On 2013’s The Terror, The Flaming Lips funneled dark, personal subject matter—Wayne Coyne’s recent divorce, Steven Drozd’s brief drug relapse—into skeletal electronic ambience, downplaying the psychedelic uplift of their best music. They’ve veered back toward their sonic sweet spot with Oczy Mlody, a whirlwind of Krautrock synthesizers, programmed hip-hop drums, and lush space-pop production that nods toward their back-to-back masterpieces The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Having successfully exorcised his demons on The Terror, Coyne drew inspiration from the weirdest possible place: a Polish book full of phonetically vivid phrases (“Do Glowy,” “Nigdy Nie”) that he often leafed through in the recording studio. The singer was particularly struck by one: “Oczy Mlody,” which he interpreted as “Oxy Melody,” a futuristic drug. The album sounds like that description reads, with Coyne and Drozd, the band’s multi-instrumentalist mastermind, burrowing into the trippiest corners of their imagination. “White trash rednecks/ Earthworms eat the ground,” Coyne croons on “How??,” a lullaby built on hypnotic keys and buzzsaw bass. And that’s somehow not the kookiest lyric here: On “There Should Be Unicorns,” he envisions a decadent sci-fi party full of “day-glo strippers” and “edible butterflies we put ketchup on.” But Oczy Mlody grows more intimate the longer it plays: “The Castle” is a twinkling electro-pop rumination on a friend’s suicide—only filtered through a fairy-tale prism. “The castle can never be rebuilt again,” Coyne sings, expertly blurring the euphoric and the tragic.