Though they’ve lately adopted a fire-hose approach to releasing covers and EPs and new singles, it’s been more than three years since the Flaming Lips released a proper album. As the Lips announced yesterday, that will change on April 2 when they put out The Terror, their follow-up to 2009’s Embryonic.
In keeping with the album’s title, front man Wayne Coyne has described the new album as a “bleak, disturbing record.” He elaborated in typically Wayne Coyne fashion:
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.
While that hopelessness may be a new twist, writing songs about bleak, disturbing topics isn’t all new for a band that’s made a career of songs about death and powerlessness and how everyone you know someday will die. We can’t hear any songs from the new album just yet, but we do have what could be a hint in new non-album track “Sun Blows Up Today,” which the band just uploaded to YouTube. Doomful title aside, the song finds the band exuberant as ever, complete with hand claps and a bouncy bass groove. The song will air in a Hyundai commercial during the Super Bowl, and, for a song about the end of the world, it shouldn’t do such a bad job at fitting in.
