Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Down Beat
MusicHound	3.5/5
Q
Rolling Stone	(favorable)
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
Slant Magazine
Virgin Encyclopedia of Popular Music

Strange Days is the second studio album by the American rock band The Doors. Released in September 1967, it was a commercial success, reaching No. 3 on the Billboard 200 album chart and eventually earning a RIAA platinum certification. The album also yielded the Top 30 hit singles "People Are Strange" and "Love Me Two Times".

Strange Days was recorded during tour breaks between May and August 1967 at Sunset Sound Recorders in Hollywood (the same studio as their first LP). In contrast to the 1966 sessions, producer Paul A. Rothchild and engineer Bruce Botnick employed a cutting-edge 8-track recording machine. The protracted sessions allowed the band to experiment in the studio and further augment their otherworldly sound with unusual instrumentation and sonic manipulation; developed with the assistance of Paul Beaver, the title track constitutes one of the earliest uses of a Moog synthesizer in rock. On the Morrison poem "Horse Latitudes", Botnick took the white noise of a tape recorder and varied the speed by hand-winding it (resulting in a sound akin to wind) as the four band members played a variety of instruments in unusual ways. Further varispeed was then employed to create different timbres and effects.

Much like their debut album, Strange Days features several moody, authentically odd songs, although some critics feel it does not quite match up to its stellar predecessor. In his AllMusic review of the album, Richie Unterberger notes, "Many of the songs on Strange Days had been written around the same time as the ones that appeared on The Doors, and with hindsight one has the sense that the best of the batch had already been cherry picked for the debut album. For that reason, the band's second effort isn't as consistently stunning as their debut, though overall it's a very successful continuation of the themes of their classic album." In the 2014 book A Biography of The Doors: Love Becomes a Funeral Pyre, however, author Mick Wall writes, "Looking back now, all three of The Doors I later spoke to agreed that Strange Days was a watershed moment in the band's story. That it was, arguably, their finest, purest moment." Two of the album's songs ("My Eyes Have Seen You" and "Moonlight Drive") had been demoed in 1965 at Trans World Pacific Studios before Krieger joined the group; indeed, the latter had been conceived by Morrison prior to his fateful reunion with Manzarek in the summer of 1965. Although the song was attempted twice during the sessions for the band's debut, both versions were deemed unsatisfactory. A conventional blues arrangement, "Moonlight Drive"'s defining features was its slightly off-beat rhythm and Krieger's bottleneck guitar, which creates an eerie sound.

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