Hear Flaming Lips Sparse ‘Sound of Failure’ Demo Ahead of ‘Mystics’ Reissue

Band will release box set of At War With the Mystics this fall

The Flaming Lips will commemorate the 20th anniversary of their 11th album, At War With the Mystics, this fall with an anthology box set due out this fall. The six-disc collection, which includes previously unreleased demos and studio recordings, as well as non-album tracks and concert recordings, will come out on Nov. 13. A full track list is on the band’s website.

The original album, which followed their celebrated Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots LP, contained the psychedelic singles “The W.A.N.D. (The Will Always Negates Defeat),” “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song (With All Your Power),” and “It Overtakes Me” — college radio hits that propelled the album to Number 11 on the Billboard 200.

The box set includes the original album, expanded to include B-sides from singles and compilation tracks released at the time, along with a 360-degree behind-the-scenes look at how the group wrote the music. One disc includes several different demos, some only a minute long, that shows the creative process. “The W.A.N.D.,” for instance, appears as two instrumental demos and an early demo, the latter of which is 89 seconds long, before the disc ends with a 3:44 instrumental. On Wednesday, they released, “The Sound of Failure (2 Demos),” a sparse rendition of the song featuring frontman Wayne Coyne singing along with acoustic guitar and keys and a more piano-driven version.

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There are also previously unreleased songs, tracks they contributed to soundtracks (like The Heartbreak Kid and Spider-Man 3), a Goldfrapp remix of “The W.A.N.D.” And they’ve included their iTunes Originals session and the promo CD If You Could Blow Up the World With the Flick of a Switch (which fans know is the first line from “The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song”). And the CD version ends with two live albums, U.F.O.s at the Zoo – The Legendary Concert in Oklahoma City and Live at the Hollywood Bowl. The LP box set has a slightly different arrangement of tracks.

The band, which has recently gone through lineup changes following the departure of Stephen Drozd, has only one concert on the books for the rest of the year. They’ll appear at Tecate Comuna 2026 in Cholula, Mexico on Nov. 28.