1967 is often remembered as the year of psychedelia – kaleidoscopic colours, swirling guitars, and mind-expanding studio effects.
But to reduce the year to acid trips and flower-power is to miss the sheer diversity and ambition of the music being made in 1967. Across the globe, artists were redefining what a popular album could be: the Beatles were transforming the studio into an instrument itself, the Velvet Underground was exposing the dark underbelly of city life, Aretha Franklin was turning soul into gospel-infused empowerment, and Bob Dylan was retreating into quiet, parable-filled reflection. Jazz, blues, country, orchestral pop, and early hard rock all vied for attention, often colliding in thrilling and unexpected ways.
In a single year, music became simultaneously more experimental and more personal, more political and more fantastical. There was room for the cosmic imagination of Syd Barrett, the razor-sharp observations of Ray Davies, and the swampy surrealism of Captain Beefheart. Some albums dazzled with technical innovation, others with lyrical sophistication, and some with sheer emotional impact.
The 21 albums on this list represent the richness of 1967 – a year that forever changed the possibilities of popular music, proving that rock, soul, folk, and avant-garde could all coexist and push boundaries simultaneously.
21. Buffalo Springfield Buffalo Springfield Again
A record born of tension, egos, and genius in flux. Neil Young, Stephen Stills, and Richie Furay all pull in different directions – from baroque pop ('Expecting to Fly') to fiery political rock ('Mr. Soul'). The result is uneven but dazzling, a mosaic of late-’60s America before the fracture lines split wide. Psychedelia hovers at the edges, but this is rootsy experimentation with real heart and grit.
Key track: 'For What It's Worth': A quintessential protest anthem, blending folk-rock harmonies with sharp social commentary on 1960s unrest.
20. Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band Safe as Milk
Beefheart's debut fuses swampy blues, raw rock, and dada-inspired surrealism, introducing his idiosyncratic vision with astonishing immediacy. His growling, unpredictable vocals and the band’s jagged, inventive arrangements feel both rooted in tradition and utterly ahead of their time, foreshadowing punk, post-punk, and experimental rock. Every track brims with off-kilter rhythms and quirky instrumentation.
Key track: 'Sure ‘Nuff ‘n Yes I Do': a raucous, twisted blues workout
- We named Captain Beefheart one of music's greatest mavericks
19. Jimi Hendrix Axis: Bold as Love
Axis: Bold as Love, released in 1967, showcases Hendrix’s more refined and soulful sensibilities, complementing the raw energy of Are You Experienced. The album blends psychedelic experimentation with lyrical introspection, intricate guitar work, and vivid sonic textures, revealing Hendrix as both a virtuoso and a storyteller. Its richly layered production and emotional depth make it a landmark in rock history.
Key track: 'Little Wing': delicate guitar work paired with wistful lyrical beauty.
18. Cream Disraeli Gears
A kaleidoscopic burst of psychedelic blues-rock brilliance, blending Clapton’s scorching guitar, Bruce’s melodic bass, and Baker’s inventive drumming. The album alternates between searing riffs, playful experimentation, and soulful grooves, capturing a band at the height of creativity. Its vibrant production, quirky covers, and fearless fusion of genres made it both of-the-moment and timeless, influencing generations of rock and blues musicians alike.
Key track: 'Sunshine of Your Love': heavy, hypnotic blues fused with psychedelic swagger.
17. Leonard Cohen Songs of Leonard Cohen
In a year obsessed with sensory overload, Cohen whispered instead. His debut album was austere, poetic, and intimate – just voice, guitar, and an unblinking stare into human desire. Songs like 'Suzanne' and 'So Long, Marianne' introduced a new kind of troubadour: literate, self-lacerating, romantic yet detached. Cohen’s restraint was revolutionary – proof that mystery could be found not in distortion, but in silence and space.
Key track: 'Suzanne': mystical love, longing, and luminous melancholy.
16. The Moody Blues Days of Future Passed
A pioneering fusion of rock and orchestral music, blending the London Festival Orchestra with lush vocals and Mellotron textures. Tracks like 'Nights in White Satin' exemplify the album’s emotional grandeur and cinematic sweep. It established the symphonic rock template, balancing rock instrumentation with classical sensibilities, and influenced generations of progressive and art rock musicians while retaining heartfelt, melancholic resonance.
Key track: 'Nights in White Satin': melancholic grandeur and symphonic textures.
15. The Who The Who Sell Out
A concept album masquerading as a pirate radio broadcast, blending satire, rock, and mock-commercial jingles. Pete Townshend’s songwriting balances cheeky humor with melodic invention, while Roger Daltrey and John Entwistle deliver precision and personality. The album’s inventive structure and sly commentary on consumer culture make it one of the era’s most playful and subversive masterpieces, cementing The Who’s reputation for conceptual audacity.
Key track: 'I Can See for Miles': Explosive, propulsive, defiantly complex rock masterpiece.
14. Jefferson Airplane Surrealistic Pillow
A defining album of the San Francisco scene, blending folk sensibilities with emerging psychedelic textures. Grace Slick’s commanding vocals and Marty Balin’s melodic warmth anchor the band’s adventurous arrangements. Tracks like 'White Rabbit' and 'Somebody to Love' fuse surreal lyrics with hypnotic instrumentation, capturing the tension between innocence and the psychedelic counterculture, making it a landmark in American rock history.
Key track: 'White Rabbit': A surreal, hypnotic, psychedelic Alice-in-Wonderland anthem.
13. Bob Dylan John Wesley Harding
After a motorcycle crash and retreat to rural seclusion, Dylan resurfaced with something stark and biblical. John Wesley Harding was a tonic to the acid-soaked chaos of 1967 – sparse, moral, and mysterious. Backed by Nashville session pros, Dylan swapped electric fire for parables and parsimony, pioneering country rock in the process. It felt like a man stepping outside the zeitgeist to rebuild his myth from silence.
Key track: 'All Along the Watchtower'. Biblical tension meets electric, apocalyptic vision.
12. The Kinks Something Else by The Kinks
While the world floated off on clouds of psychedelia, Kinks frontman Ray Davies turned inward. Something Else traded trippy studio effects for bittersweet character sketches like 'Waterloo Sunset'. Its delicate melodies, harpsichords, and wry observations of British life capture a band moving toward timeless storytelling. A quietly radical record, Something Else showed that subtlety and satire could cut deeper than any phaser pedal.
Key track: 'Waterloo Sunset': bittersweet nostalgia bathed in golden light.
11. The Byrds Younger Than Yesterday
A masterclass in genre fusion: country, psychedelia, and proto-folk-rock meld seamlessly across shimmering harmonies and Roger McGuinn’s jangly 12-string guitar. Tracks oscillate between upbeat experimentation and reflective introspection, marking the band’s most adventurous period. Lyrically, the album explores youthful idealism tempered with worldly insight, crafting a timeless record that influenced both American and British psychedelia.
Key track: 'So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star': satirical, jangly anthem of music ambition.
10. Aretha Franklin I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You
With her Atlantic debut, Aretha Franklin didn’t just sing soul – she redefined it. Recorded in Muscle Shoals, the album brims with emotional depth and righteous fire. Aretha’s voice commands, pleads, and celebrates in equal measure, fusing gospel fervour with worldly wisdom. Every note feels lived-in, every phrase an assertion of identity. I Never Loved a Man… isn’t just an album – it’s a declaration of power, womanhood, and self-respect that changed popular music forever.
Key track: 'Respect': a demand, a celebration, and a revolution in rhythm.
9. Pink Floyd The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
Syd Barrett’s childlike wonder and cosmic imagination captured lightning in a bottle. Psychedelic textures, whimsical lyrics, and inventive guitar work define British psychedelia at its strangest and sharpest. The album’s playful surrealism, haunting melodies, and experimental tape effects created a blueprint for future Floyd ventures while remaining grounded in Syd Barrett’s singular vision.
Key track: 'Astronomy Domine': Cosmic psychedelia from Barrett.
8. The Rolling Stones Between the Buttons
A transitional gem – witty, cynical pop before the Stones embraced full rock ‘n’ roll grit. Clever arrangements, baroque flourishes, and Mick Jagger’s sly vocals showcase a band in playful experimentation. While not as raw as Aftermath, it teases the melodic potential that would later flourish. “Ruby Tuesday” epitomizes this blend of melancholy and sophistication, balancing sadness with baroque elegance.
Key track: 'Ruby Tuesday': Baroque pop tinged with bittersweet melancholy.
7. Love Forever Changes
Arthur Lee’s masterpiece paints Los Angeles as both paradise and purgatory – sunshine laced with existential dread. Forever Changes weaves mariachi brass, baroque strings, and folk guitars into an elegant tapestry of decay and beauty. Lee’s cryptic lyrics, delivered with quiet intensity, hint at apocalypse and disillusionment beneath the golden veneer. It’s a psychedelic record for those already waking from the dream.
Key track: 'Alone Again Or': Sunlit melodies shadowed by quiet despair.
6. The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour
Born of television folly, Magical Mystery Tour nonetheless contains some of The Beatles’ most transcendent moments. Though less cohesive than Sgt. Pepper, it’s where their surrealism shines brightest – 'I Am the Walrus', 'Strawberry Fields Forever', and 'Penny Lane' are dazzling, strange mini-worlds of sound and wordplay. Between whimsy and weirdness, it captures The Beatles in full psychedelic command, inventing new realities as they go.
Key track: 'I Am the Walrus': Nonsense, orchestration, and psychedelic brilliance collide.
5. The Doors The Doors
A debut that sounded like nothing else – equal parts mystic poetry, blues swagger, and dark theatricality. Jim Morrison’s baritone oozes menace and charisma, while Ray Manzarek’s organ conjures both church and carnival. From the sensual embers of 'Light My Fire' to the sprawling apocalypse of 'The End', it’s an album steeped in sex, death, and transcendence.
Key track: 'The End': A hypnotic, Oedipal descent into psychedelic darkness.
4. The Beach Boys Smiley Smile
A fractured, haunting echo of the abandoned Smile project, Smiley Smile emerged from Brian Wilson’s creative collapse – intimate, eerie, and strangely beautiful. Gone were the lush orchestrations, replaced by lo-fi textures and whispered harmonies that feel both homegrown and haunted. It’s a record of retreat and reinvention, where simplicity and fragility become virtues. What could have been pop’s grandest statement turned instead into its most delicate ghost.
Key track: 'Heroes and Villains': a broken beauty from pop’s great unraveling.
3. The Jimi Hendrix Experience Are You Experienced
This was the album that detonated guitar music. Hendrix’s debut introduced a fusion of blues, psychedelia, and pure cosmic energy that felt almost supernatural. With Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding, he created controlled chaos – feedback sculpted into melody, rhythm turned to fire. Beneath the pyrotechnics, though, lay emotional nuance and a sense of otherworldly wonder. It’s hard to imagine rock’s future without Are You Experienced lighting the fuse.
Key track: 'Purple Haze': Reality bends, minds melt – the sound of rock’s reinvention.
2. The Velvet Underground & Nico The Velvet Underground & Nico
Lou Reed and John Cale’s debut remains one of rock’s most influential provocations – a work of darkness amidst the technicolour 1967 scene. Songs of addiction, S&M, and urban alienation were paired with Nico’s icy vocals and distorted beauty. Initially reviled, it later became a blueprint for punk, goth, and indie rock. Stark, fearless, and avant-garde, it proved that vulnerability and noise could coexist in unforgettable harmony.
Key track: 'Heroin': a hypnotic rush between ecstasy, despair, and total sonic surrender.
1. The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
A turning point in modern music, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was more than an album – it was a world unto itself. The Beatles shed their mop-top past and embraced studio experimentation, orchestral colour, and psychedelic imagination. Its concept – a fictional band performing a show – provided a playful framework for dazzling variety: from vaudeville pastiche to cosmic introspection.
Lennon’s surrealism, McCartney’s tuneful precision, Harrison’s mysticism, and Starr’s warmth combined in a vivid, unified soundscape. It captured the optimism, curiosity, and creative freedom of 1967, proving that pop could be art, that art could sell millions – and that music could reimagine what culture itself might sound like.
Key track: 'A Day in the Life': a dreamlike crescendo of chaos, reflection, and quietly cosmic awe.
Artist pics Getty Images
