09-07-2025
King Gizzard are contemporary music's premier shape-shifters
To call King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard a rock band is like describing the Marvel Cinematic Universe as just a film franchise. While that's technically true, they're also so much more—this generation's answer to Phish and the Grateful Dead; a band so prolific that Pitchfork once called them 'a vinyl pressing plant in human form"; contemporary music's most mind-bending musical shape-shifters; and the architects of a thriving DIY economy based on free culture ideals. Wild-eyed and perpetually restless, the Australian experimental rock sextet delight in chaos and subversion. And, perhaps, in watching hapless music critics try to encapsulate their massive oeuvre without having a full-on breakdown.
Maybe I should just start from the beginning. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard—we'll call them Gizz for short—started out in 2010 as a psychedelic garage-rock band, firmly in the tradition of Ty Segall and Down Under contemporaries Thee Oh Sees. But things quickly got weirder. And then weirder still. Over the course of the next decade-and-a-half, the band would travel far and wide from their garage-rock roots, experimenting with krautrock, dream-pop, heavy metal, modular-synth prog, acid-friend spoken word, and too many other genres to name.
Let me run you through just a four-album run to give you a sense of the whiplash their discography can induce. The Beatles-meets-Brubeck jazz-fusion of Quarters! leads somehow into the acoustic, bossa-nova inflected freak-folk of Paper Mâché Dream Balloon. Follow-up Nonagon Infinity—their breakthrough record—returns to scuzzy, lo-fi garage-rock before Flying Microtonal Banana takes a hard-left turn into Middle-East inspired microtonal riffs and a blasting chorus of Turkish horns. That one band could play such wildly different types of music—and do it well—is already amazing. The fact that all four albums came out within a single two-year period simply boggles the mind.
Which brings me to the other problem one faces when trying to explain Gizz to the unfamiliar—the sheer volume of their output. Since their first full-length in 2022, the band have put out 27 studio albums, not counting the innumerable EPs, remix albums, live albums, and official bootlegs. They've managed to put out five studio albums within a calendar year not just once, but twice.
The band's hulking discography can make them seem intimidating or a novelty act to newcomers. But for the band's hardcore fans—who call themselves The Weird Swarm and follow the band around on tours like GenZ deadheads—this commitment to exploring every creative idea, giving space and energy to every contrarian flight of musical fantasy, is what makes them so uniquely special. It does raise one question though—how long can they keep it up? How long before fatigue or the seductive inertia of commercial success saps them of their ability to constantly subvert and surprise?
Judging by Phantom Island—their latest full length, released last month—they're in no danger of running out of steam just yet. The 10 songs on this album were originally written and recorded during the sessions for last year's Flight b741, an album full of crunchy roots rock riffs, rollicking boogie grooves and dark, paranoid lyrics about depression, suicide and the end of the world.
When they returned to these songs to finish them a little while later, the band felt that they sounded a little unfinished. So they sent the songs to LA Philharmonic Orchestra conductor Chad Kelly—whom they'd recently met and befriended—and asked him for an orchestral glow-up. Kelly wrote new arrangements for the songs, and put together a 24-member orchestra to dub over the original recordings.
The end result is an album that combines country-fried choogle and Philadelphia soul with lush orchestrations of strings, woodwinds and horns. Think a weirder, freakier Electric Light Orchestra, or a less bombastic Chicago. The opening title track begins with jazzy, AOR-adjacent layers of piano, violin and horns, before accelerating into a full-blown freakout in the final third. Deadstick is an irresistibly catchy chunk of Southern boogie-rock fortified by blasts of grandiloquent horns.
Panpsych opens with solo flute and guitar in frisky interplay, before finding it's—rich, cosmic, eminently danceable—groove. Standout cut Spacesick channels David Bowie in both its cinematic arrangements of strings and crescendoing horns, and lyrical conceit (its protagonist is an astronaut looking down at the Earth from his spaceship). At its best, the band's blend of soul-ified psychedelia, 1970s rock and orchestral flourishes elevates these tracks to euphoric, earworm-worthy highs.
But the fact that these songs weren't originally written for orchestral accompaniment means that sometimes the combination falls flat, as on the meandering, overstuffed Silent Spirit, or Eternal Return, which sounds like it's being pulled in two opposite directions. Elsewhere, like on the otherwise beautiful baroque pop of Lonely Cosmos, the strings seem almost superfluous, only really making their presence felt in the intro and outro without engaging with the song substantially.
But even when things don't quite click, the results are interesting and ambitious enough to be worthwhile. Phantom Island may not be as visionary or ground-breaking as some of the other records in their catalogue, but it's still a whole lot of fun. It also makes me want to see what the band can achieve if they properly collaborate with an orchestra, bringing them in at the compositional stage rather than at the last minute. Knowing them, though, the next record will be another left-field turn. Will they venture into noise-punk territory next? Or maybe even rap? I have no idea. But I do know that whatever they get up to, I'll be tuning in. If only to see whether they can keep getting away with it.
Bhanuj Kappal is a Mumbai-based writer.
