The Flame Still Burns

The Flaming Lips are as comfortable with Miley Cyrus as with Yoko Ono. Adaptability and a willingness to say yes to weird ideas have formed the core of the group’s success, as it rose, under the direction of the singer and joyful madman Wayne Coyne, from third-division punk rock to a cherished festival-capping band.

Mr. Coyne, who turns 56 this month, is a founder of the band, which formed in 1983, in Norman, Okla. It didn’t break through until 1999, with “The Soft Bulletin,” when the group coined a mixture of electronic new wave, Beach Boys-styled symphonic pop and the unabashed cosmic quest of psychedelic rock.

In the last few years, as if uncomfortable with becoming elder statesmen, the Flaming Lips found a new left turn, in the form of Ms. Cyrus, the uncaged ex-Disney star. They co-produced much of her latest album, then served as her backing band on tour.

The Flaming Lips situate their own music in extreme contrasts: humanism and horror, Day-Glo colors and widow’s black. Much of their new album, “Oczy Mlody” (a phrase Mr. Coyne chose from a Polish-language paperback he bought, which turned into a talisman), is gentle but disturbing. In one song, a woman whose “face was a fairy tale” bites into a poison apple, which destroys her.

From “Firing Up the Triggers in Your Mind” by Rob Tannenbaum for the New York Times; Photo by George Salisbury

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