The Flaming Lips return with seventeenth album, The Teardrop Throbs

The Teardrop Throbs follows the band's 2020 album American Head, and will mark their first release on Third Man Records. "God Will Control The Werewolves" — a track inspired by band lead Wayne Coyne playing hide and seek with his sons under a full moon — lands as the first preview of the wide-ranging collection of songs, and is accompanied by an extensive letter from band lead Coyne detailing the creative process behind it.

Coyne traces the album's origins back to a moment in a Trader Joe’s car park, where he misread a sign for the “Children’s Health Foundation” as the “Children’s Death Foundation” while watching his sleeping son in the rearview mirror. This led him to think back to his mother, who, as a teenager , assisted nuns at her Catholic school with grieving families that had suffered the loss of a child, with this becoming the emotional crux of the album.

“There will never be anything in my life as important as my two little boys,” Coyne writes. “So.. I am lucky. To have arrived at the greatest of the greatest purposes in life..yes..I am here. But also we (The Flaming Lips) are making a new record and what’s in your mind usually finds its way into your music whether you intend it to or not.”

While many of the songs touch on family, mortality and memory runs through the songs, Coyne notes that the album’s meanings remain open. “I don’t really believe any song has a fixed meaning,” he writes. “I think the song should be allowed to affect your mood and feelings regardless of how we (as The Flaming Lips) played it and put it together..these notes are just some talking points."

Coinciding with the release of The Teardrop Throbs, The Flaming Lips are set to tour through Nashville, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago for a run of intimate shows. In April, they will make their return to the UK for two shows at London's O2 Shepherds Bush on 2-3 April. Tickets for all shows go on sale this Friday, 30 October.

The Teardrop Throbs artwork

The Teardrop Throbs tracklist

"Throb"
"God Will Control The Werewolves"
"Titan"
"Every Teardrop Cried"
"Hooray"
"Instructions On How To Draw An Eyeball or How To Deal With A Loved One Who Is Addicted To Drugs"
"You See You In Me"
"You've Got Brain Damage"
"At the End of the Day"
"The Trees Are Getting Their Leaves / Ceasefire In The City of Singing Flame"
"Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell Part Two"
"A Sunset Far Away"
"Now I Understand"