Neo-psychedelia

Neo-psychedelia (or simply neo-psych) is a genre of psychedelic music that draws inspiration from the music production approaches and songwriting of 1960s psychedelia, either exploring emulations of the sounds of the era or applying its ethos to new styles of music. It has occasionally seen mainstream pop success but is typically explored within alternative music, indie music and underground scenes.

Neo-psychedelia first developed in the late-1970s as an outgrowth of the British post-punk scene. In the United Kingdom, the "psychedelic revival" was referred to as "the New Psychedelia" or "acid punk". A neo-psychedelic wave of British alternative rock in the 1980s spawned the subgenres of dream pop and shoegaze. Mainstream artists like Prince and Lenny Kravitz explored the style in the 1980s and 1990s.

Characteristics

Neo-psychedelic artists primarily borrow a variety of musical, visual and aesthetic elements from 1960s and 1970s psychedelic music. Artists such as the Soft Boys, Spacemen 3 and the Church merged post-punk and jangle pop with psychedelic rock, pop, acid and folk music. According to AllMusic:

Whether they played trippy psychedelic pop (à la the Beatles, early Pink Floyd, and countless others), jangly Byrds-influenced guitar rock, distortion-drenched free-form jams, or mind-bending sonic experiments, these groups looked to psychedelia as a wellspring of evocative, unusual sounds, and either updated or unabashedly copied the original artists' approaches.

Some neo-psychedelic bands were explicitly focused on drug use and experiences, and like the acid house movement of the same era, evoked transitory, ephemeral, and trance-like experiences.