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The First Single to Flying Lotus’s New Album Is a David Lynch Spoken Word Piece

Flying Lotus has announced a new album entitled Flamagra, five years after the release of his sprawling electro-jazz-fusion fifth full-length You’re Dead. It’s out May 24 via his longtime label Warp, and sports an impressive list of guest appearances: frequent FlyLo collaborator Thundercat, George Clinton, Tierra Whack, Solange, Shabazz Palaces, and others.

Also: David Lynch. The legendary director guests on a track called “Fire Is Coming,” which was released today in conjunction with the album announcement. It is, to put it lightly, not what you might expect from your first taste of a new FlyLo album. “Fire Is Coming” consists almost entirely of eerie spoken word from Lynch (“Tommy’s mother was outside on the front lawn, tending to a small flower garden. She was visibly upset about her flowers’ condition. She was observing a black film on the stems and leaves,” and so on), accompanied occasionally by buzzing sound effects and dissonant piano and strings. Then a beat comes in for about ten seconds, and it’s over. The accompanying visuals, directed by Flying Lotus himself and David Firth, feel much more like a scene from a surrealist horror film than a music video.

Either Flamagra is way further out into avant-garde weirdness than any previous FlyLo album, or this is a hilariously perverse choice of first single. A press release for the album cites a variety of more familiar reference points—”hip-hop, funk, soul, jazz, global dance music, tribal poly-rhythms, IDM, the L.A. Beat scene”—suggesting it might be the latter. Hear “Fire Is Coming” below.