How does Wayne Coyne—Flaming Lips singer and psych pop’s busiest self-promotional sort—spend his 45th birthday? By driving with his wife from Dallas to Oklahoma City, where he’ll meet up with his bandmates for dinner and drinks. And by talking to MAGNET. The Lips’ newest album, At War With The Mystics (Warner Bros), wasn’t intended to be a treatise on worldly woes, but it takes to the subjects of religion, politics, gods and monsters with a prickly vigor and shockingly hard guitars.

The Flaming Lips don’t do comedy rock. But in the face of a music industry that’s growing more literal by the day, how important is it to stay absurd?
Well, I don’t think I do what I do to go against what everybody else is doing—as a reaction or anything. Maybe in comparison, it seems like other people are playing it safe. Then again, they probably really like what they’re doing. You have to do what you love. I don’t want to defend the Celine Dions or the Axl Roses of the world, but I bet they’re in the same boat: that what they do is cool and important.

At War With The Mystics is a loaded title for political and religious reasons.
The weight of that title just happened by accident. We came up with it a few years ago, haphazardly, after someone just asked me what I was working on. Suddenly, everybody wrote it down. [Laughs] Naming records is just the worst hell in the world. You don’t know what to call these damn things. So when a theme just happens to come out from under it, it’s pretty amazing. In fact, the name Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots was a great relief. The best four songs on the album got their thematics from it. But it is weird that Mystics is abstractly appropriate for our time. You really can read all sorts of different dilemmas going on right now into it. But we’re getting too much credit for knowing what we’re talking about.

There’s lot more heaving heavy guitar work on Mystics than the last batch of stuff.
We’re always trying. Out of our own curiosity, we wanted to do something we had never done before. After 12 records, there’s not a lot we haven’t done. So it was a studio thing. There were riffs that were expressive and emotional. We were excited. But I hate to say it, and not as a defense: We started playing that damned Black Sabbath song “War Pigs” and people really responded. It infected us with a simplicity and power. It’s just a bad-ass, weird song. It changed how our intricate and odd guitar rock can be.

What got you writing about magic realism, doomed lovers and rampant self-possessed optimism?
There’s something cinematic about what we call psychedelic rock. So to tell a story is just a more compelling narrative. Besides, we’re always just singing about ourselves. Those characters live within you. That’s so much better than the junk you’d make up or imagine. Even when you’re pretending, I think you’re writing about that pretentiousness. There’s a level of psychological weirdness that makes me feel like we’re communicating with people. Even Syd Barrett—people didn’t fucking know what he was talking about. But it seemed to make sense.

You’ve been stuck in plastic space bubbles floating above stage and blown smoke bombs through megaphones. What’s left to scare you?
Nothing, artistically. Not at this age, not turning 45 today. If I was 25, I’d be a lot more insecure. So many things have happened along the way. [Lips multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd] has been a heroin addict. My parents died. You don’t really worry about the pettiness or art and ideas. It’s what my life is. But it’s not all it’s about. Our art is our joy, and if we fuck up, I think our audience loves us still.

Are you comfortable with having crafted this role—this well-dressed, erudite, spacey and damaged preacher sort—for yourself in pop culture?
Heck. The way you say that out loud, I’ll buy it. If I went to see a band with a guy like that, I’d think it was pretty cool.