It’s a rarity for rock bands to last as long as The Flaming Lips have, and practically unheard of to remain as artistically relevant. But over a constantly shapeshifting, nearly 30-year lifespan, Lips’ frontman and spiritual guide Wayne Coyne and company have proven time and again they’re not your typical rock band. Case in point: While The Terror — the iconoclast Oklahoma City band’s 13th record — is technically its first “proper” album in roughly four years, The Lips have been as productive and creatively curious as ever.
From track-for-track album covers and collaborative EPs to experimental videos, 24-hour-long songs and tracks distributed in weirdo formats like gummy skulls, candy fetuses, and chocolate hearts it’s been impossible to keep up. Likewise, the band’s devotion to boundary pushing and musical evolution has been just as remarkable. Starting with Embryonic — a sprawling, if uneven double-album of raw improvisations fashioned into noisy songs — the band ushered in yet another new era, breaking away from the lush and joyful orchestrations of its masterpieces (The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots), and moving towards something messier and explosively urgent. Now with The Terror, the band is morphing again.
While a continuation of Embryonic’s brooding direction, The Terror’s nine relentless tracks — which all seamlessly flow from one to the next — bring more of a subdued tonal cohesion. Stretching beyond traditional “song structure,” the lengthy, meandering songs focus on an unshakeable sense of dread that ominously pervades throughout. With churning guitar static, gloriously droning synthesizers, and a ever-present grinding pulse of drums and bass, songs like “Look… The Sun Is Rising,” or the sinister 13-minute “You Lust,” are downright unnerving and unexpected. Elsewhere, “Butterfly, How Long It Takes To Die”‘s bursts of feedback and skin-crawling vocals feel like an acid trip gone horribly wrong.
However, for all the underlying bleakness, The Flaming Lips are still capable of sentimental beauty, as on “Try To Explain,” a blissful, yet heart-aching song of existential doubt and regret. “Try to explain why you’ve changed / I don’t think I’ll understand,” Coyne sings amid electronics and synths that ping around in your headphones like tiny synapses firing in your brain.
The Terror represents both a new direction and a restless transition more about the path than any one destination in mind. But for a band as wildly unpredictable as The Flaming Lips, that journey is the best part.