King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard Release Fifth Album of 2017

We’ve spent much of 2017 chronicling King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s stated goal to release five full-length albums during the calendar year. What seemed like pie in the sky around this time in 2016 has actually happened: With two days to go before 2018, the Australian psych-rock chameleons released Gumboot Soup on Saturday, completing the all-too-rare quintuple. The album follows February’s Flying Microtonal Banana, June’s Murder of the Universe, August’s Sketches of Brunswick East (which appeared on our 50 Best Albums of 2017 list), and the free download Polygondwanaland, which came out in November.

Gumboot Soup, the band’s 13th album since 2012, can be heard in its entirety on their banddcamp, and on YouTube—another holiday-season gift from one of the best rock bands on the planet right now. Opening track “Beginner’s Luck” marks a return to the group’s folkier side, with flutes mingling around wah-wah guitars and lilting harmonies, while second track “Greenhouse Heat Death” snaps back into droning riffage and distorted vocals—in all, a multifarious mix of everything we love about King Gizzard.

“We don’t expect everyone to like everything that we release, but I hope people can view these five records as one body of work,” frontman Stu Mackenzie said. “They’ve been made at the same time, by the same people, in the same place, and they all overlap.”

Read: The Tripped-Out, Magnetic Horror of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard