Agents of perpetual motion King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have revealed details for all three albums the band will release in October, as well as shared the single “Ice V”. The whopping 10-minute track will appear on the first of three releases, Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava, out on October 7th via the band’s KGLW label.
Frontman Stu Mackenzie wasn’t kidding when, ahead of Gizzard’s 20th album Omnium Gatherum, he noted that the group was “entering into our ‘jammy period’.” Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava was born from extensive jam sessions as the band entered the studio without any pre-written songs or ideas.
“All we had prepared as we walked into the studio were these seven song titles,” Mackenzie said. “I have a list on my phone of hundreds of possible song titles. I’ll never use most of them, but they’re words and phrases I feel could be digested into King Gizzard-world.”
Mackenzie assigned a beats-per-minute value to each of the seven song titles that he felt “had a vibe.” Additionally, each song would also correspond to one of the seven modes of the major scale: Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, and Locrian.
“Naturally, each day’s jams had a different flavor, because each day was in a different scale and a different BPM,” Mackenzie said. “We’d walk into the studio, set everything up, get a rough tempo going and just jam. No preconceived ideas at all, no concepts, no songs. We’d jam for maybe 45 minutes, and then all swap instruments and start again.”
Each day would end with four-to-five hours of new King Gizzard jams on record, and after the sessions were done Mackenzie pieced them together to become Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava (a pneumonic device for the seven modes). With the instrumentals in place, the band went about overdubbing flute, organ, percussion, and extra guitar and working on the lyrics collectively.
“We had an editable Google Sheet that we were all working on,” Mackenzie said. “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.”
Knowing how the sausage got made, the album’s lead single “Ice V” makes perfect sense. The double-digit single carries a coastal European vibe that fits perfectly with the music video which is basically just multi-instrumentalist Joey Walker dancing in various landscapes for ten minutes, with a healthy instrumental jam making up the bulk of the track.
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – “Ice V” (Official Video)
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On Wednesday, October 12th King Gizzard & The Lizard will release the comparatively straightforward Laminated Denim. The album hosts just two 15-minute tracks, with Mackenzie simply noting, “Laminated Denim is an anagram of Made In Timeland.” One of the two tracks, “The Land Before Timeland”, also references the group’s vinyl-only Made In Timeland release from March of this year.
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Finally, on October 28th, King Gizzard will deliver Changes. The group’s fifth album of the year has actually been in the works for five years since 2017, the last time the band released five albums in a single year. Though based around a relatively simple concept (at least compared to the rest of the band’s catalog), the central idea behind Changes was one the group was never able to nail down, until now.
“I think of Changes as a song-cycle,” Mackenzie said. “Every song is built around this one chord progression—every track is like a variation on a theme. But I don’t know if we had the musical vocabulary yet to complete the idea at that time. We recorded some of it then, including the version of “Exploding Suns” that’s on the finished album. But when the sessions were over, it just never felt done. It was like this idea that was in our heads, but we just couldn’t reach. We just didn’t know yet how to do what we wanted to do.”
The group stepped away from Changes in 2017 and instead released Gumboot Soup as the last of a five-album year. Now, five years later, the long-awaited Changes will fulfill its destiny and finish out another five-album year for King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, bringing the band’s prodigious output to a total 23 albums.
“It’s not necessarily our most complex record, but every little piece and each sound you hear has been thought about a lot,” Mackenzie added.
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The band is currently gearing up for some of its largest North American shows to date, including two nights at Red Rocks Amphitheatre and a show at New York’s Forest Hills Stadium. As a special incentive for fans attending the shows, limited copies of Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava will be available at the Greek Theatre show in Berkley (10/2), Laminated Denim at Red Rocks (10/10, 10/11), and Changes at Orpheum Theater in New Orleans (10/27). All three albums are also available here for pre-order.
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