Six years is a long time to sit with your own thoughts. Long enough to lose a bandmate of more than three decades, sign with a new label, and come back with an album that opens with a reference to a 1955 film. The Flaming Lips have never done anything the obvious way. The Teardrop Throbs — out January 22, 2027, via Third Man Records — suggests they’re not about to start.
A New Label, a Missing Voice, and Thirteen Songs That Don’t Flinch
The absence at the center of this record is as loud as anything on it.
The most significant thing about this album isn’t the music. Not yet. It’s the absence. According to reports, The Teardrop Throbs is the first Flaming Lips studio LP without multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd since 1992’s Hit to Death in the Future Head. The reasons for his departure remain attributed rather than settled, depending on who’s speaking. What’s not in question: the band built something without him anyway.
Here’s what the record delivers on paper:
- 13 tracks, released January 22, 2027 through Third Man Records — the band’s debut on the label
- The first new-material album since 2020’s American Head, making this a gap of more than six years
- Lead single “God Will Control the Werewolves,” which grew from Wayne Coyne playing hide-and-seek with his sons beneath a full moon
The tour supporting it takes an equally intimate approach — two-night runs at:
- Brooklyn Bowl Nashville (Jan 22–23)
- Irving Plaza NYC (Jan 26–27)
- LA’s Bellwether (Feb 23–24)
- Chicago’s Metro (Feb 27–28)
- London’s O2 Shepherds Bush (Apr 2–3)
Ego Death, Dark Side of the Moon, and the Ghost of Yoshimi
The band reaches backward and inward, pulling its own threads toward something new.
Coyne described “God Will Control the Werewolves” as sounding — in his imagination — like “Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon with Syd Barrett still in the group.” That’s artistic intent, not a genre classification. It tells you where his head is: vast, strange, emotionally wide open.
The album also reaches back deliberately. “Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell Part Two” revisits the Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots-era original, with Coyne framing the new version around ego death, status, power, and transformation. Opener “Throb,” meanwhile, developed from A.J. Slaughter’s recreation of music associated with The Night of the Hunter. These aren’t random touchstones — they’re a band actively pulling its own threads.
Coyne has also said listeners should respond to the music independently, without needing his interpretive framework to unlock it. The small-venue tour format — two nights per city — reinforces that spirit. This isn’t a victory lap. It’s a conversation, and your seat at the table is already waiting.
