King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard

King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard – Polygondwanaland (2017/2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 43:52 minutes | 533 MB | Genre: Alternative, Indie
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Heavenly Recordings

Like the rest of their albums released in 2017, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s fourth album of the year has a gimmick. This time it’s not musical, though. The stunt here is that it’s the world’s first public domain album, given away free by the band and legal to sell by anyone who feels like pressing it up. After an album made with microtonal instruments, a synth prog epic, and a trip-hop jazz collaboration with Mild High Club, Polygondwanaland sounds like a consolidation of everything the band has done up until now, chewed up and spit back put in large and small chunks of psychedelic rock. The first song alone, the ten-minute-long “Crumbling Castle,” employs microtonal guitars, layers in synths, sounds like space prog, has laid back jazz interludes and heavy metal breakdowns, and delivers all the trippy punch of their early work. After all the experiments and tricks, it almost sounds like the band is playing it safe, even if the song is a rampaging ball of barely controlled energy. They really aren’t, though. Instead, they are delivering a record that plays to their strengths as songwriters and musicians instead of distracting people with some flashy idea. It’s straight – or as straight as possible – King Gizzard, and at this stage of their career, that’s a welcome development. Hearing them incorporate all the different sonic flourishes they’ve employed in the past in pursuit of good songs and not some higher concept means the album may slip past unnoticed, but it will sound great to anyone not scared off by the lack of theatrics. Tracks like the spookily restrained “Searching,” the rampaging “The Fourth Colour,” the tribal “The Castle in the Air,” or the thrumming title track are the work of a band in full command of their process and results. Their fourth album of 2017 may not be their most exciting of the year, but it is their strongest and shows that King Gizzard don’t need any bells and whistles to make a great psychedelic splash.
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King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard – Live At Bonnaroo ’22 (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:15:40 minutes | 966 MB | Genre: Garage Rock, Psychedelic Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Self-released

Live at Bonnaroo, Manchester, TN, USA, June 17rd 2022.
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King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard – Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushroom And Lava (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:03:59 minutes | 801 MB | Genre: Psychedelic Rock, Garage Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © KGLW (King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard)

Having assembled full working instrumentals from these jams, Mackenzie and his bandmates began overdubbing flute, organ, percussion and extra guitar over the top. The lyrics, meanwhile, were a group effort. ‘We had an editable Google Sheet that we were all working on,’ says Mackenzie. ‘Most of the guys in the band wrote a lot of the lyrics, and it was my job to arrange it all and piece it together.’ The result of this radical, experimental creative process is one of the densest, most unpredictable statements from a band whose work always rockets in from unexpected angles accompanied by a wealth of subtext and theorems. But you don’t even need even a passing understanding of those Ancient Greek musical modes to appreciate this adventurous new music. Highlights include ‘Lava’, a suite of pure fire music that swings between spiritual jazz and new age visions, powered by psychedelic saxophones, shimmering cymbals and McCoy Tyner-esque pianos, and the wormhole-riding prog-folk excursions of ‘Magma’, which leads unsuspecting listeners into unfamiliar realms via the siren call of Mackenzie’s flute, while ‘Ice V’ delivers apocalyptic funk with a cool hand at the controls, ‘Hell’s Itch’ hypnotises with its coiling guitar lines, hard honking harmonica and polymorphic basslines, and the ever-shifting ‘Iron Lung’ follows the choppy grooves of its happy/sad songcraft through unexpected twists and turns, a vision of pop refracted through a house of mirrors. Sinister closer Gliese 710, meanwhile, pushes ever onwards into the darkness, its lumbering-but-lithe heaviosity enough to get corpses to nod their heads.
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King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard – Fishing For Fishies (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 42:01 minutes | 499 MB | Genre: Psychedelic Rock, Garage Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © KGLW

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard return with Fishing for Fishies, perhaps their most perfectly-realized album to date. FfF is a blues-infused blast of sonic boogie that struts & shimmies through several moods & terrains. King Gizz are no longer just a band, they’re a youth movement, a cult, an exploration, a double-drumming trip, a cottage vinyl industry.
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King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard – Demos Vol. 3 + Vol. 4 (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:30:46 minutes | 1,06 GB | Genre: Psychedelic Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Self-released

The schizophrenic psych-metal band King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have released the third and fourth volumes of their excellent Demos series, and they’re also encouraging their fans to bootleg the set. The 26-song collection is available now on Bandcamp and spans the group’s short but nonetheless prolific career, including outtakes from their most recent LP, Omnium Gatherum.
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King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard – Omnium Gatherum (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:20:19 minutes | 1001 MB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © KGLW (King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard)

Omnium Gatherum is the 20th studio album and first double album by Australian psychedelic rock band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, released on 22 April 2022. The album was announced on 8 March 2022 and made available for pre-order on 22 March.
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King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard – Oddments (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 32:12 minutes | 374 MB | Genre: Psychedelic Rock, Garage Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © KGLW

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s sense of unfettered sonic exploration makes it easy to mistake them for a long-forgotten relic of the psych explosion of the 1960s. With a far-out sound that, at times, feels barely held together, King Gizzard evoke the eclectic rock experimentation of Frank Zappa’s early work with the Mothers of Invention, the anything-goes feeling of the Flaming Lips, and the demented glee of a random, obscure ’60s group plucked from a Pebbles compilation as they follow their musical flights of fancy wherever they might lead.
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King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard – The Dripping Tap (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 18:17 minutes | 235 MB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © KGLW (King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard)

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are (of course) back with another new album — it’s called Omnium Gatherum and pre-orders for it will begin on March 22, though no official release date has been announced yet. It’s the Australian band’s follow-up to last year’s Butterfly 3000, which got the full remix treatment at the top of this year. Omnium Gatherum apparently started as a way to put out songs that didn’t fit on older albums but, in typical King Gizzard fashion, things spiraled from there.
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King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Laminated Denim (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 30:00 minutes | 370 MB | Genre: Psychedelic Rock, Garage Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © KGLW (King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard)

Laminated Denim is made up of two fifteen minute songs meant to be used as intermission music at King Gizzard’s late 2022 shows held at Colorado’s famed Red Rocks amphitheater. They were originally scheduled there in 2020, and the band concocted intermission music for the occasion, but the shows were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Never a band to waste material or let down fans, they released the music under the name Made in Timeland after the band were able to play an epic Melbourne concert. When the time grew closer to the rescheduled shows at Red Rocks, they realized they wanted to treat fans to something brand new. (For fans of wordplay, Laminated Denim is an anagram of Made in Timeland.) The first of the tracks “The Land Before Timeland” is a motorik jam with slots for harmonica solos, avant garde jazz guitar noodling, a laid back melody sung in falsetto, and an ending that swirls into a psychedelic dust storm. It makes for exactly the kind of relaxed vibes concert patrons might want after watching the Gizz go wild onstage for ninety minutes. The other piece, titled “Hypertension,” feels a little more filler-y as it unspools one fuzzy, proggy guitar solo after another, never really going much of anywhere but sounding good as it meanders. It does come to a nice climax, with flutes, guitars, and chanted vocals locking into a strong groove that builds excitment as it grows in intensity. Again, perfect for taking up time until the stars of the show return to the stage. Does it make for good home listening? Is it King Gizzard at their best? yes, and not exactly. It certainly slots in a level below their more considered releases, but if one is fully onboard with the King Gizzard experience, Laminated Denim is certainly worth adding to an ever expanding collection of works. – Tim Sendra

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King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Infest The Rats’ Nest (2019/2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 34:54 minutes | 419 MB | Genre: Psychedelic Rock, Garage Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © KGLW

The planet is in trouble. Dire trouble. But fear not: Melbourne seven-piece King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard return to save us all, this time armed only with blast beats, an arsenal of well-oiled guitars that are locked and loaded, and a desire to melt faces clean off. Their fifteenth studio album, Infest The Rats’ Nest, out Aug 16th, is by far The Gizz’s hardest and heaviest album to date. How metal is it? Very Metal. Maybe even more.

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King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Eyes Like The Sky (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 27:47 minutes | 321 MB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © KGLW

Some time in July 2012 we played a show in Castlemaine with Brod Smith. He’s a crazy-genius-western-nut-ex-rocker and is also Ambrose’s father. This was not long after we had collaborated with him on the recording of Sam Cherry’s Last Shot so we performed an off the cuff version of that song to half-a-dozen confused locals. That got me thinking about trying a multi-song, read-along, narrative based, western musical record. Brod seemed keen to compose a story and provide narration so Cavs, Lucas and I raced to my parents garage and recorded Fort Whipple and The Killing Ground. You can hear my parents dogs barking in the background and my dad banging on some old rusted saw blade. I didn’t really have much of an idea about recording back then (still don’t really). I think I had 2 microphones and I was recording onto this hunk-of-shit-but-kinda-awesome digital 8 track machine. We had no mic stands so one mic was taped onto a shoebox in front of a guitar amp and one was hanging over the drum kit boxing ring style from the roof truss. I sent these recordings to Brod and he wrote the first chapter of Eyes Like the Sky that night and send me a recording of him reading it into his computer mic. It sounded kind of fucked up so played it though a guitar amp, recorded it, and synched it to the next recording we made which ended up being the title track. Brod and I went back and forward from there, sometimes the music inspiring the words or the words inspiring the music. It all came together pretty fast. So as you may be able to tell, it is flattering and bemusing to me that people would want to listen to this fried, weird, lo-fi record of ours.

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King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Changes (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 40:03 minutes | 465 MB | Genre: Psychedelic Rock, Garage Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © KGLW (King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard)

Good things come to those who wait, and the magnificent Changes is worth every one of the 2,628,000 minutes King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard invested in it. Soaked in the warm sonics of 70s r’n’b and guided by simple chord-changes that contain multitudes and rounding out another remarkable year for the group, their fifth album of 2022 is a luminous, soft-pop marvel. Come lose yourself in its slow-cooked brilliance.

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King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard – Omnium Gatherum (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/48 kHz | Time – 01:20:19 minutes | 1001 MBGenre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © KGLW (King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard)

Omnium Gatherum is the 20th studio album and first double album by Australian psychedelic rock band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, released on 22 April 2022. The album was announced on 8 March 2022 and made available for pre-order on 22 March.
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