It was released by ATO in August 2017, mere months before their next record arrived. Titled Sketches of Brunswick East, the album was a heady mix of soft rock, psych-pop, and cosmic jazz. The duo was then joined by the rest of the band to fill those ideas in. to King Gizzard's Flightless HQ studios in East Brunswick, Melbourne, where he and Stu Mackenzie put together some rough ideas. Just before that album's release, the band finished a collaboration with Mild High Club's Alex Brettin, who traveled from L.A. It was broken into three long sections, each one telling a different apocalyptic tale of the human race being taken over by cyborgs and AI while featuring heavy use of synths and spoken word narration. The group's second album of 2017, Murder of the Universe, arrived two months later in March. They had a custom-made guitar gifted to them, and the bandmembers bought new gear and altered the instruments so they could be microtuned in a way that made them compatible. On the first of them, Flying Microtonal Banana, King Gizzard decided to investigate microtonal tuning, a non-Western way of tuning that involves intervals smaller than a semitone. They tout it as the "world's first infinitely looping album." The band spent time touring and getting five albums ready for release in 2017. It was recorded so that one track bleeds into the next, then jumps back to the beginning after the last song. The follow-up, 2016's Nonagon Infinity, was recorded at Daptone Studios and featured some of the band's heaviest, most forceful psych-rock to date. After signing to ATO Records, King Gizzard's sound took a detour from expanded jams and fuzzy freak-outs to tightly constructed, but still weird, laid-back pop songs played exclusively on acoustic instruments on the 2015 album Paper Mâché Dream Balloon. Still working quickly, in early 2015 they released the Quarters EP, which featured four trippy, free jazz-inspired jams that each timed out exactly at 10:10. A third full-length, Float Along, Fill Your Lungs, was released in 2013 and was quickly followed by 2014's Oddments and I'm in Your Mind Fuzz. Working at the kind of feverish pace that became their standard, King Gizzard followed up just five months later with 2013's Eyes Like the Sky, which the band described as a "spaghetti Western audio book" complete with narration by Ambrose Kenny-Smith's father, the noted Australian musician Broderick Smith. They released two garage rock-inspired EPs in 2011, Anglesea and Willoughby's Beach, then in 2012 released their debut album, 12 Bar Bruise. Formed in 2011 in Melbourne, Australia, by a group of friends who jammed frequently, then decided on a whim to play a show, the lineup consisted of vocalist/guitarist Stu Mackenzie, harmonica player/singer Ambrose Kenny-Smith, guitarists Cook Craig and Joey Walker, bassist Lucas Skinner, and dual drummers Michael Cavanagh and Eric Moore. Some of their albums, especially Nonagon Infinity from 2016, stand shoulder to shoulder with the best psychedelic rock ever made, and even their most daring moves - like releasing a death metal song cycle (2019's Infest the Rats Nest), an album that revolves around a single chord change (2022's Changes), or one built around bubbling analog synth loops (2021's Butterfly 3000) - land like a knockout punch. King Gizzard's prolific nature has led them to release albums at a frenetic pace, and their intense desire to seek out new sounds and follow new paths - from expansive jazz-rock (2015's Quarters) to semi-acoustic ballads (the same year's Paper Mâché Dream Balloon), and from sci-fi prog (2017's Murder of the Universe) to trippy garage rock (2014's I'm in Your Mind Fuzz) and explorations of microtonal tunings (2017's Flying Microtonal Banana, 2020's K.G) - means that every one of their multitude of releases sounds different from the last. 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. King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard Albums (2012 - 2022)īiography: 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.
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