Oklahoma’s favourite musical sons, The Flaming Lips, certainly haven’t strayed from the spotlight, having played to Australian fans at New Year’s Falls Festival before playing Southbound, where Wayne Coyne’s giant laser hands were stolen before being found in a field somewhere.
They also had a busy twelve months, which saw the band featuring in a radio play called Wayne Coyne’s Human Head-Shaped Tumour, celebrating the 10th Anniversary of the band’s landmark 2002 album Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, produced a musical based on the record.
Musically speaking however, apart from their collaborative LP The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends, and reworking King Crimson’s 1969 debut with a bunch of psychedellically minded musicians, the Lips haven’t released a proper studio album since 2009’s Embryonic.
After four years, this April will see the Flaming Lips release their thirteenth studio album, titled The Terror, due for worldwide release on April 1st 2013 through Bella Union and Warner Bros (unless it’s some April Fool’s Day prank).
Coyne calls the new nine-track record, self-produced by the band in conjunction with long-term collaborator Dave Fridmann, a “bleak, distrubing record.”“Why would we make this music that is The Terror— this bleak, disturbing record…??” – Wayne Coyne
Asking the rhetorical question, “why would we make this music that is The Terror?” Coyne writes in a press release. “I don’t really want to know the answer that I think is coming: that WE were hopeless, WE were disturbed and, I think, accepting that some things are hopeless… or letting hope in one area die so that hope can start to live in another?? Maybe this is the beginning of the answer.”
The woolly description continues: “We want, or wanted, to believe that without love we would disappear, that love, somehow, would save us that, yeah, if we have love, give love and know love, we are truly alive and if there is no love, there would be no life.”
“The Terror is, we know now, that even without love, life goes on… we just go on… there is no mercy killing.” So… not the band’s return to sunshine-fuelled psychedelic pop it would seem.
The album will be preceded by a non-album single, the cheerily titled ‘Sun Blows Up Today’, which will feature in a commercial starring the Lips themselves that will air during the Super Bowl on February 3rd, reports Consequence Of Sound. The track will also be available as an exclusive download to all pre-orders for The Terror through iTunes starting January 29th.
You can view the artwork and tracklisting
Tracklist:
01. Look…The Sun Is Rising
02. Be Free, A Way
03. Try To Explain
04. You Lust
05. The Terror
06. You Are Alone
07. Butterfly, How Long It Takes To Die
08. Turning Violent
09. Always There…In Our Hearts
