Following their latest foray into thrash metal with 2019’s Infest the Rats’ Nest, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard returned with a promise of more “heavy as fuck” tunes coming our way with the lengthily titled PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation, due June 16 via their own KGLW.
The band’s first album of 2023 follows the triple-header of LPs released in October of last year, Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava’, ‘Laminated Denim’ and ‘Changes’.
The new album’s full title is ‘PetroDragonic Apocalypse Or Dawn Of Eternal Night: An Annihilation Of Planet Earth And The Beginning Of Merciless Damnation’. No firm release date has yet been revealed, but the album will be up for pre-order from May 16 on Gizzverse.
Earlier this month, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard announced a new album called PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation. Now, they’ve shared more details about the project, due out June 16th, and revealed its first single, “Gila Monster.”
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard came out of 2022 with five new albums, and the prolific Australian psych-rockers already have another new one on the way. They announced their 24th studio album in an Instagram post: It’s called PetroDragonic Apocalypse; Or, Dawn Of Eternal Night: An Annihilation Of Planet Earth And The Beginning Of Merciless Damnation and pre-orders for the album start on May 16, though they haven’t disclosed a release date just yet.
“When we made Rats’ Nest, it felt experimental,” singer Stu Mackenzie said in a statement. “Like, ‘Here’s this music that some of us grew up on but we’d never had the guts or confidence to really play before, so let’s give it a go and see what happens.’ And when we made that album we were like, ‘Fuck, why did it take us so long to do this?’ It’s just so much fun to play that music, and those songs work so well when we play them live. So we always had it in our minds to make another metal record.”
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard will release new album ‘PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation’ on June 16th.
The Australian band are ever-productive, releasing a string of albums throughout 2022. The coming year brings yet more projects, with King Gizzard set to release a grandiosely titled album this summer.
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have announced details of their forthcoming album ‘PetroDragonic Apocalypse’, which is apparently “heavy as fuck”. The album will be out on 16th June via KGLW
“After 14 years, 23 albums, and one pandemic-driven period of “defragmenting the hard drive,” the members of Australian psych-rockers King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard look back on a banner year and their newfound place in the jamband pantheon”
Today, they present a new video for “Astroturf,” a track off of 2022’s Changes. The album was originally conceived in 2017, and is a concept album that is ” built around this one chord progression – every track is like a variation on a theme,” says Stu Mackenzie. “Astroturf” is one of those creations, a 70s-tinged soft-pop earworm. The accompanying video was filmed in the band’s Australian studio. The band adds: “We filmed this live then overdubbed the fuck over it. Recording is fun.”
“King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard released five studio albums this year, encouraged fan bootlegging and didn’t rely on TikTok”
“Certainly, this is one of their loosest, most sprawling records, with almost every track exceeding seven minutes; on the other hand, even the most outré odysseys are less a product of improvisation than intricate arrangement. When the Afrobeat-steeped “Ice V” and the dizzying 13-minute showstopper “Hell’s Itch” settle into their fleet-footed grooves and start introducing new ideas every 16 bars, the effect is less like a band showing off their chops and more like rotating MCs chiming in with a few rhymes on a posse cut. And where past Gizzard epics have embraced a racetrack construction, whipping in and out of recurring motifs at regular intervals, the mischievous “Magma” is built more like a spiral staircase, its guitar accents and frisky rhythms swirling skyward en route to the cataclysmic, wah-wah-splattered finale…”
“King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, the pretty-much-every-genre rock band from Australia, boarded a tour bus in Montreal at 2 a.m. one night this month and arrived in Brooklyn nine hours later. No gig until the following night, in Queens: a rare day off. “I passed out for an hour at the hotel, grabbed a chicken burrito, and here we are,” Ambrose Kenny-Smith, one of the band’s singers and multi-instrumentalists, said that afternoon. “Here” was a skate park under the Kosciuszko Bridge, on the Brooklyn side of Newtown Creek. “On off days, we try to go for a skate,” he said. “It keeps the mental health in check.””
“King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard have shared their thoughts on their freshly-dropped album ‘Changes’, saying their 23rd studio effort is “the most complex we’ve ever done”
“The Melbourne band, one of the most formidable live acts in the world, also somehow finds time to release more albums than almost anyone, with an admirable degree of quality control. This month they’ve already released two albums, the Can-inspired cut-and-paste exercise Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava (for which they jammed their way into songs in the studio and edited them together afterwards) and the motorik rave-up Laminated Denim (comprising two 15-minute songs, each one written at 120 bpm to mimic the pulse of a ticking clock). Today they’re back with the last album of this October outpouring”
“The band’s North American tour is a breathtaking live comeback for them, even by Gizz standards. In just over a month, they’ll play a headline set at Desert Daze; four marathon three-hour sets, three of them at the picturesque Red Rocks amphitheatre; and a stadium show in New York supported by Black Midi, Leah Senior and Jonathan Toubin”
From humble beginnings as a goofily named, “hey, why not?” college project in Australia to releasing 23 different genre-jumping albums since 2009, King Gizzard has suddenly become one of the most talked-about bands in rock, seized upon by jam band-loving Gen Z stoners, Metallica and Tool devotees jonesing for like-minded heavy riffage, suburban dads still holding a candle for AC/DC and Pink Floyd, and Discogs-loving record nerds perpetually in search of the next great buzz. At a time when many established artists can’t make the economics work to tour at all and many listeners cling to the notion that “rock is dead,” there’s something quite extraordinary about what King Gizzard is doing
“The discography of Australian sonic explorers King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard is littered with grand conceptual flourishes, ambitious schemes and missions often seemingly impossible. Be they reinventing the electric guitar to explore the outer reaches of Middle Eastern psychedelia, soundtracking climate change nightmares with blood-flecked thrash-metal, finding new possibilities within archaic synthesisers or composing the world’s first ever infinitely looping psych-prog mobius strip, the impossible seems something the Gizzards eat for breakfast”
“The Aussie rock explorationists recently dropped ‘Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava,’ and have two more releases planned within a month. What binds them beyond mere prolificacy is King Gizzard’s infectious curiosity and creativity”
“Hate Dancin’” appears on Changes, King Gizzard’s third album of October and sixth album of 2022. The psych band originally began working on the album way back in 2017, but they weren’t satisfied with their recordings until now”
This Friday, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard release Changes, their third album of October 2022 following Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava and Laminated Denim. That will also be their fifth album of the year, not counting the remix album they dropped in January. They’ve just shared the video for “Hate Dancin'” from the album and it’s on the group’s poppier side. “I started writing a song about how I hate dancing, but then I realized that I love dancing,” says KG frontman Stu Mackenzie. The video has the band showing off their moves and you can watch that below.
“It was originally going to be the fifth album that we made in 2017,” the band’s Stu Mackenzie said in our recent KGLW cover story. “We had it locked in to be the fifth record. And we recorded what we thought was going to be the album in 2017. It just wasn’t fully realized at that time. We didn’t have the musical vocabulary to actually complete this idea.” On Changes, “we’re kind of flicking between key like every chord change on every song,” he explained. “It’s these two keys, and they shouldn’t be in tune with each other, basically. We’re sort of flicking between them the whole time.”
“King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have released new album ‘Laminated Denim’, the second of three the ultra-prolific psych-rockers will share in October.
The album was released on Wednesday (October 12), and consists of two tracks – ‘The Land Before Timeland’ and ‘Hypertension’ – both of which are exactly 15 minutes in length. ‘Laminated Denim’ serves as a spiritual successor to earlier album ‘Made In Timeland’ (which its title is an anagram of), which was released physically in March of this year before arriving digitally yesterday alongside ‘Laminated Denim’ “
“King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard launched its new album, Laminated Denim, last night (Oct. 11) against the backdrop of two marathon three-hour performances at Red Rocks outside Denver. The vinyl (with an actual denim cover) was available early at the merch stand yesterday, and the music itself was debuted over the PA during each show’s intermission”
“Laminated Denim is an anagram of Made in Timeland, the album the ever-prolific psychedelic band released in March. Like that project, Laminated Denim is comprised of only two songs — “The Land Before Timeland” and “Hypertension” — that both run for exactly 15 minutes. To coincide with its release, King Gizzard have also uploaded Made in Timeland to streaming services for the first time”
“King Gizzard are very busy this month; in addition to being on tour in North America they’re releasing three albums in three weeks. Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava was released last week, and now here’s Laminated Denim, the band’s 22 album in 10 years. They call this a “spiritual successor” to Made in Timeland from earlier this year — “Laminated Denim” is also an anagram of “Made in Timeland” — and it consists of two very jammy 15-minute songs, “The Land Before Timeland” and “Hypertension.”
“It also happens to be 10 years to the day since they released their first, 12 Bar Bruise. In the decade since that record’s fried echo-chamber psych-surf shenanigans, King Gizz have tried their hand at (among other things) a Spaghetti Western epic narrative, heady jazz fusion, dreamy psychedelic folk, prog-metal short stories, woozy soft rock, brain-melted boogie, charred primitivist thrash, panoramic synth-pop, and extensive experiments with microtonal composition — most of it merged seamlessly into the zany garage-punk jam-band vibe that has made them one of the most infectiously fun live acts in the world. They’ve also documented that concert experience via umpteen live albums and official bootlegs freely uploaded for their fans to download and distribute how they see fit. It’s a rare group that can convincingly blur the lines between Phish, Neu!, King Crimson, and the Osees while never sounding like anything less than themselves”
“After scrapping summer European dates so its frontman Stu Mackenzie could seek treatment for Crohn’s disease, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard will return to the continent for a spring 2023 tour. Dates begin March 2 in Paris and wrap with a March 22-23 stand at London’s O2 Academy Brixton. Tickets go on sale on Oct. 14”
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have released the new single “Iron Lung” from Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava, their first of three albums coming in October. The nine-minute psych-rock jam comes with an equally trippy animated music video by SPOD.
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard already shared “Ice V,” a 10-minute track that’ll appear on Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava. Today, they’ve also shared the free-flowing nine-minute rave-up “Iron Lung.” It’s a percussive acid-rock explosion with some nice, sinuous riffage and a whole lot of guitar theatrics, and it sounds like the work of a fully locked-in jam band. In a press release, band member Stu Mackenzie says, “We wrote the lyrics as a group and created the music out of improvisation. Spontaneous creation. The best kind. And that’s why I’m proud of it. Hope you dig.”
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard — longtime Desert Daze favorites who have grown to increasingly bigger stages and later time slots — exploded onto the Moon Stage for their headlining appearance. They blasted through selections from their hefty catalog like Stone Roses playing speed metal or Metallica on acid, while inflatable alligators were tossed around, and a skeleton on a stick and a skewered fuzzy worm were waved about by an enthusiastic crowd.
