Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is the tenth studio album by American rock band the Flaming Lips, released on July 16, 2002, by Warner Bros. Records. The album saw the band pursue a more electronic direction than previous efforts, incorporating acoustic guitars and rhythms influenced by hip hop and Top 40 music. The album was well-received critically and commercially, helping the band break into popularity, and was adapted into a musical in 2012. To commemorate the album's 20th anniversary, the band embarked on a world tour where they played it live from start to finish each night starting in 2023 and ending in 2025, and a box set was also released in 2023.

Music and lyrics

The lyrics of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots concern a diverse array of subject matter, mostly melancholy ponderings about love, mortality, artificial emotion, pacifism, and deception, while telling the story of Yoshimi's battle. The title character is inspired by musician Yoshimi P-We of Boredoms/OOIOO, following a comment in the Flaming Lips studio that her unusual singing style sounds like she is battling monsters. Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne added 'pink'. The Flaming Lips also won the same award for "The Wizard Turns On...", taken from At War with the Mystics, in 2006. The title of the fifth track, "In the Morning of the Magicians", is a reference to the book The Morning of the Magicians.

Release

Commercial performance

In recent years, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots has had a bigger commercial impact than the band's 1999 breakthrough album The Soft Bulletin, and became their first gold-certified release in April 2006. Calling the album "as strange as it is wonderful", Billboard nonetheless noted that "beneath the sunny, computer-generated atmospherics and the campy veneer of talk about gladiator-style clashes between man and machines with emotions, Yoshimi is actually a somber rumination on love and survival in an unfathomable world."

Track listing

Personnel

The Flaming Lips

  • Wayne Coyne – songwriting, vocals, guitars, cover paintings, mixing, production
  • Steven Drozd – songwriting, drums, guitars, keyboards, electronics, bass, vocals, mixing, production
  • Michael Ivins – songwriting, bass, keyboards, backing vocals, mixing, production, additional engineering

Additional personnel

  • Yoshimi P-We – vocalization
  • Dave Fridmann – additional songwriting, production, mixing, programming, engineering, mastering
  • Scott Booker – production
  • Trent Bell – additional tracking
  • Andy Taub – additional tracking
  • George Salisbury – design and layout

Charts

Weekly charts

{| class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders"

|+ Weekly chart performance for Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

! Chart (2002–2004)

! Peak <br/> position

|-

! scope="row"| Australian Albums (ARIA)

| align="center"| 62

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{| class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center;"

! Chart (2024)

! Peak <br/> position

|-

! scope="row"| Hungarian Physical Albums (MAHASZ)

| 21

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Year-end charts

{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center"

|+ Year-end chart performance for Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

! Chart (2003)

! Position

|-

! scope="row"| UK Albums (OCC)

| 151

|}

Certifications

References

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