The Flaming Lips Did Not Break Up

For about 15 minutes Thursday night, indie-rock jokesters the Flaming Lips pronounced their own demise. In a Tweet they’ve since deleted, they wrote, “We have sad news. We’ve broken up…” A whole 18 minutes later, though, they tweeted again, “lol just joking guys,” and deleted their farewell. A representative from the Lips’ label wrote “not true” when Rolling Stone attempted to confirm the group’s disbandment.

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During the midst of it all, the group’s frontman, Wayne Coyne, tweeted from his own personal account, “The Flaming Lips twitter has been hijacked!!!!”  Still the unusual tweets continued.

The Flaming Lips account tweeted a request for their fans to buy the new single from the boy band Union J, a tweet claiming “that last announcement was a bit premature,” accompanied by an image of a skeleton in tagging “The Flaming Lips, 1983 – 2013,” a request to Justin Bieber for him to follow them. It then went on to retweet a number of random tweets from a British marble designer.

Then it all made sense when it asked for “everyone to follow @CallumB95 and help him reach 400 followers!” The Lips tweeted twice more asking people to follow the account. Then those tweets began getting deleted at around 6:52. By that time, though, the Callum account had gotten up to 455 followers. No one from the band has made any further comment about the situation.

Just yesterday, the Lips premiered the song “Wolf Children,” from their forthcoming Peace Sword EP, a release that contains songs from the movie Ender’s Game. It will come out on Black Friday, as part of Record Store Day’s “Back to Black Friday” event.