10 Trippy Albums You MUST Hear Before You Die

2. Love - Forever Changes (1967)

For all the psychedelic songs and albums about peace, love and happy cosmic journeys, Forever Changes represents a more sinister side to the “trip”. Recorded in 1967 during the height of California’s Summer of Love, Forever Changes is a melancholy album that offers a paranoid and sceptical view of the drug-induced hippie hysteria that was sweeping America at the time.

The band, who had their own issues with substance misuse, had a knack for pairing dulcet tones with dark, surreal lyrics, from a tale of loneliness in “Alone Again Or”, to the grim social commentary of “A House is Not a Motel”: “More confusions, blood transfusions/The news today will be the movies for tomorrow/And the water's turned to blood/And if you don't think so/Go turn on your tub”. In “The Red Telephone” the conflict between lyric and song are continued, as the disturbing opening lines “Sitting on the hillside/Watching all the people die”, blatantly contrast its delicate, folksy, baroque influenced sound.

Although a commercial failure at the time of its release, the album has since been hailed by critics as one of the greatest ever made, serving as a forerunner to the later punk rock sound. It might have been a bad trip, but the destination was well worth it.