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, initially earning a gold record and reaching No. 3 on the Billboard 200 albums chart. The album also yielded two top 30 hit singles, "People Are Strange", "Love Me Two Times", and eventually a platinum certification.

Strange Days was recorded between May and August 1967 at Sunset Sound Recorders in Hollywood, the same studio as their first LP, only this time using a professional 8-track recording machine. Unlike on their debut, which had been recorded in six days, the extra time allowed the band to experiment in the studio, often augmenting their already otherworldly sound with unusual instrumentation and sonic manipulation. According to Jerry Hopkins' Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive, the title track was one of the earliest uses of a Moog synthesizer in rock, while on the Morrison poem "Horse Latitudes" engineer Bruce Botnick took the white noise of a tape recorder, varied the speed by hand-winding it, and got something that sounded like wind, with the four band members all playing musical instruments in unusual ways - plucking the strings of a piano, for instance - and the organic sounds were tampered with electronically to create different times 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." Two of the songs contained on the album had been demoed in 1965 at Trans World Pacific Studios before Krieger joined the group: "My Eyes Have Seen You" and "Moonlight Drive". A second recording of "Moonlight Drive" was made in late 1966, but this version was deemed unsatisfactory. Though a conventional blues arrangement, "Moonlight Drive"'s defining features was its slightly off-beat rhythm and Krieger's 'Bottle-neck' guitar, which creates an eerie sound.

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