Even more than their reworkings of classic prog albums by King Crimson and Pink Floyd, it’s The Flaming Lips’ unwavering ambition and experimentation that makes them a true progressive

band. On new album The Terror, the band delve into some very dark places for the first time, but frontman Wayne Coyne reassures us that there’s light at the end of the tunnel… Words: Emma Johnston

ooking at them from far enough away, it’s easy to think you’ve got a handle on The Flaming Lips. On the surface, they’re a band of pure joy, the unique self-

proclaimed “weirdos” who take the darkest day and paint it Technicolor, their infectious mix of punk DIY attitude, hippie-ish communalism and proggy artistic experimentation taking fans on a thrilling, 30-year trip of sonic and visual invention. Their live shows bring a ray of sunshine to even the most waterlogged festival field, psychedelic backdrops flashing as frontman Wayne Coyne rides across the crowd in his giant hamster ball while fans and friends dressed as animals and superheroes dance beatifically on the stage. There’s a deeply intelligent sense of fun, of seizing the moment, putting aside shyness and making a meaningful human connection that elevates them beyond just a rock band. Heck, this is the band that made Christmas On Mars, a festive sci-fi treat that’s as weird as it is wonderful.

And yet, with The Terror, The Flaming Lips have produced the darkest, most unsettling album you’re likely to hear all year, a beautiful nightmare of murmured half-thoughts, repetitive drones and atonal shrieks that channel Suicide at their coldest, and emotionally raw lyrics that burn like acid.

“I love it, but I don’t listen to it much because for me it sort of puts me in a state of mind that I don’t really like that much,” says frontman Wayne Coyne, sipping a posh coffee in a chilly London hotel room. “It’s anxiety, there’s something about it that’s very much a part of me, or was more a part of me as we were making it, that I don’t like to just sit there and listen to it.”

Wayne Coyne is excellent company. Tall, wiry and looking much younger than his 52 years, he talks 90 to the dozen (“Sometimes I get a little off course,” he warns), his mind zipping from one topic to the other with no concern for continuity. He has an enthusiasm for his immediate environment, the people he

comes into contact with and his own creative work that would be described as childlike if it wasn’t so mathematically incisive. But the darkness that looms over The Terror has always lurked in the band’s work, adding depth and forcing the listener to ask questions about the nature of being alive. Do You Realize?? from 1999’s The Soft Bulletin may be the State Song of Oklahoma – the place they still call home (Coyne can be spotted on Oklahoma City’s Google Streetview, sitting in a bath outside his house at Halloween, under a sign reading ‘Blob In The Bath’) – but it’s a plea to notice the beauty in life because, as the achingly sad lyrics so starkly remind us, everyone and everything you know and love will die in the end.

Embedding their music into jelly skulls quickly escalated into limited-edition versions encased in real human craniums. Follow Coyne on Twitter and you’ll find pictures of freshly oozing roadkill, carefully composed to pick out exquisite and horrifying colour. And those live shows? For every balloon-laden moment of euphoria, there’s another, such as

Coyne singing through a stream of fake blood pouring from his forehead, that can invoke a sense of primal unease.

A lot of their music seems to have tackled physical human frailty, death and what it means to be alive, with a veil of ambiguity that allows people to see what they want in it (fans are still searching for the true meaning of Waiting For Superman a decade and a half on, some finding solace in it after the death of a parent, others seeing the overwhelming fear of responsibility that comes with the birth of a child – it’s all up for grabs). But The Terror seems more rawly honest in taking on emotional frailty and fear. The stark Try To Explain, in particular, details the death throes of a long-term love affair to devastating effect.

“I don’t really write songs that are about me. I’m really writing songs that are just cool things to listen to,” says Coyne, contradicting himself in the next breath. “But in time, in a song like Race For The Prize or Do You Realize??, I go, ‘Oh, that’s about me.’ But I don’t like to know that they’re about me when they’re just still with me. And little by little you start to ask yourself what’s going on there. A lot of the meaning of things is a lot like a bruise. I can punch you now and it’s painful now, and then it goes away, but then a little bit later it’s, ‘Oh here comes the stuff.’ And I think music is kind of like that for me. I can take the punch, but when the bruise starts to come in, it’s, ‘Oh, this is what it means now.’

“But it’s a horrible, powerful, sad thing, when that [sings] ‘try to explain’, the way that those chords and those notes and that distortion crescendo up there is uncanny. There’s elements of this record that are about things that were happening in my and Steven’s life… we made a pact that we can’t really say because it affects too many people. Some things are a struggle to talk about because it affects a lot of people and would hurt them.”

The Steven he’s talking about is Steven Drozd, the prodigiously talented multi-instrumentalist who joined the band as a drummer in 1991. He is, says Coyne, “a master musician. I can’t even emphasise how good of a musician he is. And for him to

Wayne Coyne: flower child...

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Blowing their own trumpet: from left, Steven Drozd, Michael Ivins, Wayne Coyne, Derek Brown and Kliph Scurlock, 2013.

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– to their involvement with their home-town gallery and arts space The Womb, due to reopen in the coming months (“It’s an art space that us as a collective of weirdos can just do stuff”). But as the Flaming Lips have discovered in their 30 years of existence, searching for answers about your life through creativity has a habit of providing them, whether you’re ready for the truth or not.

“Well yeah, every artist, if you don’t do that you’re an idiot, and if you do do that you’re an idiot,” the frontman says with a chuckle. “It’s like all good things. It’s like, if you like a hotdog, don’t go to the slaughterhouse. The curiosity is, ‘I like this,’ and you go backwards from, ‘How did it get here, what is this?’ There’s a little bit of a slaughterhouse waiting for all of us, in our way of being.”

But while The Terror is as heavy as can be, in every sense, life in The Flaming Lips bubble seems to be one spent constantly looking for the light. When the demons are out in the open, they’re easier to slay, and Coyne’s instinct to lean towards the positive is impossible to crush.

“I never want to make it seem like this is some plea for ‘woe is me’ – it’s not,” says Coyne with a huge, warm smile. “I have the greatest life anybody could ever live. But as an artist and a sensitive person, I feel like it’s my duty to go to that area.”

The Terror is out now via Bella Union. See www.flaminglips.com.

Foiled again. The Terror won't make it through this time…

let his music be of my expression is amazing. But he’s of a calibre of a Stravinsky or something like that.”

Drozd is responsible for the bleak, often frightening, insular sound of The Terror, having locked himself away in the studio – while Coyne was off working with collaborators on last year’s Heady Fwends Record Store Day album – and summoned black aural magic. He’s a man with demons of his own, Drozd’s well-documented struggles with heroin addiction raising their head again when he was working on the sonic map of the new record. And while this impossibly difficult period undoubtedly played into the claustrophobic repetition and creepy, half-hidden vocals on The Terror, Coyne prickles slightly in defence of his friend, who’s now clean and every bit as prolific in his ideas and arrangements as ever.

“You know, this isn’t Steven,” he says. “The Steven that made this music is now the Steven

after that. He’s completely changed, and he does feel a lot of regret and a lot of guilt and a lot of strange anxiety that that is what people perceive his life is. It’s so close to us that people tie all these things into it, like, ‘Here’s this druggy, freaked-out guy that’s making all this music.’ When we speak about a lot of things we romanticise it and say, ‘Isn’t this cool?’ And this time it’s not that cool, because it’s so much a part of us and it’s not something that we like, and we wish that we could not be that way. For the first time ever, we’re standing here saying, ‘I know this is the way that we are,’ and in one corner that’s the greatest thing that art does, but when it’s you, it’s tough.”

And it’s the art that comes first for them. They live it more than most, from the constant challenges they set themselves – 24-hour songs, ambitious reworkings of King Crimson’s In The Court Of The Crimson King and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon

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