Born in 1982, the year before the Flaming Lips formed, Dennis Coyne attended his first Lips show when he was eight months old. His dad’s younger brother, Wayne, is the group’s frontman after all, and Dennis has gone on to see them at every stage of their career. A few concerts stand out in particular, like the one that was also attended by Warner Bros. A&R reps in the early ’90s. “They poured a bunch of lighter fluid in this big symbol and lit it on fire,” Dennis remembers. “They were banging it so hard that it fell over and caught part of the stage on fire and lights were falling. It felt like everybody was about to die. I was about 10.”

But what really sold Dennis on his uncle’s band—and went a ways toward influencing the music he now crafts with his noise-pop band Stardeath and White Dwarfs—was a show he attended in 1999, just after The Soft Bulletin’s release. “It was the first time I’d seen them without a drummer, doing all that experimental stuff, not just being a traditional rock band. That’s what did it for me, because it just blew my mind. It was so loud, so crazy, and so good.”

Speaking before a recent Stardeath show at New York City’s Mercury Lounge, Dennis is energetic and warm, and possesses great quantities of middle-American charm. The 26-year-old singer/guitarist/keyboardist shares with Wayne a wiry build and a mane of long, unruly hair. He has big, blue eyes, teeth that have never seen braces, and wears a purple t-shirt that says, “You Can’t Roll a Joint on a Digital Download.” Unlike many show business newcomers who have benefitted from familial connections in the industry—it was a connection with the Lips that helped win Stardeath a deal with Warner Bros. Records—Dennis clearly delights in talking about his famous uncle, who has been enthusiastic about helping him realize his dreams. Stardeath regularly opens for the Lips, and the two acts have even recorded a cover of Madonna’s “Borderline” together.

Raised in Oklahoma City, Dennis journeyed to Norman to attend the University of Oklahoma, where he briefly studied film before flunking out. “Around the same time, I started working on the Christmas on Mars movie,” he says, referring to the Lips’ science-fiction film set on a newly-colonized Red Planet. “I was like, ‘Why am I going to school for film when I could just help on the [movie] and learn about that?’ Then, I could decide whether to do film or music.”

On the Christmas on Mars set, he did everything from setting up lights to gluing Styrofoam onto props to playing small roles. (He’s actually in the movie seven times, as different characters.) Filmed primarily in an old grain silo, an abandoned cement factory, and at Wayne’s house, it was the first time uncle and nephew collaborated on a creative level. “Through that, Wayne and I started becoming close,” Dennis says. “We were already close from our families, but we started developing a close working relationship.”

After Dennis turned 19 the next year, he traveled to England with the Lips as a roadie. “He was doing it mostly because he needed a job,” Wayne remembers. “I felt like he’d know after a month or so if he didn’t like it, and that would be the end of it, no big deal. But you never know how young people are going to react to these things.”

Dennis enjoyed the work tremendously, and eventually the Lips enlisted two other members of the newly-formed Stardeath and White Dwarfs to be roadies as well: Bassist Casey Joseph and drummer Matt Duckworth. The idea was to help them make money while traveling together so they could practice their music.

Wayne says the experience had a tremendous impact on his nephew.

“It wasn’t just his seeing us playing, but the driving, helping us set up, talking to people, and seeing other groups play.” Wayne continues, “I think having those experiences influenced him even more than the music.”

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Stardeath’s main creative forces, Dennis and Casey Joseph, inhabited the same Oklahoma City social orbit, but Dennis didn’t initially want anything to do with his future collaborator. As a 16 year old who was preparing to drop out of high school, Joseph was something of a bass prodigy. After hearing a recording of Dennis’ music from a mutual friend, he made overtures about collaboration, but Dennis was skeptical. “I was 22 at the time, and I was like, ‘How can I have a 16 year old in my band? That’s not rock ‘n’ roll.’”

Eventually, however, Joseph won him over with his instrument proficiency, not to mention his wide-ranging knowledge of rock and pop. “He was one of the only people who knew some of the more strange and embarrassing songs I was into, like Hall and Oates stuff,” Dennis says. “He could play all of them, plus he knew all these classic artists like King Crimson and Yes. He’d probably been playing less than a year—I was shocked by how good he was.”

Joseph was impressed by Dennis’ songwriting abilities. “When I start writing a song, it’s not really a song, it’s more of a verse or a chorus or a bridge, whereas he’ll do a whole song,” says the bassist, who has dark hair and wears a heavy beard that grows thickest on his neck. “[Nowadays], a lot of times, I’ll just give him a chord progression, and he’ll turn that into a song with actual structure.”

The band’s layered, oft-rousing psychedelia makes no apologies for its Lips’ influence, but it’s somewhat less experimental (at least at this point) and is often content to indulge in bombastic hooks or long instrumentals. Dennis writes most of the lyrics, which—as indicated by song titles like “Smokin’ Pot Makes Me Not Want to Kill Myself”, “I Can’t Get Away”, and “Age of the Freak”—often include themes of self-despair and introspection. Dennis says that focusing on bleak, emotional subject matter comes naturally to him, given the type of music he usually listens to. “I’ve always been drawn to the songs that can invoke that kind of emotion in somebody; songs that make me feel a sense of despair or loneliness.” Still, he’s quick to add that he doesn’t make a habit of drinking from the well of despair. “[My songs] are like an episode of Seinfeld; they’re all kind of connected, but they don’t have anything to do with each other, really.”