The Boundless, Expanding Universe of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard are a relentlessly creative force. Since the Australian group made their debut in 2012 with 12 Bar Bruise, they’ve averaged a little over one new album every six months—not counting their live albums, EPs, and other miscellanea. If you played their catalog back to back in chronological order, you’d probably start hallucinating from sleep deprivation somewhere around last year’s Omnium Gatherum. They’ve conquered garage rock, psychedelia, krautrock, folk, heavy metal, prog and just about every space in-between on their vastly expanding spectrum of sound. But even King Gizzard recognize their limits. “We probably wouldn’t do a modern ska album,” says guitarist Joey Walker over a Zoom call from his home in Melbourne. “There’s been some exploration into doing some hip-hop stuff, and we’re very conscious of how we’re doing that—since we’re a band that makes heavy rock music. Just because we can do something doesn’t necessarily mean that we should.”

The band’s new album, The Silver Cord, once again finds Walker, Stu Mackenzie, Cook Craig, Lucas Harwood, Michael Cavanagh and Ambrose Kenny-Smith continuing to explore sonic terrain beyond the tried-and-true familiarity of guitar rock. Throughout The Silver Cord, the sextet builds epic, side-long space-disco soundscapes from analog synthesizers. Yet, while the tonal palette is cohesive and consistent, the styles they explore are characteristically all over the map—from the extended odyssey of 20-minute synth-pop opener “Theia” to the hypnotic disco pulse of “Set.” “Gilgamesh” even takes on an early ‘90s hip-house sound in the vein of The KLF’s “America: What Time is Love?,” while a variety of other unexpected influences show up throughout the album, from disco auteur Giorgio Moroder to cult Afrobeat icon William Onyeabor. The band likewise took the unusual move of releasing The Silver Cord in two formats: a single-LP release with edited, more radio-friendly versions of each song and a double-album, in which each track is given the luxury of an extended runway from which to fully take off.

The Silver Cord is also intended as a companion album to their other full-length release from 2023, the heavy metal influenced Petrodragonic Apocalypse (the “Petro album,” as Walker refers to it), with each of its seven songs corresponding to another song on its predecessor. As the band preps the album for live performances, they plan to have songs from the two albums bleed into each other seamlessly. But the progressive, semi-self-referential synth odyssey that the album turned out to be is still a few degrees off from Walker’s initial idea for where the band could go next. “I dabble in the dance world and produce music under a different alias,” Walker says. “So I was like, ‘Let’s make a dance album—a club album—that would be sick!’ And it ended up not being that, and never could be. The conventions or the template of dance music, the guys aren’t really familiar with, so it could never be that. And that’s what was brilliant about it. There was a naivety about it that everyone brought to the picture, using synths and shit, that justified the album.”

The Silver Cord also represents a new milestone for King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard: It’s their 25th album. The group seems to only grow more productive and creatively fertile as they continue on and, just last year, they unloaded five full-length records on listeners—which is the second time they’ve done so. To those outside the band and its obsessive legions of fans, the relentless volume of material can feel perhaps like a novelty, but there’s no denying how much fun the band seems to have doing it or, for that matter, the confidence and curiosity that goes into their continued expansion and growth together.

By the time they released 2014’s I’m in Your Mind Fuzz, the group had already begun to cultivate a steady buzz and were capturing the attention of critics, but it was around the release of 2016’s Nonagon Infinity, the band’s eighth album, that Walker says is where King Gizzard’s ideas and creative stride really began to take off. “That was, maybe, the first record where it felt like uniquely Gizzard, the tenet of what we were and could be started to establish itself,” he says. “And if Nonagon was the album that sparked that for us—that period in 2017 where we did the five albums and we were just running with it, not adhering to industry norms about frequency of albums or how long they should be—that’s when we said ‘This is our tip.’”

“I think we’ve grown as musicians and with what excites us, but what’s great about it is we can go back and re-contextualize it and pull stuff out, usually on a live stage,” he adds. “I look back fondly on all of our stuff, really. It’s all good stuff, and it’s still fertile ground to go back and rehash.”

Having such a wealth of material to draw from has given King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard the opportunity to present their live performances in a unique way. In 2024, the band will perform four three-hour marathon concerts across the U.S., in New York, Austin, Washington and Chicago. These concerts will see the band playing material from throughout their 25-album-deep catalog, complete with extended jams and improvisations, and plenty of riffs to spare. The duration of the shows is about twice that of a standard King Gizzard performance, though they operate from a similar guiding principle: Never give an audience the same show twice. At any given moment, the band is prepared to play anything from a pool of about 300 songs, and no two setlists in their repertoire are ever quite alike. And they go to great lengths to enforce that ideal, as Walker explains.

“We won’t play any song that we played from the previous time we’ve been in a city, so if we’re playing in L.A., and the last time we played [there] was in October of last year, none of the songs from that show are going to be in the set,” he says. “There might be one or two songs we’ll play for a lot of the shows, moving from city to city, but we look at Setlist.fm—the archive of live shows—and we have this Excel spreadsheet of all our albums, it’s color coded and there’s all the notes around it, what everyone’s playing—monitor notes—so from each show we drag it from the master file into the setlist, and there’s a definite system that we’re running and it makes it cool.”

As Walker looks back on how much the band has accomplished in such a short amount of time, he recognizes that, from an outsider’s perspective, the very idea of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard is one that lends itself to absurdity. But, even though they’re self-aware enough to not be so precious about some of the more trivial aspects of the band, he also suggests there’s enough creative fuel in the tank to keep going indefinitely—a pure joy in the exploration of music itself that he hopes is infectious.

“I often think about what I would think of Gizzard if I wasn’t in it, and there’s a world where Gizzard would exist and I would probably find us annoying,” he says. “But that’s just because of our dumbass name, our frequency of output, all that stupid shit. But, if I gave it a bit of time, I’d think ‘Oh, this is really cool.’ It’s exploratory and varied, and you don’t really know what you’re getting. And that’s what’s enjoyable about us making it. I think that at this point, we don’t have any other option. We’ll be making music forever.”

Jeff Terich is a Richmond, Virginia-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in SPIN, Bandcamp Daily, uDiscover Music, Grammy.com and San Diego Magazine. His Twitter is @1000TimesJeff.