On July sixteenth, 2002, The Flaming Lips launched their tenth studio album, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. The follow-up to the band’s surprisingly profitable, now-canonized The Comfortable Bulletin, the document got here adorned with surreal work of colourful, digital monsters and unlikely heroines. It was inventive and somewhat left-field — however the Oklahoma act was all the time inventive and somewhat left-field. For this undertaking to face out, it’d need to be a brand new type of bizarre, a tall order for a band already 20 years into probably the most weird careers in common music.

Enter Yoshimi, a set of 11 songs that may in the end assist outline the legacy of The Flaming Lips.

That includes tracks like “Do You Understand??” and “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Pt. 1,” the album showcased a brand new, barely poppier facet of The Lips, taking inspiration from hip-hop and high 40 hits. It was an surprising flip for a band who, just some years prior, dropped Zaireeka, a undertaking with such a excessive barrier of entry that it included 4 CDs meant to be performed concurrently. This course, nevertheless, whether or not intentional or not, paid off, as Yoshimi proved to be a timeless, influential, extraordinarily profitable work of psychedelia.

Ask frontman Wayne Coyne, although, and he’ll strategy the document’s large cultural mark with fun and a shrug.

“On the time, it didn’t really feel prefer it was that vital,” he tells Consequence. “To not play it down, however it’s prefer it’s simply one other music that we have been engaged on, and it doesn’t actually matter if 20 years from now individuals are speaking about no matter it’s we’re engaged on. It’s simply such an awesome feeling to be engaged on one thing cool, working with cool folks, and all people being in love with what they’re doing.”

But, 20 years later, individuals are certainly nonetheless speaking about Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. A lot so, in truth, that Warner Brothers has seen match to launch a completely large Twentieth-anniversary deluxe version of the album. With over 100 tracks of rarities, b-sides, demos, and stay periods, the world of Yoshimi has by no means been so expansive.

“When Paul McCartney or Neil Younger does [a box set], they need to put within the piece of paper that’s bought the espresso stain the place they wrote the lyrics,” Coyne says of the Yoshimi’s deluxe version. “And sometime I’m positive we’ll try this, I assume, however we simply don’t assume that stuff issues that a lot. Our field units aren’t actually like that. It’s actually concerning the music and explaining the music and us attempting to recollect what the fuck occurred.”

As casually as Coyne tends to debate a few of his most heralded work, the emotional influence of his songs is much from misplaced on him. It’s why you’ll hear “Do You Understand??” each time you catch the band’s legendary stay present (which Coyne guarantees is crazier than ever), however received’t ever hear Coyne bemoan the unstated obligation he has to incorporate it on the setlist.