Psychedelia is alive and vibrant in 2024. Musicians worldwide have been exploring the visionary potential of electrical instruments in all manner of new and novel ways, integrating shimmering production and stream-of-consciousness song structures into hip-hop, progressive rock, metal, jazz, and most other genres you can think of. Meanwhile, previously under-appreciated genres are being busted out of the bargain bins and put on a global stage, like the magnificent Turkish psych of Kit Sebastien. Plenty of others are sticking with tried-and-true psychedelic templates, though, like the searing lysergic acid rock of Sweden’s Goat or the blissed-out baroque pop of the Lemon Twigs.
So set your controls for the heart of the sun; here are the ten best psychedelic albums of 2024!
10. Kit Sebastien – New Internationale (Brainfeeder)
On New Internationale, Kit Sebastien are the new Stereolab. The psychedelic pop duo mine a similar vein of obscure soundtracks, library music, and agitprop to produce a fizzy dayglo smoothie of funk guitars and political consciousness. Where Stereolab steeped their retrodelia in francophonic fabulousness, New Internationale leans into Turkish psych/funk and Middle Eastern folk music, making them like an easy-listening Altın Gün.
While their grooves may be light and breezy, their rhetoric is anything but, delivering lyrics like “Collective salvation in the making / Formation of the New international / Is this another adamant march toward catastrophe or an overture to the age of revolutionary action?” over buzzing, burring analog synths. As the saying goes, any revolution without dancing isn’t worth taking part in.
9. La Luz – News of the Universe (Sub Pop)
La Lux‘s sixth LP finds the Seattle quartet in transition. They’ve gained a drummer with the addition of Audrey Johnson but lost a bassist and keyboardist with the departure of Lena Simon and Alice Sandahl. Simon and Sandahl’s departure made room for a new bassist and electronics wizard, recruiting bassist Lee Johnson and producer Maryam Qudus, formerly known as Spacemoth.
These last two musicians, in particular, have done much to overhaul the band’s sound, pushing the bass forward in the mix and adding a particularly electronic texture to News of the Universe, with Qudus’ analog synths and sequencers serving as a beaded glitter curtain, refracting Shana Cleveland’s existential angst into a sugarplum fairy tale wonderland of Beach Boys harmonies and dazed, middle-distance reverie. It’s a perfect setting for La Luz’s stories of life during freefall.
8. The Bevis Frond – Focus on Nature (Fire Archive)
The Bevis Frond are rare musical specimens in 2024—a genuinely middle-class psychedelic act who genuinely seem content cranking out rock solid psych rock, power pop, and amped up rock ‘n roll year after year, decade after decade—primarily organized around lead singer and guitarist Nick Saloman, who has released almost 30 albums as the Bevis Frond over nearly 40 years. While Saloman might not be entirely without regrets or aspirations – he seems to be taking on the persona of a down-at-heel aging roadie on “The Hug,” desperate for some form of recognition for his service, even if it’s just a smile or a hug – Saloman seems to acknowledge they’re not going to be everyone’s cup of Earl Grey. In “Here For the Other One”, he cloaks his obscurantist instincts in a metaphor for going to a gig to see the opener.
Focus on Nature might not be the flashiest, splashiest psych record this year, but that’s mainly because we’re conditioned for pop spectacle. It’s got everything a psychonaut could neat – burning Farfisa organs, addictive hooks, sweet ballads, and, most importantly, an even sweeter guitar. Saloman’s pyrotechnics are always the crown jewel of a Bevis Frond record, soaring and crashing like neon seagulls one second, floating across an English moor the next. He’s like a more mild-mannered Jimi Hendrix or a less fuzzy and alcoholic Guided By Voices. Nick Saloman is a genuine treasure of the psychedelic underground. Someone give him a hug.
7. Slift – Ilion (Sub Pop)
Psychedelia isn’t all paisley and flower power. It can entail the dystopian paranoia of post-punk, the natty dread of dub, and the cybertronic machine trance of various types of electronic music. It can even the paint-peeling pathos of extreme metal, pairing behemoth bellows and incendiary fretwork with wavy production and metaphysical themes.
Toulouse, France’s Slift seem to be picking up where millennial post-metal left off, adopting the transhuman force of Isis and the epicness of Mastodon with the highly technical precision of bands like King Gizzard. Everything on Ilion is on a grand scale, even the runtimes. It clocks in at a meaty 79 minutes, but it’s only got eight songs. It feels more like wandering through some inhuman landscape than listening to a pop record, arid deserts evaporating into Moebius-like cityscapes devoid of life. It’s a journey and an arduous one at times. Slift’s mighty engine will keep you pushing forward, though, Tower of Babel percussion raining from the sky like burning wreckage while the bass rumbles like divine retribution. Surrender is not an option.
6. Nolan Potter – The Perils of Being Trapped Inside a Head (Independent)
Nolan Potter has more ideas than a think tank tanked up on free espresso. The Perils of Being Trapped Inside a Head is twistier than Snake Alley, swaying and bobby from 1970s AM gold to knotty prog to muscular funk, blazing power pop, and swaying hippy rock while somehow never sounding unfocused or bloated. It’s like a glittery Who, a less manic Of Montreal, or a modern update on the Elephant 6 Collective. It’s a perfect psychedelic pop confection that never becomes too precious or twee. Rarely does ambition meet imagination so seamlessly, so tight yet simultaneously so loose. It’s refreshing.
5. Mount Kimbie – The Sunset Violent (Warp)
On their fifth LP, Mount Kimbie prove they can do anything and are surprisingly convincing at that. They’ve reinvented themselves more often than David Bowie and Bob Dylan combined, shapeshifting from one of the slickest and most sophisticated exports of the post-dubstep/chillwave underground to art popsters, a solid post-punk outfit and, most recently, a suave, spectral R&B group. On The Sunset Violent, they show themselves to be an equally proficient shoegaze/dream pop outfit, bringing on two members to create an addictive electro-rock blur. They’ve still got the unmoored tracking, lo-fi burr of Saturday Mornings overdosing on Flintstones chewable vitamins of their earliest electronic work, but the rock band format and shoegaze production gives The Sunset Violent a unique, blank-eyed detachment that’s as steely and detached as a Joy Division outtake while still sounding playful and fun.
4. Dummy – Free Energy (Trouble in Mind)
The name Dummy is a Red Herring designed to throw you off the trail of the Los Angeles quartet’s real influences. Barring a yen for funky breakbeats, Dummy have very little to do with the nocturnal noir paranoia of Portishead’s debut. Instead, they channel the sleek motorik beats and pop ebullience of Stereolab with notes of My Bloody Valentine’s technicolor noise pop drop shadow. Organs flare like peacock feathers, guitars chime like good news, drums hold on for dear life. Free Energy is the wild, unfettered sound of freedom, a much-needed blast of optimism in a dim world.
3. Goat – Goat (Rocket)
A new album by Goat is getting to be a Halloween tradition. Last year gave us the quality Medicine LP, while the previous year delivered Oh Death, one of the Swedish psych collective’s best. This year’s self-titled album carries on the tradition with aplomb, polishing the psych-folk tendencies of the last two albums with some acid-burn cosmic rock and some of the slickest production of their career to date. Goat are certainly doing their best to live up to their name!
2. The Smile – Cutouts (XL)
Jonny Greenwood‘s goal of releasing music “90% as good, twice as often” as Radiohead is bearing fruit. They released two albums of avant-classical streamlined future pop in 2024. Of the two, Cutouts is the wilder, woolier of the pair, emphasizing the Ligettian chamber experimentation of Thom Yorke‘s Confidenza soundtrack and Greenwood’s score for There Will Be Blood as well as the cybernetic electro pulse that’s been running through their radioactive veins since Kid A. It’s some of the loosest, most freewheeling music of either’s career while still sounding as polished and technically proficient as anything you’d expect from members of Radiohead.
1. The Lemon Twigs – A Dream Is All We Know (Captured Tracks)
There’s been plenty of fascinating international psych, electronic mutations, and genre mashups in this year’s psychedelic releases, but there’s still something to be said for straightforward, sunshiny flower power pop. The Lemon Twigs‘ straight-up Spirit of 1967 incense and peppermints sunshine daydream is a refreshing blast of Vitamin D for dismal times, smoothing over anxieties about income inequality and societal collapse with euphoric Pet Sounds “bah bah bahs” and Left Banke electric harpsichords.
Mining classic rock bins for retrophiliac impulses isn’t precisely revolutionary, though. We’ve been trying to recapture the lightning in the bottle of the 1960s since at least Oasis‘ Definitely Maybe.
What makes the Lemon Twigs’ crate digging different is that they seem intent on unearthing the unhippest, uncoolest documents the decade has to offer. This isn’t Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar at the Monterey Pop Festival. This is the Strawberry Alarm Clock scene in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. It imagines a world where the Beatles’ “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “Drive My Car” has more cultural cachet than The White Album or Abbey Road or the Beach Boys’ Christmas record was as influential as Smile. Rather than dragging down the quality of the record, it invites a reappraisal of 1960s psychedelic pop and J. C. Penny rock. The best art encourages you to look at the world in a new way.