The Flaming Lips

Since 1983 · United States

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The Soft Bulletin (1999)

The Soft Bulletin builds lush, orchestral arrangements out of layered strings, synthesizers, and processed drums, a dramatic departure from the noisier, more guitar-driven records that came before it. "Race for the Prize" opens the album on a swelling, almost symphonic note, Wayne Coyne's plainspoken meditations on mortality and heroism riding a melody big enough to match the ambition of the production. The record's maximalist studio approach never buries the emotional directness underneath it. It stands as the moment the Flaming Lips became one of the most critically significant bands of their generation, decades removed from the hardcore scene that first shaped them.

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The Flaming Lips

The Soft Bulletin · 1999

The Flaming Lips formed in Oklahoma City in the early 1980s, and despite the lush, orchestral psychedelia the band would later become known for, Wayne Coyne has said the group's real formative influences were hardcore and American underground punk — Hüsker Dü and Black Flag specifically, along with Sonic Youth, Minutemen, and the Replacements, bands the Lips went to see live even as their own music moved in a stranger, less aggressive direction. Coyne has described the band's early weirdness as partly reactive, a way of standing apart from a punk scene whose sound the band admired more than they were suited to replicate.

The Soft Bulletin (1999) marked the culmination of a long evolution away from that noisier beginning, building lush, orchestral arrangements out of layered strings, synthesizers, and processed drums around Coyne's meditations on mortality and wonder. The album became the record most responsible for establishing the Flaming Lips as a critically significant band well beyond their earlier cult following, and its combination of emotional directness and maximalist studio ambition set the template the band continued exploring across the following decades.