From the Vaults Friday: The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002)

The Year: 2002
The Album: The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
Who It Influenced: Passion Pit, MGMT, Evangelicals, the Minus Story, Band of Horses, and, um, Coldplay

For a certain generation, "Do You Realize??" isn't just a song, but an anthem; a gleaming, glorious, slightly-psychedelic power-ballad that sees the exquisite, aching beauty in being but a tiny, frail, mortal figure standing on this rock hurtling through space, desperately trying to fill a life with wonder and love before the inevitability of death comes along.

The centerpiece to 2002's utterly-beloved Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is something more than just a killer single on a classic record. It's like an alt-rock answer to "Imagine," or something; a tune so universal and transcendent that, for example, the State of Oklahoma named it its Official Rock Song. A tune that finds thousands upon thousands of people gleefully screaming along, every time the Flaming Lips play, about how everyone they know will, someday, be but food for worms.

In such, this song —this anthem— is the song that defines the Flaming Lips. Since releasing The Soft Bulletin in 1999, the band have turned their ridiculous liveshows into seize-the-day-spectacles exploding with as much joy as confetti; life-affirming celebrations of love and positivity. In other hands, that sounds like so much empty Oprah rhetoric, but the Lips' don't airbrush out the death and decay, and come out looking all the more poignant for it.

• Full review: The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots