The Flaming Lips will release their 21st studio album, American Head, on Sept. 11 through Warner records. The album will include 13 new singles, including an appearance by Kacey Musgraves on “God and the Policeman” and “Flowers of Neptune 6.”
Additionally, they released the song “My Religion is You” and its corresponding video.
The Flaming Lips were supposed to go on tour this summer, but they canceled and postponed shows due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Two versions of the album will be available, the group announced. One will be a black vinyl double LP that comes with the physical and digital albums. Another version will be a limited-edition color vinyl edition, with one blue and one pink LP.
“The music and songs that make up the AMERICAN HEAD album are based in a feeling,” said frontman Wayne Coyne in statement. “A feeling that, I think, can only be expressed through music and songs. We were, while creating it, trying to NOT hear it as sounds… but to feel it. Mother’s sacrifice, Father’s intensity, Brother’s insanity, Sister’s rebellion…I can’t quite put it into words.”
Coyne said in a statement that for this album, the group started thinking of themselves as an American band for the first time, and this inspired their sound. Coming from Oklahoma, the group was not influenced much by local musicians and had a hard time finding a unique identity. But, that all changed with The Flaming Lips’s latest release, where they looked to groups like The Grateful Dead and Parliament-Funkadelic.
“I know growing up (when I was like 6 or 7 years old) in Oklahoma I was never influenced by, or was very aware of any musicians from Oklahoma,” Coyne said in statement. “So… for most of our musical life (as The Flaming Lips starting in 1983) we’ve kind of thought of ourselves as coming from ‘Earth’… not really caring WHERE we were actually from. So for the first time in our musical life we began to think of ourselves as ‘AN AMERICAN BAND’… telling ourselves that it would be our identity for our next creative adventure.”
The latest release, according to the group, will sound more in line with their albums The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. The track list and artwork can be found below.
American Head Track List
1. “Will You Return / When You Come Down”
2. “Watching the Lightbugs Glow”
3. “Flowers Of Neptune 6”
4. “Dinosaurs On The Mountain”
5. “At The Movies On Quaaludes”
6. “Mother I’ve Taken LSD”
7. “Brother Eye”
8. “You n Me Sellin’ Weed”
9. “Mother Please Don’t Be Sad”
10. “When We Die When We’re High”
11. “Assassins of Youth”
12. “God and the Policeman”
13. “My Religion Is You”
Posted by Flaming Lips on Thursday, June 25, 2020
Photo Credit: Stephen Hoffmeister
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