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Flaming Lips’ Super Bowl Ad Song ‘Sun Blows Up Today’ Will Brighten Your Last Day on Earth

The Flaming Lips' 'Sun Blows Up Today'

Sorry, gramps, this supernova isn’t the champagne kind. Yesterday the Flaming Lips announced they’ll release a new album, The Terror, on April 1 via Bella Union and Warner Bros, and the Oklahoma psych-rockers reportedly planned to precede that “bleak, disturbing record” on February 3 with a non-album track with the bleak, disturbing title “Sun Blows Up Today.”

Happily, the song is here early as a hypercolor, seizure-inducing lyric video. And while it’s lacerated with squiggles of electronic noise, the hummingbird-heart-rate psych-pop freakout makes the imminent end of our solar system actually sound kinda exhilarating. The repetitious vocals and frenetic percussion suggest a possible debt to mad-scientist party-starter Dan Deacon, but the wild sonics and beatific lyrical theme are pure Lips.

Acid supernova? Ecstasy supernova? Either way, the last words are “epic day,” and that day might come sooner than previously reported: The information posted on YouTube says “Sun Blows Up Today” will be out on January 29 as “an instant grat bonus track,” presumably with The Terror pre-orders.

As Billboard reports, “Sun Blows Up Today” will appear during the Super Bowl in a commercial for Hyundai. The Lips have licensed a bunch of their songs before, including their best-known track “Do You Realize??,” so there’s a good chance the brand association won’t distract from the song’s quality. Still, we’re not sure why Hyundai didn’t just use Beck’s Midnite Vultures closer “Debra,” in which he pleads, “Lady, step inside my Hyundai.”