen
A maximalist pop song that strips romantic desire down to pure velocity and sensation, piling up images of flight and ascent to…
infatuation impatience with restraint transcendence through romance/desire
Jamie xx
A single phrase repeated for the entire duration functions less as lyric than as texture, a vocal sample looped into a mantra of…
euphoria repetition as meaning dance-floor ecstasy
Kid Cudi
A breezy, uptempo pop-rap track built for a family film, this song trades Cudi's usual melancholy and introspection for…
escapism euphoria freedom from worry
One Direction
A teen-pop declaration built on a single conceit: the addressee's unawareness of her own appeal is itself framed as the source…
idealized crush self-perception vs. others' perception innocence as attraction
A disco-funk track that uses space travel as an extended metaphor for euphoria, likely sexual or chemical in nature. The lyric…
euphoria and escapism space travel as metaphor for ecstasy sensory overload
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
Fatboy Slim
This is a track built almost entirely from a single syllable and a pun on the can-can dance, functioning less as a lyric than as…
collective euphoria permission and liberation repetition as ecstasy
Roy Harper
A meditation on long-distance flight and the way jet travel scrambles ordinary time, used as a metaphor for the instability of…
time and dislocation illusion versus reality transatlantic distance and longing
Bee Gees
A falsetto-driven disco hymn that treats a night of dancing as a near-mystical, almost religious experience. The lyric barely…
nightlife as transcendence collective euphoria desire and surrender
Gosh is almost entirely instrumental, built around a handful of chopped vocal samples that function less as lyrics than as…
rave culture and nostalgia collective euphoria minimalism as expression
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