Warner Bros. / Bella Union

Just like John Lennon’s 1970 solo album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, The Terror is Wayne Coyne’s primal scream. The difference between the two albums is that The Terror is more of a silent shriek and more unnerving because of it. With their minimal, hardly discernable lyrics and austere, cacophonous metal-on-metal soundscapes, The Flaming Lips have crossed
over from the dreamy kaleidoscope boundary of psychedelia and moved into the dark, subdued heaviness of German prog rock. Coyne is no longer the showy clown prince, tumbling over a crowd in a plastic bubble. He has burst that misshapen bubble and hurled himself in the negative space of Nietzsche’s existential nihilism, feeling nothing, believing nothing, and, in the end, knowing nothing – the space where they say enlightenment begins.

It’s not like anyone can say that they didn’t see this coming. A longtime cynic and self-avowed atheist, Coyne warned us that “everyone you know someday will die” in the frothy sunshine pop of “Do You Realize,” from Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Likewise, 2009’s aptly named Embryonic was certainly a dark portent and a foreshadowing of a paradigm shift that artistically is almost as startling as the Copernican revolution in a Lipsian universe. Further clues that The Flaming Lips had become the band clog dancing at the end of the world came when they recast Pink Floyd’s bleakest work, The Dark Side of the Moon, and participated in a series of disconcerting collaborations on 2012’s Flaming Lips with Heady Fwends.

The Terror finds the Oklahoma City art provocateurs further along that path of psychic annihilation until they almost become an Event Horizon – almost, but not quite. Instead, The Terror is a last ditch effort to find hope among the hopeless, to vomit up those fears that hold you hostage, and by expressing them, like Lennon before him, to allow Coyne to attempt to exorcise them and create an illusion of safety. Or as he sings in the title track: “However love can help you/ We are all standing alone/ The terror’s in our heads/ We don’t control the controls/ I turn to face the sun/ We are still standing alone/ At last we’ll sing of the terror/ It helps us hold the controls.”

The Terror is not an easy listen. It’s a little like Eno in a blender and is best appreciated at a distance. You have to step back to appreciate it like fine art, instead of getting caught up in each individual brush stroke, every word and every scratch of guitar or drum arrhythmia. It becomes a greater whole that way and you are able to discern the emotional symmetry and the painful prophecy. This anxious music for anxious times is The Flaming Lips’ masterwork.