The Lips will release their first album since 2009’s Embryonic on April 1 (but knowing them, that date should raise some red flags).

Back in August, bandleader Wayne Coyne called The Terror “possibly the best Flaming Lips record ever made,” despite (or cynically, perhaps because of) the fact that the album being created as multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd was dealing with drug addiction.

“Why would we make this music that is The Terror— this bleak, disturbing record…??”, Coyne writes via press release. “I don’t really want to know the answer that I think is coming: that WE were hopeless, WE were disturbed and, I think, accepting that some things are hopeless… or letting hope in one area die so that hope can start to live in another?? Maybe this is the beginning of the answer.”

Coyne continues in cryptic-hippie fashion: “We want, or wanted, to believe that without love we would disappear, that love, somehow, would save us that, yeah, if we have love, give love and know love, we are truly alive and if there is no love, there would be no life. The Terror is, we know now, that even without love, life goes on… we just go on… there is no mercy killing.”

The nine-track album (the band’s 15th) was produced by the Lips and Dave Fridmann. Terror is due out on April 1 via Bella Union and Warner Bros; the art and tracklist are below. Non-album track ‘Sun Blows Up Today’ will be released on January 29 and will feature in a TBA Super Bowl ad. [via Pitchfork]

01 Look…The Sun Is Rising
02 Be Free, A Way
03 Try To Explain
04 You Lust
05 The Terror
06 You Are Alone
07 Butterfly, How Long It Takes To Die
08 Turning Violent
09 Always There…In Our Hearts