Flaming Lips Explain ‘The Terror’

Although the Flaming Lips’ upcoming album The Terror evokes darkness, Wayne Coyne and company look to ward off evil with true, overwhelming love and truth. In this clip, Coyne and Steven Drozd dive into their new record and the album’s title track, explaining its influences and motivations.

“”˜The Terror’ to me has one of the greatest things that music can do and one of the worst things that music can do. It seems to tell you some very complicated, pure, strange truth that you’ve never heard before,” Coyne says, describing the spaced-out track. “What I mean by that is the song doesn’t have anything in it.”

“When someone told me they looked at the album cover . . . they thought it was a picture of an explosion that was happening,” Coyne says later. “And the dude was just sitting there, and the camera caught him ”“ he didn’t know I took the picture ”“ just a millisecond before he realizes that this thing in front of him is blown up. And in a way, I think that’s what the song . . . kind of does.”

“If we have love, give love and know love, we are truly alive, and if there is no love, there would be no life,” Coyne tells ROLLING STONE. “”˜The Terror,’ we know now, that even without love, life goes on . . . we just go on . . . There is no mercy killing.”

The Terror will be out in the U.S. on April 16th.