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Apr 15, 2013It's not easy to face up to and present the worst parts of being alive, much less in a way that's artistically pleasing or relevant. The Lips don't make it sound easy, which is why The Terror is so powerful.
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Apr 5, 2013By matching their ever-evolving, exploratory musical ethos with less eager-to-please, more confrontational modes of performance, the album marks the moment when the Flaming Lips become whole again.
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UncutMar 29, 2013As with most "difficult" albums, the more one listens, the more forgiving they become. [May 2013, p.77]
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MojoApr 9, 2013[Wayne Coyne's] prolix tendencies have been stripped down into sombre considerations of lust, mortality and universal chaos. [May 2013, p.87]
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Q MagazineApr 9, 2013The Terror is dark and experimental, full of synths and loops that owe more to Krautrock than guitar bands. [May 2013, p.101]
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Apr 2, 2013It’s the sound of the man inside the ball feeling an unknowable fear and trying to accept it. The rest of us should join him in his strife, if only to enjoy that psychedelic drone groove. It’s an anxious riot.
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Apr 16, 2013The beauty is fleeting but piquant.
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Apr 1, 2013While The Terror feels at first glance like an exercise in noise and disintegration, repeated listens reveal it to be a dark, challenging, and ultimately rewarding work of genius. It may be their best yet.
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Under The RadarMar 26, 2013It's almost relentlessly bleak, but taken as a whole, the overall experience can be intriguing. [Mar-Apr 2013, p.92]
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Apr 12, 2013At turns noisy, wistful and dark, The Terror is a beguiling record that's as beautiful as it is frightening.
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Mar 26, 2013After it burrows its way under your skin, The Terror does genuinely feel like something of a dark masterpiece, the album you’ll stick on to discredit anyone who tries to claim The Flaming Lips are lacking in depth or darkness.
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Apr 16, 2013The Terror is the sound of The Flaming Lips going from a group experience to an internal monologue, the perfect record for any fan who has ever felt like the band could use two “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate”s for every “Race For The Prize.”
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Apr 15, 2013By facing down the exhausting nature of depression and loneliness (seriously, Coyne sounds so depleted that he can barely muster the dejection to sing, and yes, that's a compliment), the Lips have retroactively strengthened their entire artistic credo.
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Mar 27, 2013The fact that a band thirteen albums in to their career can still make music that scares their audience is one thing. But the most amazing thing about The Terror is that it sounds like they still have the capacity to scare themselves.
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Apr 16, 2013It would almost be safe to say The Flaming Lips have hit closer to the classic record here than on the Dark Side cover album they released a few years ago.
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Apr 19, 2013It’s an album that provides tangibility to an incredibly complex feeling.
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Apr 15, 2013There's always been a relentless optimism hidden behind the Flaming Lips' unique brand of pop experimentalism.... Which makes their understated 13th album, The Terror, an evocation of a bleak, post-apocalyptic future, such a striking contrast.
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Apr 8, 2013The Terror stares back at you like panicked faces underneath a frozen lake, visible, but distant. It’s giant metallic bugs filling an apocalyptic sky and blotting out a blood red sun.
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Alternative PressMar 26, 2013The nine songs ooze out with floating bits of atmospherics and noise appearing and receding in the murk while hypnotizing listeners via insistent synth and drum loops. [May 2013, p.88]
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Apr 11, 2013The Terror may be The Flaming Lips’ most concise statement to date.
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Apr 11, 2013The Terror crafts that chaos into a careful, impeccably sequenced compositions that should buy Coyne at least a few more years of guilt-free wackiness.
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Apr 11, 2013If nothing else can be said about The Terror, it at least represents the culmination of all of The Flaming Lips’ oddball experiments and elongated, anti-sonorous jams into a single, abrasively beautiful cacophony.
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Apr 11, 2013It’s their most cohesive record since Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, and its eternally exhausted realizations and powerful, if demanding, passages confirm that the band is as tight and concentrated as they’ve ever been.
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MagnetApr 16, 2013It's a dark, repetitive, uncompromising record, full of challenges and threats. [No. 97, p.51]
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Apr 1, 2013Beautiful, blissful melodies are buried in there.
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Apr 15, 2013It’s a take-it-or-leave-it album that’s willing to be inert or annoying. But its obsessiveness brings its own rewards.
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Apr 1, 2013It's all fog machines and mirrors, with heavy synth riffs and deep motorik grooves that loop ad infinitum.
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May 15, 2013The Terror is simply the latest (and darkest) report from those reaches, one that generates holographic intensities of the dire straits this band has seen throughout its 30-year career.
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May 6, 2013The Terror is an unselfish view of a world free of human manipulation, and as such is a staggering listen to fans accustomed to the Lips’ sheeny pop orchestra and, before that, their lo-fi quirk.
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Apr 5, 2013As one of the most polarizing records in their extensive discography, this release is sure to divide certain fans, especially those who were disillusioned by the relative inaccessibility of Embryonic. For listeners looking for a noisy and thoroughly experimental album, though, The Terror is just what the doctor ordered.
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Apr 26, 2013The Terror is a frightening trip, a fantastically cohesive album, and one that could have benefited greatly from a bit more editing and perhaps a little better track sequencing.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 57 out of 66
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Mixed: 7 out of 66
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Negative: 2 out of 66
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Apr 16, 2013
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Aug 21, 2013
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Jun 23, 2015