

(Read: Wayne Coyne Breaks Down the Entire Flaming Lips Discography)Īll this considered, the tone of Oczy Mlody shouldn’t be a surprise. Without original tunes, it was hard to know where the band’s head was at, happy to just be along for the ride as Cyrus incorporated their laughing-gas psychedelia into her own vision. Rainbows started making their way back into Lips performances, cover song albums continued, and the band found an unlikely partnership through mutual admiration with Miley Cyrus. There was the headdress incident in which an issue of cultural appropriation saw one Lips member getting fired and Coyne on the ropes from facing off against detractors. What followed was a particularly weird period for the band.


Anyone who saw the Lips supporting The Terror witnessed the band embracing their darkness, with all of the technicolor confetti of previous tours replaced by a dark paranoia that was so vivid it was contagious. The Terror was such a profoundly personal record, made in the wake up singer Wayne Coyne’s separation from his longtime partner and Steven Drozd’s relapse into drug use, that it was more of a spiritual successor to the emotional weight of classic The Soft Bulletin, even if it didn’t receive the same acclaim. Oczy Mlody is technically the follow-up to The Flaming Lips’ widely underrated 2013 album, The Terror, but so much has happened between the records that it’s hard to think of it that way.
