[I was] driving my car with Thundercat, who plays bass on all the stuff. We were driving around listening to George Duke, and there was a moment when we were tripping on how crazy all that playing was. Well, why don't we make some [shit] like this now, that just kills everybody? When you hear it you're like, 'Oh [shit] you're dead!'"
"Theme", initially called "Jodorowsky", was the song that led into the concept of the album. "Cold Dead" started with an iPhonevoice memo.[2] "Stirring" is a homage to Ellison's friend Nick Terry, who had then-recently died.[2] "Coronus, the Terminator" was the first song Ellison made in his new home; "Siren Song" was written for Pharrell.[2] "Eyes Above" has a beat that he created with FKA Twigs and Niki Randa.[13] "The Beyond", dedicated to "an unborn child", is inspired by Fantastic Planet.[2] According to Ellison, "Fkn Dead" was the most difficult song on the album to make, but the arrangement for "Turkey Dog Coma" was the most complex.[2][14] In "The Boys Who Died in Their Sleep", Ellison raps, under his alias Captain Murphy, about "being comfortable in a cloud where nothing ever happens", while naming OxyContin, Vicodin and Xanax.[4]
Artwork
The cover art for You're Dead! was designed by Japanese manga artist Shintaro Kago on the cover and inner sleeve, with further art being utilised in the accompanying live show. Much of the drawings featured men and women being disfigured and mutilated in unrealistic, hi-tech ways with a significant amount of gore and nudity.[6]
Release
The album's title and release date were announced on July 22, 2014.[15] On October 7, 2015, Flying Lotus released a deluxe version of the album containing the instrumentals and the previously Japanese exclusive bonus track "Protector".[16][17]
You're Dead! was met with widespread critical acclaim. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from professional publications, the album received an average score of 88, based on 36 reviews.[19] Aggregator AnyDecentMusic? gave it 8.4 out of 10, based on their assessment of the critical consensus.[18]
Andy Kellman of AllMusic stated, "Like his great aunt, and his great uncle John Coltrane, Ellison has created exceptionally progressive, stirring, and eternal art."[20] Clayton Purdom of The A.V. Club stated, "You're Dead! is his most confidently structured work yet."[21] Matthew Bennett of Clash stated, "This, his fifth album, is also an overt ode to limbo, the halfway house of consciousness and true death. And this is where all 19 tracks dwell, in between the failing light of traditional jazz and the bursts of neon emitted from his polyrhythmic, nocturnal electronica."[27] Adam Kivel of Consequence of Sound stated, "The album works best as a single, unified listen."[7] In a glowing review for The Guardian Paul MacInnes said, "There's always been a sense that Ellison was stretching for a new musical vernacular, one that would continue the lineage of free jazz (he is the great-nephew of Alice Coltrane). This album suggests he might have found it."[22] Chris Cottingham of NME stated, "You're Dead! is a madly inventive record, one that takes hip-hop and jazz as starting points, beats them both to death and then brings them back to life in an almost unrecognisable form."[9] Logan Smithson of PopMatters stated, "You're Dead! is arguably his most imposing album thus far."[8]
Nate Patrin of Pitchfork stated, "Flying Lotus has the notion that death should be the only limiting factor, and when he's put out a work that wrings beauty out of that very thing, what's the point of fearing anything?"[25]Will Hermes of Rolling Stone stated, "Ellison makes the boldest, most fully engaged fusion of the hip-hop-laptop era."[10] Franklin Jones of Slant Magazine stated, "While it may not be clear where we're headed throughout the album, Ellison maneuvers through the bedlam with such confidence that it's not just easy to get swept up in his grand vision of the Great Beyond, but to return for repeat visits."[28] Michael Blair of XXL applauded the album overall saying, "The genius of Flying Lotus, which has been invariably present throughout his preceding releases, but most especially on You’re Dead!, is that he has an incredible ability to both illustrate and extract exceptional amounts of emotion, without saying much at all."[29] Staff writer at Exclaim! Stephen Carlickm described the album as, "Excitingly new yet classically evocative, You're Dead! is contemplative but never boring, an example of genre cross-pollination that transcends novelty and, occasionally, time and space as well."[30]Robert Christgau was less enthusiastic in his column for Cuepoint, citing "Turkey Dog Coma" and "Ready err Not" as highlights and writing, "The problem isn't that it's less than the sum of its parts—the problem is that there is no sum, only parts".[31]
The album debuted at number 19 on the US Billboard 200, with first-week sales of 17,000 copies in the United States.[41] In its second week, the album dropped to number 67 on the chart, selling 5,000 copies, bringing its total album sales to 22,000 copies.[42]
^Flying Lotus is credited not only as Flying Lotus, but also as Steven Ellison, his birth name, and Captain Murphy, an alias he uses for rapping. These credits put all of Ellison's credits in one, despite the various credited names.
