Released nine months after their debut, The Doors' Strange Days finds the band expanding their sound while retaining their strengths. According to original engineer Bruce Botnick in the liner notes, he and the band listened to a monaural acetate reference disc of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's before it was released and were awestruck by it. That album opened up the possibilities of what a studio can do, and inspired them.

The music and ideas of The Doors run counter to the peace and love that was flowing out of the '60s counterculture. The band, Morrison's lyrics especially, embraced the darkness, the fear, the pain of life, knowing you can't have one without the other. The yin and the yang are the price of admission.

The album begins with the title track, a moody psychedelic number with Jim's voice's augmented by passing through a synthesizer. "[Strange days] are going to destroy our casual joys" is realization of the price to be paid for riding so high, for himself and the world. The music is a nightmarish swirling kaleidoscopic with Manzarek's keyboards leading the procession.

The evocative moodiness of some Doors' songs would surely be an influence on the Goth scene, which began a decade later. The lyrics from "You're Lost Little Girl," "Unhappy Girl," and "I Can't See Your Face In My Mind" could just as easily have come out of the mouths of Bauhaus' Peter Murphy or The Cure's Robert Smith. The latter contributed a Doors' song for a tribute to Elektra Records, but chose to cover "Hello, I Love You."

Two hits from Strange Days are still played frequently on classic rock stations: "Love Me Two Times" and "People Are Strange". Krieger wrote the former; his pop sensibilities creating another hit. It begins with a very familiar guitar riff. Manzarek's keyboards sound like a harpsichord. Morrison vocals and Densmore's hard drum strokes capture the narrator's passion.

The sound collage "Horse Latitudes" is a poem of Morrison's inspired by a drawing of the Spanish throwing horses overboard as they approached the New World. It is augmented by sound effects and is most likely what he would rather have been creating instead of rock music. It is a precursor to the brilliant An American Prayer.