THEY’VE MADE 20 ALBUMS IN 10 YEARS. and they’ve had three new albums — yes, three — released in late 2022 alone. 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, Australia-based collective have populated their “Gizzverse” with their own trippy cocktail of garage rock, psych rock, proggy jams, psilocybin-soaked soul, thrash metal and world music. From the thrilling microtonal experiments of 2017’s Flying Microtonal Banana to the balls-out thrash metal of 2019’s Infest the Rats’ Nest, their catalog shows how compelling and defiantly eclectic they are. And in 2022, they were more prolific than ever before.
April saw the release of their 20th LP, — their first double album, then, and finally. This vast array of 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 seems to have been the most straightforward affair.
