The Flaming Lips have announced a new album, American Head, that will see the band explore its patriotic side. The Oklahoma-bred psych mainstays released the album’s second single, “My Religion Is You”, on Thursday.
Last month, the band released “Flowers of Neptune 6” featuring Kacey Musgraves before the album was announced. That song will be featured on American Head, as will another Musgraves collaboration, titled “God and the Policeman”.
On American Head, The Flaming Lips will explore their heritage as an American band. According to a statement from frontman Wayne Coyne,
The Flaming Lips are from Oklahoma. We never thought of ourselves as an American band. So… for most of our musical life (as the Flaming Lips starting in 1983) we’ve kind of thought of ourselves as coming from ‘Earth’… not really caring where we were actually from. So for the first time in our musical life, we began to think of ourselves as ‘an American band’… telling ourselves that it would be our identity for our next creative adventure. … We started to think of classic American bands like the Grateful Dead and Parliament-Funkadelic and how maybe we could embrace this new vibe.
On the new single, “My Religion Is You”, the band largely explores the idea of God, rather than country. Throughout the eery music video, Coyne is seen holding an oversized bouquet of roses before some sort of funeral pyre. All the while, he drones on through a series of religions, shrugging them off with lines like “Yeah Buddhas cool/And you’re no fool/To believe anything/You need.” This sort of psych-pop tone found on “My Religion Is You” comes as the band commits to making American Head sound like a classic Flaming Lips release, such as 1999’s The Soft Bulletin.
Watch the music video for “My Religion Is You”. American Head is due out on September 11th, scroll down to see the full track list.
The Flaming Lips — “My Religion Is You”
[Video: flaminglips]
[H/T Rolling Stone]