The Flaming Lips – at least how we all knew them – are officially dead.
In case you missed it over the holidays, Steven Drozd – the instrumentalist, musician and vocalist who has been the better half of The Flaming Lips since the 1990s – accidentally leaked on social media that he’s no longer with the band.
Although the news had been floating around the OKC creative class for a while, it was quickly picked up by the national online music press, sparking mass hysteria in pink robot quarters.
Our main man Ryan LaCroix with KOSU has the basic details:
It’s been a trying week for Flaming Lips fans.
It started when Stephen Drozd confirmed what many of us feared: he’s no longer a member of the band.
Drozd has been absent from the Lips since fall 2024, sometime around when his daughter went missing — but was found! — in Seattle, and Lips collaborator Nell Smith tragically died in a car crash that same week.
“They’re done with me – but we’re not talking about it,” he said in a now-deleted Threads post.
Drozd later poked fun at himself for his “loose lips,” but the damage was done. Fans sounded off online about Drozd’s departure and everyone’s loss, with some blaming the Lips — and specifically Wayne Coyne — for not posting about the split.
That sucks. When I first heard this news was official, I went and listened to The Soft Bulletin on my record player like the band had just died. Then, about halfway through, I remembered that the band, as we knew them, actually died in 2009 when Wayne left his longtime wife and creative collaborator Michelle Martin for a Paseo bar fly and threesomes with Miley Cyrus — and that I was probably just being melodramatic about it.