The Flaming Lips Get Patriotic on New Album ‘American Head,’ Out This Fall

The Flaming Lips are getting as patriotic as the Flaming Lips can get on their upcoming 21st studio album, American Head. The record is currently set for release on September 11 — and, Friday, they’re out with “My Religion Is You.”

“The Flaming Lips are from Oklahoma. We never thought of ourselves as an American band,” frontman Wayne Coyne said in a statement. “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.”

The band says that this new album will have more in common with classic Lips releases — like 1999’s The Soft Bulletin — an assertion that’s supported by “My Religion Is You,” a off-kilter ballad that kicks off with: “Yeah Buddha’s cool/And you’re no fool/To believe anything/You need.”

The accompanying video features Coyne wandering through a burning wasteland, dragging a bouquet of massive flowers as a supplicant totes a cross boasting the Lips’ signature bubble instead of Christ. It’s all sorts of tongue-in-cheek sacrilege, as Coyne confirms when he croons, “I don’t need no religion/you’re all I need.”

The band previously dropped “Flowers Of Neptune 6,” featuring Kacey Musgraves. Musgraves also appears on “God and the Policeman.”

American Head Tracklist

1.    Will You Return / When You Come Down

2.    Watching the Lightbugs Glow

3.    Flowers of Neptune 6

4.    Dinosaurs on the Mountain

5.    At the Movies on Quaaludes

6.    Mother I’ve Taken LSD

7.    Brother Eye

8.    You n Me Sellin’ Weed

9.    Mother Please Don’t Be Sad

10. When We Die When We’re High

11. Assassins of Youth

12. God and the Policeman (Feat. Kacey Musgraves)

13. My Religion Is You