King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard shared details of the three new albums set for release in October through the Australian band’s KGLW label. The ever-prolific rockers issued the 10-minute single, “Ice V,” from the first of the trio of LPs to come out, Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava, which arrives on October 7.
Five days later, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard will drop the next album, Laminated Denim, on Wednesday, October 12, consisting of two 15-minute tracks. The third album slated for release in October is Changes, which includes seven songs and is due on October 28. The three new albums follow the double LP, Omnium Gatherum, which was issued in April, and Made In Timeland, which was released in March.
Stream “Ice V” and find further details regarding King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s three new albums coming out in October below:
Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava details:
Things move fast in the Gizzverse, and before Stu Mackenzie and his bandmates had even completed work on their recent mammoth double album Omnium Gatherum, they’d started sketching out this next record. Their Omnium Gatherum single “The Dripping Tap“ had begun life as a handful of ideas and riffs that had arisen at pre-pandemic soundchecks and demos recorded through lockdown. For this new album, however, the group wouldn’t be bringing in any pre-written songs or ideas; instead, they planned to cook up all the music together in the studio, on the spot.
“All we had prepared as we walked into the studio were these seven song titles,” says Mackenzie. “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 selected seven titles from his list that he felt “had a vibe,” and then attached a beats-per-minute value to each one. Each song would also follow one of the seven modes of the major scale: Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian and Locrian. Over seven days, the group recorded hours and hours of jams, dedicating a day to each mode and BPM.
“Naturally, each day’s jams had a different flavor, because each day was in a different scale and a different BPM,” Mackenzie says. “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.”
The group ended each day with four-to-five hours of new jams in the can. Mackenzie auditioned those jams after the sessions were done, stitching them together into the songs that feature on the 21st studio album by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava (the initials of the title, IDPLMAL, spell out a mnemonic for the modes). 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.
Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava Tracklist:
- Mycelium (7:36)
- Ice V (10:16)
- Magma (9:07)
- Lava (6:41)
- Hell’s Itch (13:28)
- Iron Lung (9:05)
- Gliese 710 (7:49)
Laminated Denim details:
“Laminated Denim is an anagram of Made In Timeland” – Stu Mackenzie.
Laminated Denim Tracklist
- The Land Before Timeland (15:00)
- Hypertension (15:00)
Changes details:
For half a decade, the sextet has been haunted by one elusive conceptual project that had bested their every attempt (of which there had been several). They first conceived the album back in 2017, a busy year for the group. Within a mere twelve months, they recorded and released five albums of new material, but the band had intended to see out the year with a different album. That album was called Changes, and it’s finally arriving now.
“I think of Changes as a song-cycle,” says band-member Stu Mackenzie. “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 abandoned Changes and instead prepared the beguiling Gumboot Soup (the last of five albums the band released in 2017), and were then quickly ensnared by about eight other outlandish ideas that sent them in infinite new directions. But the concept of Changes did not go gently into that good night.
“We really have been tinkering with it since then,” Mackenzie adds. “It’s not necessarily our most complex record, but every little piece and each sound you hear has been thought about a lot.”
Indeed, the album has gestated over a fitfully inventive five years. Originally imagined as the group’s fifth album of 2017, it has ended up the fifth album King Gizzard will release in 2022. Coincidences like this, Mackenzie says, wake up the latent numerologist within him. But the album has taught him that projects operate to their own schedules and are ready when they’re ready.
Good things come to those who wait, and the magnificent Changes is worth every one of the 2,628,000 minutes King Gizzard & 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, Changes is a luminous, soft-pop marvel. Come lose yourself in its slow-cooked brilliance.
Changes Tracklist
- Change (13:04)
- Hate Dancin’ (3:16)
- Astroturf (7:34)
- No Body (3:42)
- Gondii (4:57)
- Exploding Suns (4:41)
- Short Change (2:51)
