Embryonic, the newest album by the Flaming Lips, is a return to form of sorts. It’s one of the band’s most discordant albums, certainly their most jarring since the early 1990s. It is noisy, and like every other Lips album, it is bizarre. However, it is excellent, and for a band that’s been together for over 25 years, their continuing creativity is equal parts astonishing and refreshing.

No, the album isn’t the most cohesive, spanning several genres from Krautrock to jazz, with a lot in between. Yes, there are goofy songs like “I Can Be a Frog,” a singalong complete with Karen O making screeching animal noises, and throwaways like late-album track “The Impulse.” Inevitably, Embryonic falls into the same trap that most double-albums of the last twenty years have: show me a good double-album, and I’ll show you a release that could have lost a few tracks to become an even better single LP. Had Embryonic lost just a few of its eighteen tracks, it could rank with classics Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and The Soft Bulletin as some of the band’s best work. But an album like this was probably meant to be taken as a whole, warts and all. This is the follow-up to Yoshimi that the fearless freak fans of the Flaming Lips deserve.