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Will the Flaming Lips Prank Us All With April Fool’s Day Album Release?

The Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne

The Flaming Lips are asking their fans to be very trusting. As Pitchfork reports, Oklahoma’s purveyors of psychedelic pop will release a new album titled The Terror on April 1 via Bella Union and Warner Bros. Yup, that’s April Fool’s Day.

Though the Lips have been so busy lately that SPIN’s Chris Martins was able to document 2012’s dispiriting Year in Wayne CoyneThe Terror marks the band’s first proper album since 2009’s Embryonic. The Lips reportedly produced the nine-track album with their longtime collaborator Dave Fridmann, and frontman Coyne is quoted as calling it a “bleak, disturbing record.” And that’s coming from a guy who brought a grenade to an airport.

Meanwhile, onto music that isn’t coming out on a day famous for playing pranks on people. On February 3, the Flaming Lips will reportedly release a non-album track called “Sun Blows Up Today.” Actually, that does sound pretty terrifying.

In a statement quoted by Pitchfork, Wayne suggests the Lips were “hopeless” and “disturbed” while making the album. More Coyne (ellipses presumably his): “We want, or wanted, to believe that without love we would disappear, that love, somehow, would save us that, yeah, if we have love, give love and know love, we are truly alive and if there is no love, there would be no life. The Terror is, we know now, that even without love, life goes on… we just go on… there is no mercy killing.” Hmm.

Coyne can be actually quite pithy, lucid, and personable in interviews, so it’s unclear whether the terror will indeed be terror-filled or he’s instead counting on us all being very gullible. Then again, when you go out into the crowd in a giant hamster ball and ask your fans to carry you, you can’t really clown them too hard. Fool me once…