54 albums · 1966–2024

Psychedelic rock, from San Francisco and London to Brazil, Turkey, Cambodia, the Paisley Underground and today

· 2 min read · by 1001 Albums

Jimi Hendrix in a patterned shirt, waistcoat and scarf, playing a white Stratocaster behind a microphone stand, a second guitar standing behind him, in a black and white photograph
Wayne Coyne with his arms raised under two giant inflatable hands, green and red laser beams bursting from a light behind them over a stage filled with smoke and a crowd holding up phonesMark Speer playing guitar with one foot on a monitor and Laura Lee playing a pale yellow bass in a leopard print top, a stage light shining behind her
Jimi Hendrix in Helsinki on 22 May 1967. Photo: Hannu Lindroos / Lehtikuva, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. · The Flaming Lips at the Harvest Festival in Sydney, November 2011. Photo: Wayne from Sydney, Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. · Khruangbin on the main stage of the Haldern Pop Festival, August 2019. Photo: Martin Schumann, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Psychedelic rock grew out of folk rock, the blues and the garage bands of the mid-sixties, at the time LSD was spreading among young musicians. In 1966 the 13th Floor Elevators from Austin put the word on an album cover, the Byrds played Eight Miles High on Fifth Dimension and the Beatles closed Revolver with Tomorrow Never Knows. Long songs, droning guitars, studio tape tricks and Indian scales came into rock, first in San Francisco and London.

In San Francisco Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Country Joe and the Fish played at the Fillmore and the Avalon Ballroom, and in Los Angeles the Doors and Love made their records. In London Pink Floyd recorded The Piper at the Gates of Dawn in the same studios as Sgt. Pepper, beside Traffic, Cream, the Small Faces and the Pretty Things, and Jimi Hendrix came over from America to make his first albums there. The Seeds and the Electric Prunes stand for the garage bands. The sound travelled: Os Mutantes in São Paulo, Amon Düül II in Munich, Erkin Koray in Istanbul, WITCH in Zambia, and the Cambodian singers of the sixties gathered on Cambodian Rocks. In the eighties the Soft Boys, the Dream Syndicate and Rain Parade of Los Angeles's Paisley Underground took it up again, then Spacemen 3, Primal Scream, Spiritualized, Mercury Rev and the Flaming Lips. Later come Dungen, Tame Impala, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Kikagaku Moyo, Altın Gün and Khruangbin.

The list has 54 records from 1966 to 2024. It leaves out the singles, where much of sixties psychedelia was first heard, most of krautrock, space rock and progressive rock, stoner rock and psychedelic soul beyond Funkadelic, and the albums Deezer does not have, among them the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle, Flower Travellin' Band's Satori and the full Nuggets compilation. About 46 hours of music, 5 days of a few records each.

By genre

Rock 81%Pop 7%Soul & R&B 3%Other 9%
  • Rock 81%
  • Pop 7%
  • Soul & R&B 3%
  • Other 9%

The genres named most: psychedelic rock, rock, garage rock, neo-psychedelia, funk, folk rock.

The colours of the covers

A stripe for each cover, in the colour Tidal picks from it, sorted by hue; the greys at the end.

Where the music comes from

Music from 11 countries: United States 24, United Kingdom 15, Australia 4, Brazil 1, Germany 1 and 6 more. The deeper the colour, the more albums: one, two to four, five to nine, ten and more.

The 1960s

The 1970s

The 1980s

The 1990s

The 2000s

The 2010s

The 2020s

More lists

Lists of Genres first, then others; all of them on the blog. The blog.