The Flaming Lips are constantly up to new tricks, but they haven't released a proper studio album since 2009's Embryonic. That'll change on April 1, when they put out The Terror through Bella Union and Warner Bros. UPDATE: The U.S. release date is April 2.

The nine-track album was produced by Dave Fridmann and the Lips. The non-album track "Sun Blows Up Today" will be released on February 3 . UPDATE: The track is actually being released January 29, when the digital pre-order for the album will begin. And "Sun Blows Up Today" will be featured in a commercial that will air during the Super Bowl that stars the Flaming Lips. (No word as to what the commercial is for just yet.)

"Why would we make this music that is The Terror-- this bleak, disturbing record...??", Wayne Coyne writes in a 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."

Either that, or this an incredibly elaborate April Fools joke.

He continues, "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."

Here's the album cover:

The Terror:

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

Watch the Wayne Coyne episode of Pitchfork.tv's "Frames":