Oklahoma City’s experimental duo Brainwasher have returned with their searing new single, ‘Burning Cars,’ out today via Mothland. Featuring fellow Oklahoma stalwarts Spaceface, the track is the first taste of their forthcoming debut LP, ’39 Lightyears from Heaven,’ due out October 24, 2025.

‘Burning Cars’ sees the duo of Matthew Duckworth Kirksey and Tommy McKenzie, known for their collaborative work with The Flaming Lips, Miley Cyrus, and Portishead, delve into a politically charged sonic landscape. The track fuses their signature blend of trip-hop and psych-rock with cosmic textures and soaring vocal layers from Spaceface. Lyrically, the song is a direct critique of societal self-deception and the comfortable fictions we tell ourselves.

A decade in the making, ’39 Lightyears from Heaven’ is a sprawling, 10-track sonic essay that sees offbeat rock and distorted electronica collide. The album pulls influence from the surrealist worlds of David Lynch, the elegant punk moxie of Nick Cave, and the brooding experimentalism of Portishead, all distilled into a sound that speaks directly to the subconscious.

On the inspiration behind ‘Burning Cars,’ Kirksey shares: “A little while back, while we were on tour in Europe with The Flaming Lips, our label asked about a video for ‘Burning Cars.’ One day, when we were playing in Cologne, we found out the city was evacuating a 10-mile radius to defuse three undetonated WWII bombs—just a normal part of reality there. The next day I was walking around Berlin, seeing all these powerful monuments to the war, thinking about what it must’ve been like. We actually wrote the song during the George Floyd protests—it’s about how the world tells us things are getting better, but it feels like we’re not learning anything. It all felt connected.”

The accompanying video, directed by longtime Flaming Lips collaborator Blake Studdard, was shot spontaneously over two nights in Germany: “After our Berlin show, I grabbed Blake and Tommy and said, let’s go film something. We wandered around with a battery-powered light and camera until 2am. The next night, we played in a repurposed Nazi bunker and filmed more. These cities still carry the weight of the past—and this video became a way of holding onto that reminder.”