Wayne Coyne was sitting in a Trader Joe’s parking lot, looking in the rearview mirror at his 3-year-old son, Rex, asleep in the back seat, when a sign caught his eye. Or, more accurately, when he misread it. What appeared to say “Children’s Death Foundation” actually read “Children’s Health Foundation.” But the Flaming Lips frontman’s imagination had already taken him somewhere darker, conjuring memories of his mother comforting families who had lost a child and confronting the terrifying possibility of losing one himself.

“I think all parents probably have these type of thoughts a hundred times every day,” Coyne writes in a sprawling account of the making of the Flaming Lips’ new album, The Teardrop Throbs. “It occurred to me there will never be anything in my life as important as my two little boys.”

More from Spin:

• The SPIN Q&A: Queens Of The Stone Age’s Josh Homme
• Boyz II Men Go Country With New Record Deal
• Yung Miami Finds Her Groove

That realization helped set the emotional coordinates for the Oklahoma psych-rock institution’s first new album in six years, due Jan. 22 via Jack White’s Third Man Records. Produced with longtime collaborator Dave Fridmann, the band’s label debut arrives with new single “God Will Control the Werewolves” and will be supported by two-night runs in intimate venues in Nashville, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and London.

The opening track, “Throb,” grew from Coyne’s fascination with The Night of the Hunter, specifically the “Pretty Fly” song sung by children escaping an evil preacher. He tasked new slide guitarist Adam Judd Slaughter with recreating it note for note, but Slaughter’s extended introduction and outro took the music somewhere unexpected. Guitars and drum machines followed; a longer piece about a dreary hospital emerged, with Coyne changing the original lyrics. Only a fragment survived.

Coyne says “God Will Control the Werewolves,” began with a bedtime-adjacent question. While playing hide-and-seek under a full moon with his sons, Bloom and Rex, Coyne was asked whether werewolves might get them. His reassurance became the song’s central conceit. Musically, he imagined “kind of Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon BUT Syd Barrett is still in the band.”

Elsewhere, “You’ve Got Brain Damage” emerged from Coyne’s reflections on the impact caused by drugs and alcohol, while “Instructions on How to Draw an Eyeball or How to Deal With a Loved One Who Is Addicted to Drugs” grew from a simple mantra: “I don’t know why but I just keep on trying again and again.” “Every Teardrop Cried” also began as a single line written during the same parking lot episode that sparked the album’s opening track.

Coyne is careful not to dictate how listeners should interpret the results. “I don’t really believe any song has a fixed meaning,” he writes, “and I don’t WANT my songs to have a fixed meaning.” Instead, he hopes the music will affect listeners’ moods and feelings on its own terms. The Teardrop Throbs will be released on the heels of a 20th anniversary reissue of the Lips’ At War With the Mystics, which is out Nov. 13 from Rhino/Warner.

As for the upcoming live shows, the Lips will on the first night perform The Teardrop Throbs alongside “songs from the 20th century,” which appears to mean material released from 1986-1999, including some never played live. The second night will offer Teardrop Throbs material played “in a new way,” plus songs from 2002-2020.

Here are the Flaming Lips’ tour dates:

Jan. 22-23: Nashville (Brooklyn Bowl)
Jan. 26-27: New York (Irving Plaza)
Feb. 23-24: Los Angeles (Bellwether)
Feb. 27-28: Chicago (Metro)
April 2-3: London (O2 Shepherds Bush)

To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.