• News

• All

Apr 04, 2011 By Lauren Barbato

"We have the freedom to fuck around," Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne tells Billboard.com in a recent interview. And screwing around (with their music), they are.

After releasing the track "Two Blobs Fucking" via 12 separate parts on YouTube earlier this year, the experimental rock outfit are having a bit of fun with the unconventional, zany ways in which they can release their music to the world. "We've done 14 or so records, and you're always scrambling around trying to do something different," Coyne tells Billboard.com. "Everybody's in the same quagmire now: How do you release music? What would be interesting?"

"Interesting" for The Flaming Lips is format. The band will release a USB drive of four songs next week. The catch? The drive will be "encased in a life-sized skull" made out of Gummy-like gelatin, according to Billboard.com. Also up next is a stomp box effects pedal that will play another four songs, plus old-school flexi-discs that will make their rounds on the backs of cereal boxes and in an issue of Mad magazine. But how will avid Flaming Lips listeners get their hands and ears on all this new material? "We're not making our music less available," Coyne assures to Billboard.com. "We know that if we put it on iTunes, virtually at the same moment someone will post it and it becomes out there and available virtually for free. But we still want it to be heard." Coyne also divulged that The Flaming Lips might package their batches of new material into a full-length album, with a release some time in early 2012. While that's reassuring, there's just something so tantalizing about that Gummy brain.