The Flaming Lips – The Terror

The Flaming Lips – The Terror (Bella Union/COOP/V2)

The Flaming Lips have attained nearly as much notoriety for their wacky, animal-suit wearing, confetti cannon-shooting antics as for their often stunning musical output. While they’ve always exhibited a fascination with darker themes like chaos and mortality, the take-home message has generally been pretty joyous and life-affirming –  or at least curious and ambitiously experimental enough to betray a sense of hope. However, their 13th studio album finds them exploring bleaker and more disturbing territory than ever. Surprisingly, even though The Terror is devoid of the kind of ecstatic payoffs that formed the pinnacle of their psychedelic bacchanalias in the past, this somehow makes it seem more honest and definitely sound more cohesive than pretty much anything they’ve ever done.

by Carly Blair