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• A Beginner's Guide into the Gizzverse

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: A Beginner's Guide into the Gizzverse

This ain’t your typical hitchhiker’s guide. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard takes you on way more than just a journey from A to B. We're celebrating Gizzard's largest Texas show yet with this list of 10 pivotal moments and albums in the band's career, taking them from dive bars to stadiums - and beyond!

Forget even having a destination in mind—since forming in 2010, this band has been changing their own path over and over again like a shooting star of firey space gas from millennia ago. 

Since then they have released over 20 albums and show no signs of stopping the ride. So, as you can imagine, we’re not going to touch on every album on here. However, we do encourage everyone to hop in the car that is King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard and make their own memories through the Gizzverse. Just let us be your trip sitter into the beautiful chaos of this ever-evolving band. Starting with their first album and ending with the recently-released Levitation Box Set that features Live in Chicago ‘23 and Demos Vol. 5 & Vol. 6 —you’re in for a wild ride.  

WILLOUGHBY'S BEACH

So first off, let’s dive right into their 2011 debut Willoughby’s Beach . This album is a very very calm way to start with these otherwise chaotic boys. It shows their roots coming from the desire to just hang with friends, have fun, and make music. This album portrays them as young surf punks, beach garage rockers… But don’t get attached to that. 

“Black Tooth” King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard from Willoughby’s Beach

FLOAT ALONG - FILL YOUR LUNGS

Now, let’s skip to 2013 with Float Along - Fill Your Lungs . Here is your first taste of the trippy psychedelic waves of sound that are to grow and get stronger as the Gizzverse expands. The beachy rock vibes from their debut have almost vanished completely and now otherworldly essences seem to be in play. This is the album that first got fans puzzling over what could possibly come out next from this King.

“30 Past 7” King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard from Float Along - Fill Your Lungs

“Cellophane” King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard from I’m In Your Mind Fuzz

I'M IN YOUR MIND

Here we take another time-jump and head to their 2014 album I’m In Your Mind Fuzz . By this album, it feels like they have full-heartedly figured out exactly who King Gizzard is and are unafraid to express it. This is the album that officially solidified their seat on the psych-rock throne. 2014 also marked the year they made their North American debut, playing Austin Psych Fest to a packed early crowd. That set is captured as disc one of our Live at Levitation release!

Another year later and we’re at Paper Mâché Dream Balloon. This is their version of an “acoustic” album. But this isn’t your neighborhood sad boy bedroom music. This album is still just as groovy as the King demands his Gizzverse to be and even includes some fantastic wind instruments.  

“Trapdoor” King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard from Paper Mâché Dream Balloon

NONAGON INFINITY 

Their next album, Nonagon Infinity in 2016 was probably what really set their name in the stars. This album is so perfect in the sense that you can start it anywhere and listen to it on a loop and it will always tell you a magical story. It’s a little darker, a little more intricate, and a whole lot more in-your-face.  The band celebrated the release of the album at LEVITATION 2016 - not the way anyone expected after the festival was cancelled due to severe weather, but instead becoming the MVPs of the weekend headlining two showcases at Barracuda (RIP) for a grateful and insanely hyped crowd. A compilation of those sets is DISC TWO of  their  Live at Levitation  release!

“Robot Stop” King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard from Nangon Infinity

POLYGONDWANALAND

Album number 12 was a milestone not just musically, but also a game changer for the band's ever-expanding universe of fans, and was announced  November  14, 2017  by the band with epic news:  "This album is FREE. Free as in, free".  Released under an open source license—the band uploaded the master tapes online for anyone to freely use and launched their Bootlegger series opening up a world of recordings and releases. It's been a genius move from the band, giving fans (including us!) a chance to create their own versions of releases, and giving them a stake in the band's musical universe. It's hard to say if that's the moment that took the band on the path they're now on, but it certainly seems to have helped.

After being released by 88 labels worldwide in 188 different variants they announced an 'official Flightless pressing' of Polygondwanaland. We've lost count of how many pressings there are now!

FLYING MICROTONAL BANANA

Then in 2017, they stuff a banana in the gas pipe of their norm and released Flying Microtonal Banana —an album completely recorded in microtonal. Which basically means that they played “in-between” the typical 12 notes of Western society music. “Out of tune,” some closed-minded American guitarist might say, but arranged properly and you get this transcendental beauty of an album. 

Now, we’re about to skip a lot of REALLY AWESOME albums that they released in 2017-2018, but this is a beginner’s guide, remember? The isn’t a guide to every album, so we encourage you to go back and check them out yourself, but for now… On to 2019!

INFEST THE RATS' NEST

Here, we’re making a stop at their first thrash metal album Infest The Rats’ Nest. This is just a sick album, like, in all the history of music ever existing—we’re including whatever rocks and trees cavemen were banging on to make a melody. If you don’t like metal, then you probably won’t agree with us, but it also makes an urgent statement about ecological disaster we think any Gizz fan would agree with. 

“Planet B” King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard from Infest The Rats’ Nest

OMNIUM GATHERUM

Again, we’re going to make a big hop over some magical albums, even skipping over the pandemic, to go straight to 2022 with the album Omnium Gatherum . Now here is an album that has a song for every music fan. Here the King is announcing to the Gizzverse that yes, he is the master of psychedelic rock and ominous tales told through melody, but he is also an ever-expanding being. They hit pop, rock, rap, and then some. It’s honestly epic AF.

Also in 2022, they released Changes , which was another turn down an unknown road on the ride for King Gizzard. Here they created a catchy R&B-inspired album that’s sexy, groovy, and perfect to dance with your honey to. This album makes you think that maybe the King Gizzard found his Queen Lizard Wizard.

“Hate Dancin’” King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard from Changes

LIVE AT RED ROCKS '22

Finally, we end on their unfathomably epic live album recorded at the band's 3 nights at the iconic Red Rocks Amphitheater. This album showcases one of the best bands on the planet doing their thing over 86 tracks!

This marks the moment in the time when the band went from psych rock cult band to a rock music institution. At that point, it was undeniable, Gizzard has transcended genre and their influences to become one of the biggest - and in our opinion one of the best - bands on the planet.  We took on the ambitious project of pressing this Bootlegger release to vinyl, and while the splatter version is sold out you can still grab one of the last of the 12xLP boxset Neon Half and Half pressings here:   HERE !

WHAT'S NEXT???

Who knows what's next for Gizzard. Breezy folk? A synth masterpiece? Another trash metal banger like their latest  2023 release  PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or Dawn of Eternal?  Whatever it is, y ou can bet we'll be there!  We've jumped into the Gizz wormhole and we're never coming out.  Following the Red Rocks boxset we've got two brand new ones for you in the shop :  Live in Chicago ‘23 which captures the essence of what their live set is like— and Demos Vol. 5 & Vol. 6 , which feels more like a gift from the band to fans, because now you get that little extra good-good to show off to your friends. “Oh, you think you’re a Gizz fan?? Do YOU have this album? I don’t think so.” Anyways, hopefully, we have well prepared you for your long never-ending and ever-evolving ride that is your newfound fandom of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. Welcome to the Gizzverse, my friend. Buckle up.z

Hope to see you at their 3 Hour Marathon set next year in Austin - NOV 15, 2024! Grab tickets HERE .

by ELENA CHILDERS

King gizzard.

New: Live In Chicago 2023 and Demos Vol. 5 + Vol. 6 available as pre-order! 

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By the time you read this, King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard will probably have released another album

With 24 albums in just over a decade – and five last year alone – are King Gizzard challenging their fans to process too much music? "I think we are primarily challenging ourselves,” says Stu MacKenzie

Stu Mackenzie, the singer and guitarist at the head of Australian psychedelic rockers King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard, shudders when he thinks back to the global events of 2020 that brought the planet to a standstill.

“Your whole existence is called into question when something like this happens,” he says from his home in Melbourne. “It was an existential threat, because it was like, ‘What is my purpose if not to go play music for other human beings?’”

Given the prolific nature of the band – they’d released a total of 15 albums in the seven years since their 2012 debut, 12 Bar Bruise – it’s hard not to sympathise with their predicament. But King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard are nothing if not hardy souls and so, despite Melbourne experiencing some of the toughest lockdown restrictions in the world, they set about overcoming the dilemma of not being able to make music together. 

Harnessing the power of digital communication, the band met daily via Zoom to exchange ideas, riffs and concepts to “make a record, which sounded like a live band, because that was the thing that we couldn’t do”. Of course, this being King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard, the band remotely made an eyebrow-raising two albums in the shape of KG (2020) and LW the following year and, in the process, upped their studio skills.

“It was like, ‘How do we record a drum kit and make it sound like there’s other instruments in the room, and we actually jammed and played together?’” says Mackenzie. “In trying to do that, we actually had a lot of fun writing songs, and came up with a lot of things that were happy accidents.” He adds: “I mean, this is all I’ve known how to ever do and I just love making music; I love recording music and I love touring. I really, really do.”

Mackenzie’s – and, by extension, the rest of the band – love of his craft has come into full evidence once again. With the group reunited at last, their flurry of creative activity and continual desire to keep moving forward saw them releasing no fewer than five – count ’em - albums by the end of last year and more are planned. Made In Timeland – originally envisaged as intermission music during their increasingly marathon shows and developed into two 15-minute tracks of electronic influences harnessed by a 60bpm tempo – was followed a month after its March release by the full-length Ominum Gatherum , an album that jettisoned King Gizzard’s usual conceptual modus operandi to jump around a variety of genres including psychedelia, prog, krautrock and funk, thus making it an excellent entry point for neophytes.

Total Guitar magazine hailed  Ominum Gatherum track The Dripping Tap – an 18min+ psychedelic guitar freakout – as their track of the year.

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But they were only just getting started. Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava takes its cues from Can’s cut-up studio techniques gleaned from extended jams and sonic explorations, while Changes – a project that’s taken them almost five years to complete – finds the band basing every song around the same chord changes while oscillating between two very different scales. Oh, and then there was Laminated Denim , which eagle-eyed readers will spot as being an anagram of Made In Timeland . 

And out now is PetroDragonic Apocalypse; Or, Dawn Of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth And The Beginning Of Merciless Damnation , their 24th album. 

A comment under the YouTube video for their song Hate Dancin' (below) jokes: "It's been 5 days since they last released any new music – was starting to think we'd never hear anything from them again."

But with such a head-spinning amount of music being released in a relatively short time period, isn’t there a danger that King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard are overly challenging their fans to absorb and process an incredible amount of information? 

“I think we are primarily challenging ourselves,” counters Mackenzie. “But I think that is an interesting way to frame it, though, because – and maybe it’s not something that I’ve even really thought about – I definitely do spend a lot of time thinking about our fans, because I just feel so grateful that literally anybody wants to listen to our music or come to a show.”

Pondering the band’s ever-expanding output, he continues: “I feel like, for me, recording something, collaborating with other people, finishing it, and then releasing it to a point where you can’t touch it or change it ever again, it feels like a purge; it feels really good when it’s done. And it feels like you can clear space. In my mind, it’s like emptying trash. And that’s always been my personal way of like being able to move on or being able to grow or change.”

And yet there remains a form of self-awareness within the band about applying quality control methods to what gets released and what stays in the can – along with a tip from a seemingly unlikely source. “My mother-in-law told me this trick,” reveals Mackenzie, “She said, ‘When you’re reading a book, you subtract your age from 100. And that’s how many pages you need to read until you know that it’s worth finishing the book.’ And I was like, do you know what? There’s something deep in that that I actually really, really like. So I still use that specific trick. I think there’s a version of that that applies to any kind of thing in life and I think with making records, I now know a little sooner than I used to about what’s working and what isn’t.”

By his own admission, King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard rarely have less than two projects on the go at any given time. And that’s when they’ve managed to ascertain what’s what and what’s going where.

“We always have a lot of demos going,” smiles Mackenzie. “And a lot of them are just super-loose. Sometimes I don’t even know that two of them are going to end up on the same record. But sometimes I think that two that are going to be on the same record are actually going to be on two different records. Because, you know, the way they kind of evolve, and they’re going to diverge, or they’re going to join up or whatever.”

Coupled with King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard’s huge back catalogue is their massive touring schedule. So how easy or difficult is it for them to actually put a setlist together?

“It’s actually become really fun doing that,” says Mackenzie. “When the band started, it was very loose; it was kind of improvised because we just didn’t have very many songs. And that was really fun, but we got to a point where that got very boring. We kind of hit this wall where it was like, ‘Oh, shit, we need to learn our back catalogue!’ And we spent the better part of a year with most of our rehearsals dedicated to that rather than making new music and that sucked.

When you’re reading a book, you should subtract your age from 100. That’s how many pages you need to read until you know that it’s worth finishing the book. Stu MacKenzie

“Anyways, now the sets are loose and free and changing every night. We’re pulling from about 100 songs and playing 16 or 18 a night. Each soundcheck we’d be running through songs that we just had no idea how to play and trying to remember the chords and stuff. So we’re seriously on the edge of what we can do onstage. But we’re having a lot of fun. I think people are vibing on it. And we’re getting good energy from the shows. So yeah, we’re gonna keep playing like this until it feels like we should do something else. The shows have never been so improvised. It’s very fun.”

Fun is precisely what beats at the heart of their oeuvre, alongside an increasing maturity that helps the band navigate potentially choppy waters.

“I love the way that the interplay between six people is so complex,” says Mackenzie. “It’s just a great little nucleus for creativity having that many people working in tandem. It’s really cool when it works.”

PetroDragonic Apocalypse; Or, Dawn Of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth And The Beginning Of Merciless Damnation is out now via KGLW. See their website for more information

Julian Marszalek is the former Reviews Editor of The Blues Magazine. He has written about music for Music365, Yahoo! Music, The Quietus, The Guardian, NME and Shindig! among many others. As the Deputy Online News Editor at Xfm he revealed exclusively that Nick Cave’s second novel was on the way. During his two-decade career, he’s interviewed the likes of Keith Richards, Jimmy Page and Ozzy Osbourne, and has been ranted at by John Lydon. He’s also in the select group of music journalists to have actually got on with Lou Reed. Marszalek taught music journalism at Middlesex University and co-ran the genre-fluid Stow Festival in Walthamstow for six years.

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Here's the deal with king gizzard & the lizard wizard, the band expertly weaponizes niche — again — on 'petrodragonic apocalypse'.

Matthew Perpetua

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard's latest album is the metal-forward PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation . Jason Galea/Courtesy of the artist hide caption

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard's latest album is the metal-forward PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation .

Among the surest ways to feel out of the loop right now is to look at concert listings and notice that artists you've never heard — or even heard of — are somehow big enough to play very large venues. These days, it's a revelation that can strike without warning, no matter who you are or how closely you keep up with music. The streaming ecosystem has created the ideal conditions for lucky niche artists to grow their audience without leaving a cultural bubble, and there are so many cultural bubbles to go around that a few are bound to exclude you.

The Australian band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard is a prime example: an act with no hits and modest media coverage who nevertheless commands multi-night runs at amphitheaters throughout the United States: Red Rocks. The Hollywood Bowl. Forest Hills Stadium. That it comfortably shares those spaces with household names is even more impressive considering its own name, a mouthful of internal rhyme so egregiously silly that plenty of music critics, curators and journalists still disregard its existence entirely.

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The key to understanding the King Gizzard phenomenon is a willingness to imagine disparate categories in dense overlap, well beyond anything our post-genre pop era might have prepared us for. The group's six musicians live at the center of a very unlikely Venn diagram: stylistic chameleons on par with Beck and Damon Albarn, prolific at a rate that outpaces even the famously hyper-productive Guided By Voices, mounting completely unpredictable live shows with the jam band ethos of Phish. Led by 32-year-old primary songwriter Stu Mackenzie, they have released 24 studio albums since 2010, five of which dropped in 2022. (Two of those, the MGMT-ish Omnium Gatherum and the groovy jazz-fusion opus Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms, and Lava , are good entry points for the uninitiated.) The records tend to be organized around genre and musical high concepts — garage rock, various flavors of psychedelia, electronic excursions, prog, blue-eyed soul and several albums exploring the possibilites of microtonal tuning.

The band's latest, PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation , is its second foray into full-on thrash metal. As it did on style predecessor Infest the Rats' Nest from 2019, the group uses the genre and its traditional obsession with death and destruction as a vehicles for envisioning climate disaster — and resulting class warfare as the wealthy attempt to escape.

"Converge," a particularly brutal cut from the new album, splits its perspective between MacKenzie embodying the fury of nature itself as he describes "a storm of unparalled fright" in a low growl, and multi-instrumentalist Ambrose Kenny-Smith's falsetto refrains standing in for humanity. Once it has established the destruction of civilization as a given, the record ups the ante by bringing witchcraft and enormous rampaging dragon monsters into the narrative. All the over-the-top action-movie fun, however, is balanced with real-life dread, the tone carefully pitched to avoid winking away the seriousness of actual impending catastrophe for the sake of a thrill.

What's perhaps most remarkable about PetroDragonic Apocalypse is how fully and authentically King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard inhabits the target aesthetic. A first-time listener might reasonably peg it as the work of a full-time metal band, studied in the teachings of Slayer and Megadeth. This ability to operate in any of its chosen lanes with maximum commitment, sincerity, and raw skill may be the exact reason the group has been able to grow its audience so steadily. Each new record works like an episode of an ongoing serial, presenting the musicians' ceaseless whims, experiments and reinventions as the elements of a grand adventure. (Case in point: Petrodragonic Apocalypse is only the first of a two-parter about climate anxiety, the chaotic yin to a forthcoming yang in a yet-to-be-revealed genre.)

And for the listeners, King Gizzard's instinct to burn through ideas as quickly as possible has its own odd but undeniable benefit: permission, rare among superfandoms, to care only about the creative excursions that suit their own tastes. When new material is in constant and diverse supply, the stakes get a little lower, and a drastic change in direction feels like less of a betrayal. In other words, if you're not feeling the group in Metallica mode, you can rest easy knowing it'll probably come back around to, say, funky psychedelia before too long.

• King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard

Inside the strange world of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, the most eclectic and prolific guitar band on Earth

Stu Mackenzie dishes on the modal and microtonal jam experiments that populate the Australian rock band's sprawling discography

They’d made 20 albums in 10 years. Then they released three new albums – yes, three – in the last month. But there is method in this madness, as King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s affable vocalist, co-guitarist and head honcho Stu Mackenzie explains. 

“There’s always a plan when we make an album,” he says. “Sometimes it’s still being formulated throughout the process, and sometimes it’s more of a mission statement, a manifesto. Usually we’ll have a couple of songs that have one vibe and some that have another, so we join the ones that have similar themes then write more songs like that. It’s like we’re creating brothers and sisters for them.”

Since their 2012 debut 12 Bar Bruise , this Melbourne-based collective have populated their ‘Gizzverse’ with their own trippy cocktail of garage-psych rock, proggy jams, thrash metal and world music. 

From the thrilling experiments of 2017’s Flying Microtonal Banana to the balls-out metal of 2019’s Infest The Rats’ Nest , their catalogue shows how compelling and eclectic they are. And in 2022, they’ve been more prolific than ever before.

April saw release of their 20th LP, Omnium Gatherum – their first double album – which embraced alt-rock, hip-hop, space rock, metal, jazz, soul and more. And in October came three albums in quick succession: first, Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava , then Laminated Denim , and finally Changes .

This vast array of brand-new material shows the serious musicality beneath their veneer of hip quirk – the band embracing modal jams, polyrhythmic intermission music and some woozy exercises in rapid key modulation. It’s unbelievable when listening to it, but Omnium Gatherum seems to have been the most straightforward affair.

“We didn’t intend to make a double,” Stu says. “We just had heaps of songs. That one felt less focused than other releases, but on purpose. We didn’t go in with an overarching concept and that felt nice. It was just about each song really being its own little thing, and that was liberating. We could take some different paths we usually wouldn’t go down, approach ideas that felt daunting or unrealistic to do for a whole record, and just try some things out.”

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Things like hip-hop. The spacey, ’60s-psych jazz of Kepler 22-b is powered by an irresistible breakbeat pulse, and The Grim Reaper and Sadie Sorceress saw the band channeling Beastie Boys-style rap smarts. 

Those tunes were also unconventionally written – the blueprints were based on chopped-up samples from Mackenzie’s bargain-bin world music LPs, and those ideas were then expanded on by the band, completed by co-guitarists/vocalists Cook Craig and Joey Walker, Ambrose Kenny-Smith (vocals, keys, harmonica), Lucas Harwood (bass) and Michael Cavanagh (drums). 

There are proggy/jazzy moments ( Evilest Man ) and catchy, retro tunes ( Blame It On The Weather ), along with some heavy stuff. Mackenzie reaches for his Gibson Holy Explorer on the Iron Maiden-esque Gaia – which gallops along in proggy sub-divisions of 9/8 – and the Judas Priest-like Predator X , one of the album’s unabashed metal moments. 

A leftover from last year’s Butterfly 3000 LP, the funky, eastern-flavoured Magenta Mountain has a beautiful riff whose lines shift from a major to minor pentatonic feel, the song opening in F# then gravitating towards its relative minor, Eb minor. “I have grown to love pentatonics,” Stu says. “There’s something about it which is just so inherently melodic, and so much music is built around that scale. The trick with it is to try to make something that still feels unique, original, and fresh.”

The album’s relentless opener The Dripping Tap features some drop D, Mixolydian guitar madness set to an irresistible motorik beat (complete with wailing harmonica), and such modal experimentation forms the backbone of the first of their three new releases...

Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava takes its title from the band’s mnemonic for the order of the seven modes of the major scale: Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian and Locrian. Convening at Gizz HQ – their large rehearsal space on the outskirts of Melbourne – they would spend one day jamming on each individual mode, then go back through the five or six hours of music recorded, and sift it for the most interesting moments, then arrange. 

“The concept there was to not prepare anything,” Stu says, “to just roll tape and capture everything. We record the main tracks, a day per song, but there’s a lot of content in there. We went back through all the recordings, which took an absurd amount of time, energy and patience, and grabbed all the parts that had a vibe, that didn’t sound like anything we’d ever done before.”

With sax and organ, the gentle, almost Caribbean Mycelium is their Ionian moment, an easy vamp on the Eb and F minor – the mode’s first two chords in Eb. But perhaps typically for such an unorthodox group, the major scale wasn’t King Gizzard’s starting point. 

“We attacked the modes in the order we felt comfy with them,” Stu explains. “We started with [the funky single] Ice V , which uses the Dorian mode, then went Mixolydian [the catchy 13-minuter Hell’s Itch ], Phrygian [the jazzy Magma ], the straight minor [or Aeolian, on the wah wah-packed, flute-flecked Iron Lung ], then Ionian for Mycelium .”

It’s easy to play Locrian and sound dissonant, but I wanted us to sound deliberate and melodic, but maintain the loose, freewheeling feeling of the jam it came from

Which leaves many guitarist’s favourite mode, the Lydian, and the frequently neglected Locrian, whose b2, b3, b5, b6 and b7 offer little in the way of conventional, consonant tonality.

“Locrian was easily the hardest,” Stu says. “We were nervous about it so left it last! It’s easy to play Locrian and sound dissonant, but I wanted us to sound deliberate and melodic, but maintain the loose, freewheeling feeling of the jam it came from. We’d done all these other jams beforehand, so once we got into a groove and a pattern, that one, which we called Gliese 710, kind of clicked.”

The Lydian piece, Lava , comes with flute, sax, and wah’d guitar, giving that brightest of all modes a woozy, hypnotic, psychedelic feel. “That was hard for us,” he says. “We tend to sit on the tonic – the I – and explore it, but Lydian has that sharp four, which means it’s inherently floating outside of its tonic – it doesn’t want you to sit on the I. 

“A lot of our music is muscular and strong and powerful, and Lydian is none of those things. It’s like a cloud, like air – unsolid. Funnily enough the straight‑up major scale/Ionian was quite challenging as well. It was about finding something that didn’t feel too happy, too ‘Disney’.”

With a piano, drumkit and an assortment of spanking new and knackered old synths also in the room, King Gizzard’s three guitarists would share their instruments – Mackenzie’s trademark 1967 Yamaha Flying Samurai, Walker’s Gibson SG, Craig’s Fender Jazzmaster. Mackenzie went through his sole guitar amp , a Fender Hot Rod Deluxe, using its dirty channel, and his go-to fuzz pedal , an old Devi Ever Torn’s Peaker.

The following album, Laminated Denim , was made as an intermediate step between Omnium Gatherum and Ice, Death ’s modal explorations. In 2020, the band were meant to play at the iconic Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado. 

Two 15-minute intermissions were built into their mammoth, three-hour performance, so they had produced two pieces of music to play during those breaks as a clock ticked down – at its natural 60BPM – on the stage’s screen. 

Due to the pandemic, the Red Rocks show was pushed back to this October, and, being who they are, the band couldn’t resist making two brand-new tracks for the same purpose. The Land Before Timeland and Hypertension are motorik, guitar-heavy frenzies, and masterclasses in how powerful repetition in musical can be.

“We actually started Laminated Denim before Ice, Death ,” Stu says, “but they were recorded in a similar fashion. It was entirely improvised. We had a click track in our ears because there’ll be a clock ticking down on the screen, and both songs are a polyrhythm to that – I think one might be 150 and 180 – they work with the 60BPM, so the clock becomes a polyrhythm to the tempo of the tracks. Guitar-wise, we stripped things back a lot – I’m playing the Yamaha with my Cry Baby wah and a fuzz. Cook’s on his Jazzmaster, Joe’s on his SG .”

The Red Rocks show is part of the second US leg of the band’s extensive world tour this year. Live, Mackenzie keeps just three electric guitars on stage – his Flying Samurai, which he keeps in standard or drop-D tuning, his custom Gibson Holy Explorer, tuned to C# standard [C#, F#, B, E, G#, C# – great for metal], and his Flying Banana guitar for the microtonal songs. 

Attached to his guitar by his Divine Noise Curly Cable, his live pedalboard ’s pretty sparse – the Torn’s Peaker fuzz, Cry Baby, JHS Superbolt overdrive, Boss DD-3 Distortion and a Boss TU-3 tuner . Craig has two Jazzmasters – one in standard, one in C# standard – while Craig’s SG shares a stand with a Flying V, and his own microtonal guitar.

But the guitar is only one strand in King Gizzard’s musical fabric. Their final 2022 album, Changes , came about from Mackenzie’s noodlings on the piano, which leads him to very useful tip for budding composers: “I’m a big believer in writing on an instrument you don’t feel very comfortable on. I love guitar – it’s far and away the instrument I feel the most comfy on and I’ll always play it. But unless you try very hard not to, you can get stuck in certain ruts, of playing the same thing, of using the same patterns. 

“There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as you’re aware of it, but that’s why I love composing on a piano. The separation of lines between your left and right hands means you can sketch out parts for three people – one playing chords, one playing bass, then one playing a melody. Then you can give this a rough idea to three players who can flesh the parts out.”

All seven tracks on Changes are predicated on an idea Mackenzie came up with, on piano, of modulating quickly between the keys of D major and F# major, and exploring the fresh, surprising tonal possibilities this unusual marriage of keys brings. From the cycling A/B chords of the playful title track to the spacey Astroturf , from the bluesy No Body (some great, spare lead playing here) to the motorik Gondii , the band make this pleasingly muso exercise a highly listenable one.

“Those two scales are so different,” he says. “They contain very few of the same notes. I wanted to make it sound pretty, beautiful, and not too melodically weird . I’d just never heard anyone do this before. I’m sure there are jazz records like this, but this doesn’t feel like jazz. The challenge was to make it not sound like jazz to the listener.

Everything we did was unlistenable! I’d be looking at my guitar neck and be like, ‘F**k, what scale am I in?!’

“It’s just a weird experiment, a study. When we first had the idea back in 2017 we tried to make a record out of it, but couldn’t. Everything we did was unlistenable! I’d be looking at my guitar neck and be like, ‘Fuck, what scale am I in?!’ But there was something catchy about it, and every time I’d sit in front of any keyboard I would oscillate between those two scales, and every now and then land on something pretty. 

“It took five years of tinkering in the background, but slowly it came together. My favourite records that we’ve made as a band have always been ones I felt we couldn’t have made a few years ago. They feel like progressions or signposts along the road.” 

And even over these past five years, King Gizzard have come far. It’s how they’ve been able to come up with four compelling, extraordinary albums on the bounce this year. Stu reckons they’ve developed as players together, and – crucially – they’re listening to what each other are doing better than ever before. “We jam for a little bit,” he says, “so you’re conversing in a certain way, musically. And if you’re talking all day, by the end you’ve said some fairly interesting things...”

• Omnium Gatherum is out now via KGWL.

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Grant Moon is the News Editor for Prog magazine and has been a contributor to the magazine since its launch in 2009. A music journalist for over 20 years, Grant writes regularly for titles including Classic Rock and Total Guitar, and his CV also includes stints as a radio producer/presenter and podcast host. His first book, Big Big Train - Between The Lines, is out now through Kingmaker Publishing.

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Journey to the Center of the Gizzverse with King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard

Some of the band’s members are shoeless. They joke with each other, sometimes forgetting to look up at the camera. A publicist shepherds the 20-something mates around. There’s a lot to do. But that seems to be the speed of life these days: fast. Formed in 2010, the band functioned more as a swarm around chief songwriter Stu Mackenzie, eventually whittling down to the seven-piece that’s been touring the United States and Europe constantly for the past several years.

While King Gizzard and their stroboscopic surf-punk have earned big buzz, they’ve done so through the straightahead means of having a good hook and working very, very hard. This is hardly their American debut; they even lived outside Manhattan for a few months and gigged in the city constantly. They’re perfectly capable of keeping busy without photographers or publicists.

Even though it’s a rainy, blustery last day of March, fans are lined up outside of the venue waiting for the doors to open. Huddled against the cold, the excitement is as palpable as the wafting pot smoke. Spitting out 10 albums in their seven-year career, King Gizzard is the type of band built for wide-eyed obsession. It is music suited for both wild fan theories (search for “Gizzverse” on Reddit) and frothing mosh pits and crowdsurfing—a space with enough cosmic goofery that fans feel comfortable dressing in costume. (A banana outfit and knight-errant are reported the next night.)

With one album out in February ( Flying Microtonal Banana ) and another scheduled for June ( Murder of the Universe ), the Lizard Wizard is only a little bit behind in Mackenzie’s promise to release a total of five full-lengths this year. There’s at least one more recorded, but all their time is booked up with touring for the foreseeable future. Still, they don’t seem worried. What’s to worry about?

At home, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard live in a 24-by- 13-foot box in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick East. The individual members technically sleep elsewhere but, when it comes to assembling and actually being the Lizard Wizard, it occurs at their new studio. “A year and a half ago, we started renting a warehouse,” says Mackenzie, having proceeded to the interview portion of his post-soundcheck festivities, “and we just built this box inside of it. It has a really low ceiling, which is kind of fucked up, and has fluorescent lights in it.” The longhaired guitarist almost visibly shudders.

If there’s a real-life Gizzverse, then it is the warehouse. Outside the soundproofed rehearsal and recording box, Lizard drummer/thereminist Eric Moore runs Flightless, the band’s literal in-house label, merchandising and management operation. Also stationed there is Jason Galea, the band’s artist, whose apocalyptic, mountainstrewn LP covers and live visuals provide key fodder for Reddit speculations about the connection points between the narratives of 2014’s I’m in Your Mind Fuzz and 2016’s Nonagon Infinity . The art collective and publishers No One Special also run a small gallery, Nowhere Special, out of the space.

For King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard—a name built for jamband fans—the concepts started as quickly as the band did. Though founded as a loose side project for party jams, there was a framework from the start. “It wasn’t necessarily the seven that we have now,” says Mackenzie. “It was kind of a revolving cast of different people. [The concept] was deliberately the simplest song you could write. Preferably one chord, maybe two—if you’re kind of lucky. Preferably one word, maybe a couple—and everyone sort of making as much fucking noise as you possibly can, in order that we didn’t have to rehearse, ever. And if we wanted to get some random person to play with us, we could teach them the songs in, like, 11 seconds or something. So even that kind of had an idea to it.” Even if that idea, as Mackenzie concedes, was “how can we make the most idiotic music possible?”

But concepts are scalable, and so is the Lizard Wizard. Though their 2013 album Eyes Like the Sky came with narration and a spaghetti-western plotline, most of the binding themes on magical reptilian adventures have been musical. For Nonagon Infinity (recorded during their New York sojourn), they painstakingly wrote and arranged an album’s worth of material that segued into each other, with the last song looping back to the album’s opening. Creating the album was as hard as the band has ever worked; they rehearsed obsessively so that it could be performed as one continuous suite of music.

The no-concept concept for the follow-up was to retire to the Australian countryside and play acoustic music, and the resultant Paper Mâché Dream Balloon is the most striking item in their discography. With band members teaching themselves new instruments, the songs are both textured and propulsive, with perhaps their most intensely detailed songcraft yet, sometimes sounding like a rural Australian equivalent of New York DIY psych-folk standard-bearers, Woods. Each new chapter introduces new dialects to a quickly expanding vocabulary.

Casually, if not quite accidentally, the band’s first major release of 2017 immediately propelled them into rarified territory, and it originated with a holiday Mackenzie took in Turkey. Already a fan of Turkish artists, like Anatolian rock hero (and record-collector favorite) Erkin Koray, Mackenzie grew interested in the local traditional music.

“Being a guitarist, I was drawn to the baglama, which is a long-neck stringed instrument with movable frets, and the frets are not often in the places where we Westerners would think they might be,” he says. “And you start hearing these other sounds, and it just starts to sound awesome. When I got home, I bought a baglama, and I was half-heartedly learning it, having a bash—this goes back a few years—and I started writing some songs with the baglama, and started thinking about how we’re going to make this baglama record, and started thinking,: ‘How is this going to work?’”

At the same time, a guitar-making friend asked Mackenzie if he had any ideas for a guitar he’d like, and Mackenzie wound up receiving the Flying Banana, a yellow guitar with a microtonal scale based on the baglama, minus the movable frets. “It was kind of just a way to find middle ground and figure out how to play this stuff with just the things that I’m used to, like loud guitar amps and drum kits and stuff. If you’re sitting there cross-legged playing the baglama with a drum kit, something’s not quite right, you know?”

Soon, Mackenzie realized that if he was going to play a microtonal instrument, then everyone besides the drummers would have to play microtonal instruments, so the band ended up with two more microtonal guitars, some harmonicas, a bass and a modified keyboard. And away they went, simultaneously arriving in a new harmonic dimension of the Gizzverse and a place with rich musical history, connecting the Lizard Wizard to instrument builder Harry Partch, psychedelic drone-master La Monte Young and countless other experimenters who use intonation experiments as keys to the cosmos. For King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, it’s all in an album’s work. “I think we’ll make another microtonal record at some point,” Mackenzie says. “I mean, we’ve got the guitars to do it.”

But there’s other work to do first. Next out is Murder of the Universe , unquestionably the group’s most relentlessly meta-project yet, and a return to the narrative-driven play of Eyes Like the Sky . “This record was always supposed to link up to other stuff that we’ve made,” Mackenzie says, “so it felt necessary to [have narrations] to tie some things up, even if it is still somewhat vague. We just kind of wanted to expand on this sort of universe. We ended up with three very distinct chapters which, taken on their own, sort of have a beginning, middle and end, and sort of follow a story. And they are somewhat interconnected but, more or less, it’s three distinct stories on this record.”

If it all sounds like too much to consume—that’s OK—it’s still a howling pile driver of an album, even if one skips the tracks with interstitial narration and creepy cyborg voices intoning haunting poetry, the perfect medium between the overproduced garage-rock of John Dwyer’s Oh Sees and the over-productive garage-prog of Matthew Friedberger’s Fiery Furnaces. And if even that sounds like too much, there’s always the next dispatch from the Gizzverse, a collaboration with Alex Brettin, the songwriter known as the Mild High Club. It features Mackenzie, Brettin and “whoever else was around, which was often quite a lot of us,” says Mackenzie. “It’s sort of got an exploring whatthe-fuck-are-we-doing? kind of sound.”

Given the amount of musical universes he’s already traversed, it seems like an imposition to even ask Mackenzie about what might come for albums four or five. Even if he doesn’t have a plan yet, he operates with the faith that new galaxies and constellations will manifest accordingly.

The central unifying substance of the Gizzverse, concept albums aside, is drums. On the stage at Webster Hall, the two drummers—Michael Cavanagh and Eric Moore— face one another. The band launches into their show with a seven-song segment drawn from Flying Microtonal Banana , and the moshing starts almost immediately and only intensifies. As opposed to the multi-limbed polyrhythms of the Grateful Dead or the intricate interlocking of The Feelies, Cavanagh and Moore often double each other’s parts—a veritable jet stream beneath the band’s whoosh.

After a break to switch back to standard intonation instruments, the septet slams into a suite of tunes from the not-yet-really-announced Murder of the Universe , as crowd-surfers make their way to the front barricades, deposited for the bouncers and circulated back into the crowd.

Beginning their touring year with a turn on the Australian summer festival circuit (following their own traveling Australian Gizzfest in late 2016), the band prepped for their U.S. tour by playing inthe-round for eight consecutive nights at Melbourne’s Night Cat. “We go through these periods where it’s ultra loose and we don’t write setlists and it’s called out—and things can turn into other things,” he says. “That’s the most enjoyable for me, but it can really go either way. I stand in the middle so I can kind of, like, point and tell everyone sort of what to do.” 

But New York is New York, the Lizard Wizard keeps it tight and the frenzy continues right up to the end of the show sequence of little big bangs while the onstage projections of zooming landscape grids perhaps do (or don’t) link up to miscellaneous album concepts. After nearly two hours, the Lizard Wizard waves good night, the mosh pit ceases and the Gizzverse continuum temporarily dissolves—a place to go instead of worrying.

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We rank every King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard album

Australia's hardest working band, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, are set to release their 16th album this week.

Australia’s hardest working band is back at it again this month. The wonderfully named King Gizzard And The Wizard Lizard is gearing up for the release of K.G. , the band's 16 th studio album in just eight years. Preceded by four eclectic singles showcasing the band’s genre-bending musical style incorporating everything from psychedelic-pop to prog-rock and heavy metal, K.G . will no doubt be another experimental headbanging delight from the Melbourne collective.

As we wait in giddy anticipation of King Gizz 's new record, we thought there's no better time to delve back into the band's stacked discography and get reacquainted with how awesome this band is. With 15 major releases to choose from, it's hard to know where to begin, so we've given each album a whirl and ranked them for you to get more easily acquainted. While you’d normally go from worst to best, King Gizzard are yet to put out a real stinker, so think of this piece as more of an overview of our favourite King Gizzard ’s albums and a celebration of their unique back catalogue rather than a steadfast ranking of their greatest releases.

15. Oddments

Like your drunken uncle who rambles on about a bunch of random topics after having a few too many Christmas froths, Oddments is musically all over the shop. Opener 'Alluda Majaka' is an organ-driven LSD trip, 'Vegemite' a 60s influenced ode to every Australian’s favourite spread and 'Hot Wax' a delightful surf rock ditty. While there are some good moments, Oddments lacks direction and is at the lower end of King Gizzard releases.

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Best track: 'Hot Wax'

14. 12 Bar Bruise

King Gizzard’s debut is a ferocious assault on the senses chock full of distorted guitars and psychedelic melodies. Laying the groundwork for future releases, 12 Bar Bruise is a great time capsule of Gizz's early psych-rock foundation before the experimentation began.

Best track: 'Muckraker'

13. Gumboot Soup

Made up of an eclectic collection of songs that were left of the band's four 2017 albums, Gumboot Soup is a mixed bag of odds and ends. That’s not to say it doesn’t offer some absolute pearlers, like the rollicking 'Muddy Water' and crunching 'The Great Chain Of Being,' but there’s definitely a lack of cohesion on this upbeat record.

Best track: 'All Is Known'

12. Murder Of The Universe

King Gizzard’s longest album (21 tracks running 46 minutes) is also their strangest. This is an inventive concept album split into three separate stories containing spoken-word narratives, sci-fi themes and dystopian instrumentation. When it works it’s tremendous, such as the black Sabbath-esque 'The Lord Of Lightning,' but for the most part Murder In The Universe is a weird listen that will please long time fans and confuse everyone else.

Best track: 'The Lord Of Lightning'

11. Sketches Of Brunswick East

Teaming with Mile High Club’s Alex Brettin, King Gizzard explore the world of jazz with their 11 th studio album. A strangely compelling fusion of the Gizz’s psychedelic rock style and Mile High Club’s experimental jazz concoctions, Sketches Of Brunswick East is an interesting detour with some great moments.

Best track: 'Dusk To Dawn On Lygon Street'

10. Infest The Rat’s Nest

King Gizzard explore the dark depths of 80s heavy metal on the hard and fast Infest The Rat’s Nest . Influenced by thrash metal pioneers such as Metallica, Slayer and Overkill, the album is King Gizzard’s most political yet, exploring the ecological problems facing the world backed by heavy metal instrumentation. It’s a solid album but the lack of originality means it gets a little repetitive by the end.

Best track: 'Planet B'

9. Quarters!

This unique idea for an album features four tracks running 10 minutes and 10 seconds in length. Each quarter of the album is an up-tempo exploration of jazz-rock with echoes of Santana in his prime. Quarters! is another absorbing record and provides an astonishing glimpse into the inner workings of Stu Mackenzie’s creativity.

Best track: 'The River'

8. Fishing For Fishes

After a year without music, King Gizzard finally returned in 2019 with Fishing For Fishes . Easily one of the band’s most accessible albums, King Gizzard lean into their 60s influences on songs about the environment that'll make you want to save the earth while getting down and having a boogie.

Best track: 'Fishing For Fishes'

7. Paper Mache Dream Balloon

Expected the unexpected. Following on from King Gizzard’s four-track concept album Quarters! , the band went in another entirely different direction with the acoustic Paper Mache Dream Balloon . This one has a bit of everything, from the creepy 'Trapdoor' to harmonica featuring 'N.G.R.I (Bloodstain),' and is another colourful addition to the King Gizzard discography.

Best track: 'Bone'

6. Polygondwanaland

Polygondwanaland might not contain the experimental flourishes of some of their better-known releases, but it’s a brain-busting collection of songs that is hard to fault. Each of the 10 tracks has been expertly crafted and showcases a newfound maturity in the seven-piece's writing process. It also continues their hot streak of album title tracks being phenomenal.

Best track: 'Horology'

5. Eyes Like The Sky

Following up their debut with a Spaghetti Western concept album tells you all you need to know about King Gizzard founder Stu Mackenzie’s wild creativity. Described as a “cult western audio book,” the album is narrated by Broderick Smith, frontman of The Dingos and father of King Gizzard keyboardist Ambrose Kenny Smith. It might be a little high on this list for many, but Eyes Like The Sky is a genius idea that only a band as inventive as King Gizz could pull off. For fans of Red Dead Redemption and Clint Eastwood’s Dollars trilogy.

Best track: 'The Raid'

4. Float Along – Fill Your Lungs

If anyone misses the unadulterated pleasure of King Gizzard’s early psychedelic 60s guitar drenched output, give this record a re-listen and all will be right in the world. Float Along – Fill Your Lungs is best remembered amongst day one fans for its epic opener 'Head On/Pill.' This brain buzzing assault on the senses is 16-minutes of guitar-fuzz, driving percussion and distorted vocals, ending in a cathartic explosion of ear-shattering sound. Delightful.

Best track: 'Head On/Pill'

3. I’m In Your Mind

The album that got me into King Gizzard also finds the band at their most confident. After several exploratory releases, I’m In Your Mind finds King Gizzard balancing the signature psych-rock of their first few albums with more experimental and jazz numbers without alienating their huge fan base.

Best track: 'I’m In Your Mind'

2. Flying Microtonal Banana

Incorporating elements of krautrock and Middle Eastern music throughout their ninth album, King Gizzard weave a tantalising tapestry of intriguing melodies and worldly sonics on the comically titled Flying Microtonal Banana . Listening to this album is like watching a snake charmer, with King Gizzard hypnotising you with their beguiling compositions and taking you to the edge of danger before bringing you safely back to reality.

Best track: 'Billabong Valley'

1. Nonagon Infinity

Arguably King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard’s magnum opus, Nonagon Infinity is everything you want from a King Gizzard release. Designed to play on an infinite loop, the album is a hard-rocking collection of ballbusting songs that never ends, literally. Every song on this album is heart starter, from the Middle Eastern infused opener 'Robot Soup' to the seven-minute epic 'Evil Death Roll' and riff-heavy album closer 'Road Train.' Full of twists and turns that will have you screaming with delight, Nonagon Infinity is the King Gizzard release.

Best track: 'Evil Death Roll'

K.G. is set for release November 20.

Words by Tobias Handke

Image: King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard

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King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard review – saving the world with psych-rock monsters

Barrowland Ballroom, Glasgow The Australian band, who have released 15 albums in seven years, show off an ear-splitting range from Steely Dan grooves to Slayer-style thrash

‘P opulation exodus, there is no planet B!” roars longhair-in-chief Stu Mackenzie over flaming riffage on a jagged Gibson Holy Explorer guitar. Infest the Rats’ Nest, the 15th album in seven years by the chameleonic Australians King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard , unpredictably saw them go thrash metal, and adopt a lyrical sensibility that might be deemed “sci-fi eco-consciousness”. Later in tonight’s show, their frontman will shower the crowd with liquid squirted from between his teeth – after swigging from a reusable drinking bottle. Green is the new black.

Welcome to “the Gizzverse”, as fans call the freaky galaxy orbiting this shape-shifting Melbourne seven-piece: a swirl of memes, mixes, videos, discussions and other content in the digital sphere and, in real life, a tumble of sweaty moshing and crowdsurfing. It’s a broad church for guitar music fans – headbangers, stoners, math rock nerds and more – and a place where hearing protection should be worn at all times.

Kaleidoscopic visuals are a given. Two drummers dressed in bright red with matching kits, playing in tight synchronisation, create their own trippy-hypnotic optic. Keyboardist Ambrose Kenny-Smith is liable to break out some exclamatory percussion at any moment, or, as he does on Altered Beast II, some bluesy distorted harmonica.

At a work rate of 2.1 albums a year, it won’t take King Gizzard long to visit every planet in the rock firmament. Rattlesnake is a galloping eight-minute garage-psych monster, Mars for the Rich homages Slayer, but if the smooth groove of Sense is any measure then King Gizzard’s next move could just as easily be inspired by Steely Dan. They’re the ultimate post-genre jam band, a Grateful Dead for the streaming generation. If Greta Thunberg can’t save the planet within the next 50 years, someone else has to – if only so these restless rockers can make another 100 records.

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Fire Track: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – “The Dripping Tap”

Fire Note Staff | March 8, 2022 March 9, 2022 | Fire Tracks , News

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have announced their first-ever double album, Omnium Gatherum, which is coming soon via their own label KGLW (and available for pre-order on March 22nd). Today’s Fire Track is the epic 18-minute lead single, “The Dripping Tap.”

Following 2020’s KG and 2021’s LW and Butterfly 3000 , Omnium Gatherum was the first time King Gizzard recorded together as a band since the COVID pandemic hit, and Melbourne placed its citizens under a series of prohibitive lockdown measures. Omnium Gatherum’s sprawling 16 tracks of gonzoid prog jams, dizzying pop nuggets, rubber-legged hip-hop odysseys and passages of pure thrash-metal abandon offer plenty for Gizzard fans and neophytes alike to chew on. Typically, Gizzard albums pursue a single theme or style – for example, Infest The Rat’s Nest’s eco-themed metal barrage, or Butterfly 3000’ s new age trance-pop, or Nonagon Infinity’s endless garage-prog contortions – and part of the thrill of Omnium Gatherum for the group was the opportunity of new ideas without committing to deliver an entire album in that vein. It’s the perfect entry point for newcomers, and a solid treat for the faithful as well.

Lead single “The Dripping Tap” is an 18-minute krautrock/garage-psych jam – an ecstatic pile-up of motorik vibes, giddy pop and gleefully gonzo crescendos. It’s unmistakeably Gizzard, with its restless, interlocking riffs and supernatural changes of mood, but it pushes the Lizard Wizard jam archetype a quantum step or three further. The album’s title, Mackenzie says, is “literally Latin for ‘a collection of miscellaneous people or things’” – a fitting sobriquet for Gizzard’s first-ever double album, and their boldest, most ambitious, most far-reaching release yet.

Conceived as a compendium of unreleased songs that had never found a home on previous Gizzard albums, Omnium Gatherum snowballed, and soon the group were writing and recording new songs for the swiftly expanding album. Its tracks were recorded at Gizz HQ, but also at their legendary, since-vacated clubhouse, 253 Lygon Street, or remotely at home. Lyrically, the themes are diverse, though the group’s concern for the ecological well-being of the planet remains a constant. Some tracks return to the synth-psych visions of Butterfly 3000 , others revisit the fevered thrash-metal attack Gizzard coined on 2019’s Infest The Rat’s Nest , elsewhere, the group play bold, unexpected wildcards. Goofball prog, colossal rock-outs and enchanting folksong abound.

Stu Mackenzie elaborates: “This recording session felt significant. Significant because it was the first time all six Gizzards had gotten together after an extraordinarily long time in lockdown. Significant because it produced the longest studio recording we’ve ever released. Significant because (I think) it’s going to change the way we write and record music – at least for a while… A turning point. A touchstone. I think we’re entering into our ‘jammy period’. It feels good.”

The result feels like a Greatest Hits album, in its variety and the strength of the songs – only you’ve never heard any of these tracks before. It’s the sound of a group operating at their absolute peak, a group motivated by a deserved confidence that they could try their hands at anything. It’s also the sound of a group ready to return to the road after two fallow years – a handful of live shows in Australia, performed in the brief windows between lockdowns, has reawakened King Gizzard’s taste for live action. To say that they’re “up for it” would be a dizzying exercise in understatement.

KING GIZZARD & THE LIZARD WIZARD TOUR DATES Sat. Mar. 19 – Buenos Aires, AR @ Lollapalooza Argentina Sun. Mar. 20 – Santiago, CL @ Lollapalooza Chile Wed. Mar 23 – São Paulo, BR @ Cine Joia Sat. Mar. 26 – São Paulo, BR @ Lollapalooza Brazil Sun. Mar. 27 – Bogotá, CO @ Festival Estereo Picnic Mon. April 11 – San Diego, CA @ Humphreys Concerts by the Bay^ Tue. April 12 – Pomona, CA @ Fox Theater Pomona^ Wed April 13 – Santa Barbara, CA @ Arlington Theatre ~ Fri. April 15 – Indio, CA @ Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival Sun. April 17 – Las Vegas, NV @ Event Lawn at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas % Mon. April 18 – Las Vegas, NV @ Event Lawn at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas ! Tues. April 19 – Tempe, AZ @ Marquee Theatre ? Wed. April 20 – Tucson, AZ @ Rialto Theatre ? Fri. April 22 – Indio, CA @ Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival Sun. April 24 – San Luis Obispo, CA @ Madonna Inn $ SOLD OUT Tue. April 26 – Sonoma, CA @ Gundlach Bundschu $ SOLD OUT Wed. April 27 – Petaluma, CA @ Phoenix Theater $ SOLD OUT Sat. April 30 – Atlanta, GA @ Shaky Knees Festival Wed. May 4 – Monterrey, MX @ Showcenter Fri. May 6 – Mexico City, MX @ Quarry Studios Sun. May 8 – Ixtapa Zihuatanejo, MX @ Loot/Musa Sat. May 14 – Queretaro, MX@ Jardin Hercules Sun. May 15 – Guadalajara, MX @ Teatro Estudio Guanamor Fri. May 20 – Cleveland, OH @ Agora Theatre & SOLD OUT Sat. May 21 – Columbus, OH @ KEMBA Live! Outdoor & Sun. May 22 – Millvale, PA @ Mr. Smalls Theatre & SOLD OUT Tue. May 24 – Rochester, NY @ Water Street Music Hall & SOLD OUT Wed. May 25 – South Burlington, VT @ Higher Ground & SOLD OUT Thu. May 26 – South Burlington, VT @ Higher Ground &SOLD OUT Sat. May 28 – Boston, MA @ Boston Calling Music Festival Tue. May 31 – Athens, GR @ Gagarin 205 Wed. June 1 – Athens, GR @ Gagarin 205 Fri. June 3 – Barcelona, ES @ Primavera Sound – SOLD OUT Sun. June 5 – Barcelona, ES @ Primavera in the City SOLD OUT Mon. June 6 – Barcelona, ES @ Primavera in the City SOLD OUT Tue. June 7 – Barcelona, ES @ Primavera in the City SOLD OUT Thu. June 9 – Barcelona, ES @ Primavera Sound – SOLD OUT Sat. June 11 – Mannheim, DE @ Maifeld Derby Festival Sun June 12 – HIlvarenbeek NL @ Best Kept Secret Tue. June 14 – Berlin, DE @ Tempodrom Fri. June 17 – Manchester, TN @ Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival Sat. June 18 – Miami, FL @ Space Park & Sun. July 31 – Waterford, IE @ All Together Now Tue. Aug. 2 – Šibenik, HR @ St. Michael’s Fortress Wed. Aug. 3 – Šibenik, HR @ St. Michael’s Fortress Fri. Aug. 5 – Prague, CZ @ Archa Theatre Sun. Aug. 7 – Vienna, AT @ Arena Wien (Open Air) Tue. Aug. 9 – Leipzig, DE @ Parkbühne Wed. Aug. 10 – Munich, DE @ Tonhalle Fri. Aug. 12 – Sion, CH @ Palp Festival Sun Aug 14- Helsinki, FIN @ Flow Festival Wed. Aug. 17 – Paredes de Coura, PT @ Paredes de Coura Festival Fri. Aug. 19 – Gueret, FR @ Check-In Party Festival Sat. Aug. 20 – Saint-Malo, FR @ La Route du Rock Festival Tue. Aug. 23 – Cologne, DE @ E-Werk Wed. Aug. 24 – Hamburg, DE @ Markthalle Fri Aug 26- London, UK @ All Points East Sat. Aug. 27 – Málaga, ES @ Canela Party Sun. Oct. 2 – Berkeley, CA @ Greek Theatre * Tue. Oct. 4 – Portland, OR @ Roseland Theater* SOLD OUT Wed. Oct. 5 – Vancouver, BC @ PNE Forum* Thu. Oct. 6 – Seattle, WA @ Paramount Theatre * Mon. Oc. 10 – Morrison, CO @ Red Rocks Amphitheatre* SOLD OUT Tue. Oct. 11 – Morrison, CO @ Red Rocks Amphitheatre* SOLD OUT Fri. Oct. 14 – St Paul, MN @ The Palace Theatre* SOLD OUT Sat. Oct. 15 – Chicago, IL @ RADIUS* SOLD OUT Sun. Oct. 16 – Detroit, MI @ Masonic Temple* Tue. Oct. 18 – Toronto, ON @ History* SOLD OUT Wed. Oct. 19 – Montreal, QC @ L’Olympia* Fri. Oct. 21 – New York, NY @ Forest Hills Stadium* Sat. Oct. 22 – Philadelphia, PA @ Franklin Music Hall* SOLD OUT Sun. Oct. 23 – Washington, DC @ The Anthem at The Wharf* Mon. Oct. 24 – Asheville, NC @ Rabbit Rabbit* Wed. Oct. 26 – Atlanta, GA @ The Eastern* Thu. Oct. 27 – New Orleans, LA @ Orpheum Theater * Mon. Oct. 31 – Oklahoma City, OK @ The Criterion #

^ w/ Mildlife ~ w/ Mildlife, DJ Crenshaw % w/ Amyl and the Sniffers, SPELLLING, DJ Crenshaw ! w/ The Chats, SPELLLING, DJ Crenshaw $ w/ SPELLLING, DJ Crenshaw ? w/ SPELLLING & w/ Jess Cornelius * w/ Leah Senior # w/ The Murlocs, Leah Senior

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