Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

The band pursued a more electronic direction than before, adding acoustic guitars and rhythms influenced by hip hop and Top 40 music. The title character was inspired by Yoshimi P-We of Boredoms and OOIOO, after a remark in the studio that her unusual singing style sounded as if she were battling monsters. Coyne added the word pink. She performs on the album, and the lyrics range over love, mortality, artificial emotion, pacifism and deception. Some listeners hear a concept album, but Coyne has said it is not meant as one. The first track, Fight Test, echoes the vocal melody of Cat Stevens's Father and Son, and Stevens is credited as a writer. The title of the fifth track refers to the book The Morning of the Magicians. The closing instrumental, Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon (Utopia Planitia), won the Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental Performance.

It reached 13 on the UK albums chart, 50 on the Billboard 200 and 9 in Ireland. It became the band's first gold-certified release in the US in April 2006, and had sold 570,000 copies there by 2009. Metacritic lists a score of 84 from 27 critics. Pitchfork's Will Bryant called it a bold and inventive work that was also unfocused and top-heavy, praising the production of Dave Fridmann. The Guardian's Maddy Costa wrote that Coyne fuses a sense of futility with euphoria, and that lines such as the one about everyone you know someday dying are sung so serenely that the heart swells. It appeared on the best-albums-of-the-decade lists of Rolling Stone (27) and Uncut (11). Singles included Do You Realize??. The album was made into a stage musical, premiered at the La Jolla Playhouse in November 2012, and a 20th anniversary tour played it from start to finish from 2023 to 2025.