Since forming in Melbourne, Australia, in 2010, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have become one of the best-loved bands of their time. The core six-piece – Michael Cavanagh (drums), Cook Craig (guitar), Lucas Harwood (bass), Ambrose Kenny-Smith (keyboards, vocals), Stu Mackenzie (vocals, guitar) and Joey Walker (vocals, guitar) – have created a universe around themselves with a deluge of mind-bogglingly consistent, genre-defying albums and live shows that have seen them win a devout following that calls to mind the Grateful Dead and Phish. But with 25+ studio albums and countless live sets available, it’s tricky to know where to start. That’s where we come in with our pick of 20 songs from the first decade or so of their career.
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Let’s begin our Gizzodyssey with a track that demonstrates their awesome range. Originally put together as intermission music for the band’s lengthy shows, Made In Timeland consists of two 15-minute audio collages, each set to a clock ticking at 60bpm. “Smoke & Mirrors” takes up the entirety of Side Two of the vinyl album and begins with the sound of a gong, as every epic musical journey probably should. It wastes no time in hunkering down to a funky, space-rock groove before resplendent synth harps emerge, creating an oasis of beatific beauty. The mood turns and Ambrose Kenny-Smith’s rap persona, Shrimpomaniac, is introduced, chanting the title backed by cranky synths and stomping beats. Where next? A tabla-propelled acid house magic carpet ride, after which trance-inducing beats and sub-bass take hold. Another whack of that gong breaks the spell and the harps return, yet it’s just the calm before an intense gabber storm. Lilting guitars follow, but there’s one more left turn – a dusty breakbeat starts up, like something from a late 90s Grand Royal album, and Shrimpromanic is truly unleashed. If “Smoke And Mirrors” piques your interest, strap in for a helluva ride.
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One of the stand-out tracks on King Gizzard’s full debut album was the distortion-drenched “Sea Of Trees.” Setting a precedent for future Gizz classics, beneath the life-affirming punk blast was a lyric concerned with darker themes. “Just as King Gizzard was forming, Eric [Moore] went to a Gaz Liddiard show where he talked about ‘the Sea of Trees’ in Japan, a place where businessmen go to commit suicide,” Mackenzie told Mess And Noise in 2013. “This actually ended up being our band name for a couple of our early shows and also seemed like a fitting title to this song.”
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An early indication of King Gizz’s derring-do and determination to follow their own glorious path came with the 2013 concept album, Eyes Like The Sky, a psychedelic, mostly instrumental spaghetti western narrated by Brod Smith (Ambrose’s father) that takes 12 Bar Bruise’s “Sam Cherry’s Last Shot” and runs with it. Eyes Like The Sky is set in the blood-soaked “hinterlands of the newly formed United States” and follows the titular child soldier’s life, drawing upon the brutal truths of colonialism. “Evil Man” picks up the story at the point where American soldiers, led by a wicked missionary, attack the Yavapai-Apache tribe, whom Eyes For The Sky regards as family. The music is suitably ominous, with a menacing central guitar riff and wailing background vocals. They’d return to outlaw territory on Flying Microtonal Banana’s “Billabong Valley.”
Buy Eyes Like The Sky here.
The band’s third album of 2017 was a collaboration with Alex Brettin of Mile High Club following his performance at Gizzfest 2016. Mackenzie and Brettin had exchanged a few song ideas by email, which were fleshed out over two weeks in Flightless HQ, the band’s Melbourne studio. The result was a mellow gem steeped in psychedelic pop, jazz and easy listening influences. Walker’s “Tezeta” took its name from a sublime track by Mulatu Astatke, the Ethiopian vibraphone master who fused Afro-Cuban rhythms, salsa, funk, and traditional North African music to create Ethio-jazz in the 70s. The Gizz use Astatke’s sonic palette – vibraphone, flute, wah-wah guitar – to conjure up a track that only they could create. They immediately wrong-foot us by beginning in 3/4 with Brettin’s snaking organ giving the waltz a sinister air. A shift to 12/8 ushers in another menacing section, with the title chanted over jazz-funk bass and vibraphone, before a buoyant, McCartney-esque melody transforms the song into a wistful meditation on memory and perception.
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“This record was a slate-clearer, a head-cleaner. Spring cleaning for the mind,” wrote Mackenzie in the Oddments credits. It takes most bands at least a decade before they raid the archives, but King Gizz are not most bands. Oddments collects stray songs that didn’t fit other projects, recorded in a spirit of experimentalism. The pressure-free atmosphere seeped into the slinky lo-fi psych of “Work This Time” (“Joey and I trying to record soulful music,” wrote Mackenzie), which has become one of the band’s most popular songs and regular jumping off point for wild jams (check the version from Live At Red Rocks ’22 for an inspired guitar solo from Walker).
Buy Made In Timeland here.
Following 2017’s Flying Microtonal Banana, KG was the second volume in the band’s ‘Explorations In Microtonal Tuning’ series, inspired by Mackenzie’s experiments on the Bağlama, a Turkish folk instrument, and written and recorded on modified instruments using microtonal tuning. “Minimum Brain Size” is one of the album’s highlights, a heady psych-rock overhaul of traditional Turkish fasıl music built around a colossal microtonal guitar riff. The song is an emphatic takedown of online radicalisation, written by Walker in 2019 following a string of shootings at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, by a right-wing extremist, which left 51 dead. Walker told Consequence Of Sound, “2020 has been a lot of things, but it has mainly kept us confined to our homes and more significantly, to our screens. It truly is a scary world, the online mind-hive. We live in the age of the comment section. Where Trolls have their own farms and little Incels run free. But just remember… it’s pathetic, bro.”
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The third part of King Gizzard’s microtonal voyage, LW kicked off with the trippy brilliance of “If Not Now, Then When?” It was written by Mackenzie following ‘Black Summer’, a spate of bushfires which devastated communities and wildlife in Australia between July 2019 and May 2020. Again, it’s a Trojan horse, with Mackenzie’s furious message delivered with a feather-light falsetto and set to a nimble, funky shuffle. “If Not Now, Then When?” was the winner of the first Environmental Music Prize, set up to “celebrate artists inspiring action on climate and conservation.” The band donated their A$20,000 prize to Australian conservation charity The Wilderness Society, and Mackenzie commented, “We need actual, real, tangible action from our leaders, otherwise what are they there for? Why are we not doing everything we humanly can to right our wrongs? When we’re literally on fire, why not now? If not now, then when? This song is part of a larger idea, a thread and a collection of narratives that extend through all of our music. Exploring themes of climate destruction and what that might look like is an important exploration for us. A window of what reality could be, if we fail to take real action.”
Buy LW here.
King Gizzard didn’t set out to make the dreamy, electronic suite Butterfly 3000 – it just kind of happened. Working on instrumental interludes for their 2020 live album and film Chunky Shrapnel, they soon realised that the material they were gravitating towards, major key electronica based on analogue synth loops, didn’t fit the live project and was worth exploring on its own terms. Walker and Mackenzie’s “Interior People” is a key track, a joyful and blissed-out piece of relentless kosmische that addresses mental health issues (“I got a sensory road block/I’m in a binary mind lock”). “I remember that Joey had this concept of interior people before the lyrics were really written,” Mackenzie told Stereogum. “I remember talking to him about the conceptual idea of the whole record, back when there were only two or three songs put together and there wasn’t a huge amount of lyrics written. And he was like, ‘Well, I wanna write about interior people.’ And I was like, ‘That’s cool, this is how that idea fits in the record.’ I don’t know, the song just made sense to us.”
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From their earliest days, King Gizz were determined to push themselves to new musical places. That spirit of adventure led them to pledge to learn a new instrument every year; the first was the sitar, beginning a love affair with Indian music that would inform much of their music. This coincided with a new focus on jamming and improvisation, resulting in Float Along – Fill Your Lungs, their first truly psychedelic album. “We were experimenting with synthesizers, the sitar and some odd time signatures for the first time,” Mackenzie later wrote on the band’s website. “Music was starting to unravel and we were pulling the thread. Plenty more string to unravel, though!” The title track, written by Mackenzie, epitomised this bold new direction, a seven-minute psych-rock jam in 5/4 time which the band have regularly returned to during live shows as a launchpad for extended freak outs.
Released on New Year’s Eve 2017, Gumboot Soup made good on King Gizz’s pledge to release five albums that year. “I really pushed everyone (including myself) to breaking point here,” Mackenzie reflected. “Much of this was recorded on the road between shows in hotels, venues or cheap studios on days off… I could tell the other six gizzards really just wanted to take a break. It was December after all and we’d played like 100 shows and written and recorded probably 50 songs.” Remarkably, Gumboot Soup featured some of their most accomplished songs to date. Opening track “Beginner’s Luck,” written by Mackenzie and Kenny-Smith, was a case in point, an off-kilter soft-rock gem stacked with hazy harmonies, ’67 Beatles Mellotron and gentle flutes.
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King Gizz’s 21st studio album was another bold experiment, mostly recorded over a week. Each day, one of the seven Greek modes of music – Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, and Locrian – was explored with an extended multi-hour jam, which was then edited into a song. “Iron Lung” (in the Aeolian mode, also known as the natural minor scale) begins as a languid shuffle before it kicks into a spectacular jazz-funk workout, reaching its peak around the five-and-a-half-minute mark when Kenny-Smith takes over from Mackenzie on vocals. “That was me trying to be like Bon Scott or something,” Kenny-Smith told Spin. “That riff is mega. I think I just got to it before Stu could and screamed and squealed.”
The first of the band’s five albums released in 2017 was also their first exploration of microtonal scales. Written by Mackenzie and Walker, the hypnotic “Nuclear Fusion” was typical of the eastern-inspired grooves that made Flying Microtonal Banana an essential early Gizz album. The song’s intro – the title slowed-down and pitch-shifted – has become a much-loved feature of their live shows, either a chance for Walker to demonstrate his Tuvan throat singing or for a fan to be plucked out of the audience to join their heroes onstage.
Though King Gizz had flirted with heavy rock, their second album of 2019, Infest The Rats’ Nest, was the fastest, loudest and heaviest they’d ever been. Stripped back to a power trio of Mackenzie, Walker and Cavanagh, the band drew upon formative influences. “Growing up, a lot of the music that I loved was in the realm of heavy metal,” Mackenzie told Beat magazine. “I loved Rammstein, Rage Against the Machine, Metallica, Slayer – stuff that was aggressive and is still potent now. It’s been a part of my musical DNA forever… We wanted to take what we were doing further. We wanted it to be more extreme and more intense – just to see how it would take shape. Let’s just see what happens. It was us challenging ourselves to create something that was more brutal.”
Infest The Rats’ Nest was also the band’s most politically charged album to date, a snarling and furious indictment of the state of the environment and political climate. “Mars For The Rich” was typical of this, a rampaging, Motörhead-like rocker that pours scorn upon the space-colonising fantasies of the super-rich.
Buy Infest The Rats’ Nest here.
“For years we would always talk about making a record for each member in the band’s taste,” Kenny-Smith wrote on the KGLW site. “I was always begging for us to do a blues boogie type thing.” With Fishing For Fishies, the keyboardist pretty much got his wish, save for a late-album dive into synthwave (there’s always a twist with the Gizz). The album was conceived on a band camping trip and is packed with stripped-back, simple pleasures with strong environmental themes. Though it’s not one of the three (!) songs on the album with ‘boogie’ in the title, Baker and Mackenzie’s “This Thing” is a heads-down blues-rock treat. Look closer, though, and the lyrics appear to focus on a friendship that has gone awry – perhaps an analogy for our relationship with the environment?
Again, taking inspiration from Mother Nature, “Evil Death Roll” is named after the devastating hunting technique deployed by crocodiles to subdue and even dismember their prey. The crocodile latches on to its victim and, using its hind legs, performs a powerful and rapid spinning motion to disorientate and often kill its prey King Gizz’s speedfreak riff-fest somehow captures the awesome power of the crocodile, making it a highlight of Nonagon Infinity, perhaps their most unrelenting album.
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The concept for King Gizz’s seventh studio album, the soft-focus gentle pop of Paper Mâché Dream Balloon was a novel one for the band – there was no concept. “After making a couple of pretty heavy, conceptual records in a row, it started to feel a bit thought out,” Mackenzie told DIY. “Intellectualising music is a bit dumb, in a way. We started to feel like, ‘let’s just write some songs that are just songs and not these epic pieces’. That’s where this record came about.” He’d later tell Rolling Stone, “Paper Mâché… is like a nice afternoon siesta before going to work a night shift.” Opening track “Sense” was typical of this easy-going approach, all hushed vocals and chilled out clarinet. But its lyrics don’t hold back, taking aim at those who are feckless in the face of climate change. For a more intense take on the track, check out the transcendent, Grateful Dead-like 12-minute version recorded at Red Rocks in 2023.
Consisting of four tracks, each running to 10 minutes and 10 seconds, the band’s sixth studio album Quarters was the band’s deepest dive yet into jazz and prog waters. “We had rented a big ol’ house in upstate New York for a month to record in and we’d come down for weekends to play shows and record,” wrote Harwood in the album’s press release. “We all went a bit crazy up there and got total cabin fever. Stu had four loose jams that felt in the pocket – so we went in there with hardly any structure and just kind of threw a few takes on the wall to see what stuck.” From loose beginnings came greatness, especially in the case of “The River,” which takes its lead (not least in terms of its 5/4 time signature) from Dave Brubeck’s classic “Take Five,” before setting off on a sonic journey of rare imagination and wit. “‘The River’ felt like a big turning point – I think we kind of tricked ourselves into thinking we could play jazz.” It turns out the Australian Recording Industry Association thought so too – Quarters was nominated for the ARIA for Best Jazz Album 2015.
The closing track of the band’s breakthrough album, I’m In Your Mind Fuzz, is a rare thing for the Gizz – a (relatively) straightforward love song. It begins with a snatch of The Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers” and settles into a loved-up and lo-fi prom song, all doo-wop chords and devotion, before blasting off into space rock territory. Mackenzie revealed in a 2022 Reddit AMA that it remains a favorite of his, which explains why it still pops up on setlists, often transformed into an awe-inspiring jam.
Buy I’m In Your Mind Fuzz here.
The fourth Gizz album of 2017 was a towering achievement, perhaps their greatest to that point, a heavily prog-influenced set that was years in the making. Amazingly, they initially released it as a free download, encouraging fans to “make tapes, make CDs, make records” of the album. In the press release, the group wrote, “Ever wanted to start your own record label? GO for it! Employ your mates, press wax, pack boxes. We do not own this record. You do.” Its opening track, “Crumbling Castle,” was an 11-minute monolith that flitted between swashbuckling riffs, ethereal beauty, Gregorian chants and coruscating noise. Whether the title referred to looming environmental disaster, the collapse of humanity or simply structural damage to a listed building, the stakes couldn’t feel higher.
Buy Polygondwanaland here.
“The Dripping Tap” became part of Gizz lore thanks to How To Gut A Fishie, a short ‘making of’ Fishing For Fishies documentary released in 2019. The film’s final scene is an excerpt of a wild and slightly inebriated 20-minute blowout the band called “Hat Jam,” due to the fact that they were all wearing different headwear. On the film’s release, Gizz fans clamored for more information about the jam – clearly there was something there. The band worked intermittently on the song over the years until they were ready to unleash it in all its 18-minute glory on 2022’s Omnium Gatherum. It’s an environmental protest song as epic as the climate crisis we face. “The drippin’ tap won’t be turned off by the suits in charge of the world and or future’s hangin’ on by a thread,” begins Kenny-Smith, as if pleading with the world to see sense. From that point on, the track detonates and barely lets up over a series of blistering sections, building to a jaw-dropping finale.
The sense of urgency is palpable, perhaps due in part to the circumstances around the song’s recording. “Melbourne’s lockdown was long, brutal and strict, so we didn’t get together a lot for a very long time,” Mackenzie told Spin. “‘The Dripping Tap’ was the first thing that we did when we got together… it was this jam that we had floating around that we had never finished. It felt like something that we didn’t need to conceptualize. We didn’t need to plan and rehearse; we could just pick up our instruments, hit record and go. We recorded for hours, capturing everything and keeping the best bits. That was what felt right at the time after being not social, not together and not interacting.”
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