Two albums released between 1999 and 2002 saw a well-known Oklahoma City weirdo rock band enter a new level of maturity and national awareness. The Flaming Lips formed in the late 1980s, but The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots were the best evidence that the band had become heavy hitters with something serious to say. As the band’s sound got bigger, their lyrics turned to more grounded subject matter, and when you consider their stage shows, that seems intentional. By the early 2000s, stories had started to spread about the Flaming Lips’ live show: Giant eyeballs floating over stages, twelve-foot skeletons, and what must have been metric tons of confetti falling every night. At the center of the candy-colored chaos was a man in a simple grey business suit. He’d cheerfully sing about death, in utero experiments and a teenager’s duty to rid the world of evil robots before walking across the crowd in a plastic bubble.

I remembered the band from a few well-known singles from the ‘90s and early 2000s. “Bad Days” was a favorite thanks to its use in the movie Batman Forever; the eternal classic “She Don’t Use Jelly” was high on the list too. In college, “Race for the Prize,” the standout single from The Soft Bulletin, always made me perk up. But if it weren’t for Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, I may never have been swept up in the myth and magic of this oddball band, fronted by a former Long John Silver’s register clerk. Thankfully, I stumbled on a seemingly random EP with colorful artwork that looked like a French comic book. It was called Fight Test and it was on a shelf at the radio station where I was working and was designated as a record management decided not to play. If the station didn’t want it, I was going to give it a home, and it stayed in my personal rotation for weeks. From there, I started to eat up everything they released, past and present.

In listening to their back catalog, I found that in the span of about 10 years the band had become tightly orchestrated, and its sweeping melodies could drop you in a musical deep end. Yoshimi in particular reveled in rich sonic emersion; it still turns the heads of audiophiles today, and the 2005 documentary about the band, The Fearless Freaks, helped further momentum by bringing to life the band’s backstory through home recording footage. It’s here we find the Flaming Lips at the height of the hype, and At War with the Mystics, in 2006.

“Listen. You’ll hear it...”

On a pair of headphones, the magic of At War with the Mystics swirls around inside your head. On a hi-fi system, that magic will be all around you, and that’s where I’m lucky to be in 2026. I’m at home, listening in 5.1 surround sound, in awe of how much detail I missed back in 2006. As various instruments, electronic blips and production appear, evaporate and reappear around the room, gravity seems to feel less in command. It’s a listening experience I highly recommend.

This record continues to feel cinematic twenty years later. There’s a little of Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon, a little of René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet, just enough Star Wars, and more spread across three acts over twelve pieces of music. That’s how we’ll run through the record here, starting with its fantastic opening song.

To the uninitiated, the opening of the album can be jarring. “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song (With All Your Power)” finds shrill screams from frontman Wayne Coyne rising amid repeating syllables (not even full words). It’s a crucible that, if embraced — or at least endured — yields a rich playground. Let yourself get swept up, and you’ll notice there was a sort of fortune-telling that Coyne, Steven Drozd and the Flaming Lips peddled in 2006. A blunt morality question is at the core of this song, and it remains in stark relief 20 years later. It’s an easy impulse to say we’d be responsible stewards of infinite wealth, power and influence; but are we?

For all the prognostication you might be able to scrape from “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song,” you’re brought back to the present with “Free Radicals (A Hallucination Of The Christmas Skeleton Pleading With A Suicide Bomber).” Until this point in their career, the band hadn’t been in the habit of overt political references. That changed with this album, as the Flaming Lips took a few opportunities to rage against the second Bush administration. Then, with a prescience they couldn’t have known, lines like “You’re turning into a poor man’s Donald Trump / I know those circumstances make you wanna jump” build a thread and carry forward thoughts about what wealth is worth. Using Trump’s name as a general example of a rich guy may feel surreal in 2026, but his high-profile persona was already well front and center, thanks to the TV series The Apprentice.

Jabs at the well-known continued on “The Sound of Failure / It’s Dark… Is It Always This Dark??” Of all the band’s musical output over the decades, this track has the most memorable guitar line for me. Michael Ivins’ playing stands out thanks to its tight, funky staccato sting plucking. It keeps the song moving well into its fifth minute before we slow down for the final two minutes. Existence and mortality are dominant themes in this song, the record and the Flaming Lips’ music overall. When you look ahead to future records and the darker ways Coyne, Drozd and Ivins came to explore these same topics, “The Sound of Failure” remains a neon torchlight examining the uncertainty. Far less relevant are the overt asides directed at Brittany Spears and Gwen Stefani, but what album isn’t a product of its time?

To this point the album has been a lengthy sprint; now it’s offering a breather in “My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion (The Inner Life as Blazing Shield of Defiance and Optimism as Celestial Spear of Action).” This song is a hot air balloon out of Oz. It floats and rises with a few gentle pulls of the blast valve throughout. Flaming Lips follow the musical course Burt Bacharach charted ages before them. Where Bacharach crafted sweet easy pop, Coyne and co. are good stewards of the tradition, hanging string lights and dyeing the clouds gentle pinks and yellows as they pass. Even a moment of loud, distorted electric piano feels … easy. The lyrics continue to ruminate about what happens at and after death. While it’s a solid candidate for a closer to entire record, instead it lifts us from the earth into outer space.

Now Departing the Exosphere

You don’t have to be an expert in Pink Floyd’s catalog to make a few connections into At War with the Mystics. Classic rock radio staples like “Breathe (In the Air)” or “Have A Cigar” are enough to follow the breadcrumb trail to “Vein of Stars” & “The Wizard Turns On…The Giant Silver Flashlight and Puts on His Werewolf Moccasins.” While they’re separate pieces of music, I mentally pair them the same way those classic rock stations often pair the final two tracks from Dark Side of the Moon. They follow each other so naturally, it’s easier to think of them as halves of a whole. With “Vein of Stars” the story goes that Coyne had been thinking about human’s place in the universe, and this establishes the theme of the record going forward. “Maybe there ain't no heaven. And if there ain't no heaven maybe there ain't no hell.” Mortality and acceptance. Life after death. We still don’t have answers about The Big Questions, but the record keeps us thinking about them.

As calm and melodious as the last few minutes have been, "It Overtakes Me / The Stars Are So Big... I Am So Small... Do I Stand a Chance?” ushers in another sonic handbrake turn. I love this band, but I’ve long dreaded this song. I’m not confident I listened all the way through until this year. My lasting memory has always been to reach for whatever would skip to the next track. What I failed to appreciate (or likely missed altogether in my impatience) were the funk textures and spacey nods to classic rock found in the (heavily repetitious) production. Nestled just around 3 minutes in (only 4 left to go) — I finally discovered a creamy, contemplative center. Where the first half of “It Overtakes Me” is a rambunctious 4-year-old sliding in his socks all over the living room, the back half comes in to smooth out the rugs, tidy up and quietly restore peace. I’ve loved this band since college and I’m now kicking myself for lacking the patience to soak in the full experience of this song. Now, I still look at it as a mild chore — but the reward for finishing the job comes in both the way the track ends and the song to follow.

For all the static, feedback and general noise associated with this band across its career, they manage to make an ambulance siren sound warm and comforting. This is the stuff. "Mr. Ambulance Driver" still feels emblematic of the Yoshimi-era Flaming Lips. The sincerity in the lyrics and the funky bassline It’s a sweet and lovely capper to this leg of the album. If only it swapped places with the following song …

The Final Destination

With the odd attenuation of Coyne’s voice and the repetitive cadence, “Haven’t Got A Clue” has more in common with “It Overtakes Me” than anything else on the record. It feels weird to want those two songs back-to-back considering the similarities, but I feel the pace of the album would flow better. If this album is a journey to (contemplative) space and back, “Haven’t Got A Clue” feels like the rigors of reentering the earth’s atmosphere, and the back half of “It Overtakes Me” feels like the release of the heat shields.

From here on out it’s a breezy slide home. The band has one more party jam in “The W.A.N.D. (The Will Always Negates Defeat).” This and “Free Radicals” are seen as the record’s big middle finger to the Bush administration in 2006. In this case, Coyne sings of decentralizing power and spreading it among the people at large ... with a single “magic stick.” I remember this song feeling like a huge rebuke to the government when it released, today it feels quaint when compared to the overt protest music directed at the halls of power in the last year. Lyrical interpretation aside, “The W.A.N.D.” still acts as a big, electrified bookend to “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song,” but there’s still a little more to say.

Coyne has talked about the structure of “Pompeii am Götterdämmerung” mirroring that of the German national anthem and about the bleak way the story in the song begins. Echoes of Pink Floyd return, and like so much of Mystics the song concludes with hope and optimism — in this case even in the face of world-ending volcanic activity. It also marks Drozd’s first time singing lead on a Flaming Lips song.

Splashdown. The psychonauts have exited the capsule and tell an eager populace of all they saw on their journey as the Flaming Lips close with “Goin’ On.” It’s a comparatively smaller song than the rest of the album. I can’t help but compare so much of it to the Artemis II mission NASA completed a few days prior to this article. Now that this amazing journey has concluded, everyone goes on about their lives, even with a few strains of paranoia lingering.

“Listen, you’ll hear it / We’re getting’ near it / It’s comin’, I can feel it / ‘Cause I know you’re goin’ away.”

Yet, the way Coyne sings the words, I get the feeling he’s made peace with the uncertainty we’ve been hearing about for so much of this album.

Of glorious superhuman space and time…

Drozd left the Flaming Lips last year, which instilled the kind of existential crises that dapple the themes in this record. He joined the group in 1991 and has been about as pivotal to its sound as Coyne. If we see another Flaming Lips record, what on earth is it going to sound like without Drozd’s contribution? It makes me sad to see the seismic shift within the band, let alone how Coyne and Drozd are still at odds about why the latter left the group at all. Time may tell.

It’s odd to look back two decades and be prompted to think about the future, but that’s the prevailing feeling I get from both 2006 and this album. There were glimpses of the future of communication as Facebook broadened its reach beyond college campuses. NASA’s Cassini-Huygens probe found geysers of vapor, dust, and ice on Venus, leaving us to wonder what else we had to learn about life on other worlds. Five years after the September 11 attacks on America, war in the Middle East had become deeply unpopular as the gap between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of the world continued to widen. Something had to change, right?

I watched the Flaming Lips perform at Lollapalooza in 2006, from what must have been 150 yards away. I still felt like I was in the eye of that confetti storm. There’s special magnetism about this band; a simple positivity that’s central to its identity and broad appeal. Like so many Flaming Lips records of this era, At War with the Mystics maintains its luster: Precious and colorful; heartfelt and fearless in the face of the unknown.

In 1976 New York City was a cesspool. Garbage overfilled the streets, fiscal cuts put the city on the edge of bankruptcy and crime was rampant. Musically, “Silly Love Songs” by Paul McCartney and Wings was the number one song of the year. Also relevant: the United States celebrated its 200th year of independence. These were the early days of the punk rock movement and a broader underground music scene that all traces its roots to the now-legendary CBGB in Manhattan’s East Village.

Nestled snugly in that backdrop were four torn blue jean-wearing, leather jacket-donning weirdos from Queens with a sense for the disturbed. On April 23, 1976 they released their debut album Ramones, and in doing so, they changed rock forever.

Bandmates Joey, Johnny, DeeDee and Tommy adopted the last name Ramone — no, they weren't brothers — and wrote songs about being abused, sniffing glue, Nazism, prostitution and other very family-friendly subject matter.

The Ramones were outcasts who looked like 1950s greasers. These were not the kind of guys you’d want to bring to a Young Republican Convention. Bassist DeeDee Ramone was a heroin addict who at one point worked as a gigolo (listen again to “53^rd and 3^rd” and you'll understand the song in a whole new way). Lead singer Joey Ramone suffered from alcoholism and was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Guitarist Johnny Ramone was the violent one, who liked to beat people up and rob them. Drummer Tommy Ramone, well — Tommy played the drums. Together, they unleashed their lyrics with such enthusiasm and catchy hooks that the average listener had no idea there was dark material behind the sugar blast musical assault they were hearing.

Put Ramones on in 2026 and you’ll hear a record that still sounds fresh, fun, wacky and a little off-putting. Nothing at the time sounded like their release, and while there have been countless imitators, none have come close to Ramones’ greatness. Any newer legendary punk band — from Green Day to Fall Out Boy, Weezer to The Offspring — owes Ramones, and the sound the band created, everything.

Album opener “Blitzkrieg Bop” is one of the best introductions to a band ever pressed to vinyl. The energy immediately hooks and the power chord barrage is air guitar-inducing. Joey just sounds “cool.” Yes, he’s singing about Nazis attacking Poland, but you still see little kids dancing like this song's a 1976 version of Yo Gabba Gabba!

One aspect of Ramones that I’ve always enjoyed is the inspirations they took from doo-wop and the music of the late '50s and early '60s. Joey loved girl groups of the early '60s and the Phil Spector “Wall of Sound” — so much so the band went on to record with Spector for their End of the Century album (the time when Spector famously pulled a gun on them to stop them from leaving). In my opinion, the doo-wop '50s sound is truly the "secret sauce" to Ramones' success. It sounds both old and new, and made the album (and the band) appealing to a wide range of listeners. This approachability is truly what separates the band from their contemporaries.

It wasn't all doo-wop though. “I Don’t Want to go down to the Basement” is a flat-out disturbing track, possibly about child molestation. Joey never said as much, but it’s hard not to hear it when you listen to the lyrics. Despite that, the track undoubtedly rocks, and it kickstarted its fair share of mosh pits back in the day.

Album closer “Today your love Tomorrow the World” perfectly wraps up the album. This track chronicles bassist DeeDee's life growing up in Germany and finding Nazi memorabilia in the rubble of burned out cities (it's also worth knowing that Joey and Tommy Ramone were both Jewish). DeeDee wrote this tune, and he doesn’t get the credit he deserves as a songwriter in the band. When he moved to the United States he was bullied heavily for being of German descent — which was the embryo of this song.

As a whole, Ramones is fun, lyrically divisive punk rock, and it resonated with listeners in a way that was almost primal. It was fast-paced and flat out fast: not one song on Ramones is over two and a half minutes long.

As punk rock exploded, The Ramones and this album led the charge — all the way around the globe. Shortly after they started breaking out here, punk rock took over in England, led by The Clash and Sex Pistols. The Clash were political and Sex Pistols were vile — and both their debut albums came out in 1977, one year after Ramones. Even though Sex Pistols get a lot of credit for pushing punk forward, it's The Ramones who had done it a year prior. Had British punk been around without the doo-wop punk of The Ramones, the whole genre might never have made it out of the fringes.

Ramones is now 50 years old, and it sounds as unique and fresh as it did back in 1976. Some bands come and go, but The Ramones came and created their own unique path in rock history. It's one that every kid who picks up a guitar and jams out in their bedroom eventually travels down.

“Gabba Gabba Hey” forever!

In 1991, grunge was about to explode in the U.S. When it did, it changed the musical landscape here forever. Meanwhile, across the pond something completely different — and just as impactful — was taking shape.

On April 8, the band Massive Attack, formed in Bristol, England in 1988 by founding members Robert “3D” Del Naja, Grant “Daddy G” Marshall, Adrian “Tricky” Thaws and Andrew “Mushroom” Vowles, released its first album: Blue Lines. In doing so, the band changed the course of music history.

The album offered a slow‑burning, bass‑heavy pulse that reshaped the sonic landscape of the 1990s. As a sound, it was a cultural detonation, and thanks to it, a whole new music genre emerged. After its release, Bristol’s underground music scene — which had been comprised of hip‑hop, dub, soul, post‑punk, and sound‑system culture — collapsed into a single movement. The result? What the world would soon call trip‑hop.

Trip-hop at its core is defined as the fusion of hip-hop and electronica. Now, let's be honest, Massive Attack probably wasn’t trying to invent a new music genre with this album, but nonetheless, Blue Lines is where it all began.

Blue Lines opens with the thundering beats of “Safe from Harm.” At the time those drums sounded like nothing else. They were larger than life, but not in an '80s Phil Collins way. The haunting vocal track was supplied by Shara Nelson, who's on the record a few times, including the album's hit single “Unfinished Symphony.”

With “Unfinished Symphony” the band ventured into unknown territory, and proved that hip-hop beats could be infused with orchestra strings to work together in creating a song that brings emotion to the forefront. Nelson’s vocal adds to the overall cinematic nature of this tune. There are no frills in her performance, just raw feeling, and it ties everything else that’s happening into a seamless package.

These two tracks alone cemented Massive Attack as a creative force worthy of widespread critical acclaim. But it's the album as a whole that proved that electronic music could be much more than the acts that had come before it.

In 1991 electronic music had a reputation for being “cold” and “robotic.” Massive Attack proved that notion incorrect. Most of the tracks on Blue Lines sound warm and have a near analogue feeling to them, which wasn't previously present in the genre. Take album closer “Hymn of the Big Wheel.” The synths on this track are lush and inviting, while technically speaking, the drums bounce between drum machine and acoustic kit. This sound still lives on today.

Simply put, Massive Attack paved the way for acts like Lana Del Rey and The Weeknd, both of which incorporate that more analogue hip-hop sound into their electronic production. Listen to Del Rey's "Summertime Sadness" or The Weeknd's House of Balloons record after listening to Blue Lines. Imagine them without vocals and they are essentially Massive Attack.

Is Blue Lines Massive Attack’s best album? No. That title goes to the band’s third studio record Mezzanine, when they truly perfected their sound. But is Blue Lines Massive Attack’s most important album? Absolutely! Simply for inventing trip-hop and proving to the world what electronic music could be, Blue Lines has cemented itself as an important album in the cornerstone of music history.