This month, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard released their 24th studio album. It is called (takes a deep breath) PetroDragonic Apocalypse; Or, Dawn Of Eternal Night: An Annihilation Of Planet Earth And The Beginning Of Merciless Damnation. (If that’s a little too tl;dr for you, just PetroDragonic Apocalypse will also suffice.) It is a tongue-in-cheek throwback metal record that nods to bands like Slayer and Tool, based on a concept recently described by frontman Stu Mackenzie as being “about humankind” and “planet Earth” and “also about witches and dragons and shit.”
If you know anything about these Australian rockers, you’re probably aware that they don’t normally make metal albums about witches and dragons and shit. Of course, they don’t “normally” make any kind of album. Focusing on the prolificacy and eclecticism of King Gizzard is a trope of every interview profile and record review ever written about them. But it’s also impossible to avoid. It would be like writing about Lee Harvey Oswald and not centering on his unfortunate run-in with John F. Kennedy. In the case of PetroDragonic Apocalypse, the album marks a dramatic shift from the bounty of music — five LPs in all — the Giz put out in 2022, which generally had a jammier edge. That jazzy, crunchy, and party-friendly sensibility have made them darlings among music fans who sit at the nexus of loving both the Grateful Dead and garage-punk indie rock. (Which is a much larger audience than the media might have you believe.)
But King Gizzard is nothing if not unpredictable, and PetroDragonic Apocalypse represents a deliberate zag from last year’s zig. Though it’s not unprecedented in the band’s overall body of work: 2019’s Infest The Rats’ Next, their 15th LP for those keeping score, was their first foray into heavy music. After that record, they pivoted hard again with 2021’s Butterfly 3000, a collection of poppy electronic songs.
For newcomers — and even relatively casual admirers like myself — staying on top of this band’s myriad musical adventures can seem like a full-time job. To help make sense of (part) of King Gizzard’s sprawling catalog, I recently did a Zoom call with founding member Joey Walker during a break in their recent U.S. tour, which wrapped last week ahead of a run of dates in Europe that begin in late July.
12 Bar Bruise (2012)
There were these bizarre proto-Gizzard shows that we were doing in maybe 2010, where we had this revolving lineup of members and friends. Anyone who wanted to play and could play. In 2011, the lineup became cemented. We weren’t necessarily hitting the road, because the shows were just on the east coast of Australia. But we were playing as much as we could.
As the first full-length album, it was the first iteration of us doing anything like that. We were just stabbing around in the dark a bit, in terms of process. The notion of even going to a studio was still really novel. It was ultra exciting. I mean, Stu was definitely spearheading that whole thing. It felt like he was leading the way, and it just materialized.
There were heaps of overdubs that were recorded like a voice memo on an iPhone. I think we recorded a lot of the vocals on a 10-watt PV solid state piece of crap amp. Stu did a lot of the vocals on that. But in terms of recording the beds — the main drums, bass, guitar elements of the album — we went into a studio. And then after the fact, we went in and mixed it in that same studio in Melbourne.
It’s one of our most cohesive albums, I think, in terms of the sound. We wear our influences on our sleeves on that one. There’s some big old nods to The Osees and that garage scuzzy rock thing that was happening then. It might have been a bit of a blip on the radar, that garage rock thing that the Osees were leading at the time. But to us, it felt like the be-all-and-end-all. It was the center of the universe, that world. It was the first of many versions of that, just dipping our toes into what it’s like to be in a band. We were still working out dynamics interpersonally, and what roles we had to fill.
Eyes Like The Sky (2012)
There’s a song on 12 Bar Bruise called “Sam Cherry’s Last Shot,” which is spaghetti western sounding surf rock song. We were all in our early 20s and trying to be like Nick Cave. I’d just dress up like Nick Cave or Warren Ellis, and go to parties, and walk around trying to wear a suit or something like that. And I remember I was reading Blood Meridian, that Cormac McCarthy book, and I got an excerpt of an audiobook on YouTube. And I played that over “Sam Cherry’s Last Shot.”
That was the inception of being like, “Fuck, we should maybe investigate this.” One thing led to another, and Ambrose [Kenny Smith’s] dad, Broderick, who unfortunately just passed away, but he is this Australian music icon from the ’60s and ’70s. He was in a blues boogie band called Carson, which was deeply influential on us in the early days. The Australian take on American-style rock boogie thing. He’s also a writer, constantly doing stuff, and he had this audiobook that we scored. Once we knew what it was going to be, it came together quite quickly. Like a lot of albums, we were feeling around in the dark for some form of concept or some form of parameter. Once those are dialed in, the album comes together really quickly. We’re really efficient at that these days.
Float Along — Fill Your Lungs (2013)
At that time it was pure naivety. Not knowing, no plan for the future, no idea as to what we’d be, or if we’d make another album. It was quite a haphazard sense of what would happen. We’d only been a band for 18 months or something, and it was just like, “What the fuck is this?”
It was well and truly more than a few albums in when I felt like, “Oh, okay, maybe this is a thing that we’ll keep doing, moving on to something that’s exciting to us.” But [at first], I was just assuming that we would be doing that garage rock type of record again. After that was Float Along, which is less cohesive. It was us experimenting, going down a bit more of a psychedelic path.
I was in awe of Stu’s ability to just throw something out there and move forward and commit to whatever that was. I was a lot more pedantic. I would overthink it, like, “Oh, this sounds too much like that.” Whereas he just never had that neurological setup in his brain. It didn’t feel like he thought twice about that type of stuff. He used to say, “It’s just a song, it’s not the first or last thing you will ever do. If it’s a shit song, just make another one.”
Quarters! (2015)
My natural way of thinking back in the early days was, “OK, cool, that’s an album. Let’s breathe for a second.” But Stu was like, “Let’s keep going.”
We weren’t really jamming anywhere near close to the degree we are right now on stage. But on I’m Your Mind Fuzz, which I think preceded Quarters! there’s some little moments, like “Slow Jam 1,” which go into a little bit into that territory of what became Quarters! So it’s like, “Oh, cool, that’s fun. Let’s do that.” That was definitely the first iteration of us trying to jam in an improvised way. The album recordings were products of live-take jams, and then we would stitch it all together.
As for “the 10-minute-10-second thing” with all four tracks, it was like, “Oh, we have a couple of long-form songs.” And for whatever reason, they were all around nine minutes. “The River” went for 10 minutes, and then another one went for 10 minutes. And then Stu was like, “I reckon we can get all of these songs the exact same length.” So all of a sudden the concept just materializes. And then you’re like, “Okay, the four songs, they all go from the same time. Quarters!, obviously.” There’s a little bit more foresight or calculation that we employ these days, but back then it just capitalizing on happy accidents.
Nonagon Infinity (2016)
“Robot Stop” and “Gamma Knife” were the first time we were properly starting to fuck with odd time signatures in a way that was at the core of what the album felt like, or was a thing that we were building the album around. And playing with motif — referencing melodies or ideas or words that happened more than once throughout the album.
Stu came up with an idea: “Imagine if it ends in the same way it starts, so you can just have it on loop, and they’d just link up.” And that was pretty much it. It was just like, “Fuck, let’s make this album, the whole album, on loop.” And then once we had that, we titled the album Nonagon Infinity. The blending of all the songs, and linking stuff together, that was the first time we really worked on doing that. When it was finished, I was like, “Fuck, how did we do that?”
For a lot of people, it is an entry point into the band, or the first time they heard the band. We were all ultra proud of it. What we were as a band and our identity started to come a bit more into the clear for us.
Murder Of The Universe (2017)
Stu and I in particular are fairly big sci-fi heads. There’s a book that had a huge impact on me, a lesser-known Philip K. Dick — I think it was his last book — called Valis. I picked that up on tour in the early days. I think we were in Chicago. I’d read A Scanner Darkly and some of the classics. But I got Valis, and it literally fucked me up. It’s actually this semi-autobiographical account of Philip K. Dick, when he was completely fucked up on acid and psychedelics for a long period of time. He was living in an altered reality, and the world around him was oblivious to that. He has this theophany, this religious experience, that ends up being this alien. Anyway, it sounds crazy, but I feel like a lot of etymology of Gizzard lore has come from that book, especially with my writing.
Infest The Rat’s Nest (2019)
Infest The Rats’ Nest was 100 percent like, We’re going to make a heavy album. That was me, Stu and Cavs, the drummer. Us three are the only people in the band that grew up listening to heavy music. By now we had weaponized the genre-jumping thing. It’s just what we’re defined by. But if we were going to do a heavy record, we wanted it to do it our way and be confident about it. As soon as we started doing it and committing to it, we also had a lot more of an idea of our sound, a King Gizzard sound. We felt confident enough to commit, and be like, “Oh, we’ll make it our own.” Even though you can hear all of the influences that went into it — obviously Metallica and Slayer and Tool. Tool is huge for Stu, myself, and Cavs. I was probably 13-years-old when Lateralus came out, and I remember I was just insanely obsessed with it. Had no idea what a time signature was. I remember just playing along to what I now know are fairly complex guitar riffs, and I feel like that actually was quite an important thing in terms of my development.
But yeah, that was a completely and utterly calculated experiment. We were just fucking throwing shit at the wall in that respect.
Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms, And Lava (2022)
Part of the concept was just going through all of the modes of the major scale. All of the song titles start with the first letter of each mode of the major scale. The first track “Mycelium,” it sounds like this almost reggae or African-type thing, because it’s played with a major scale. And then as it moves through the songs, or the scales, they grow just due to the simple nature of what notes you’re playing. They can sound more dissonant, or more dark. Before we even jammed, it was like, “This jam is going to be in the Phrygian scale,” which is very metal sounding. So just due to its very nature, you know it’s going to have a Soviet marching feel. It could only go one way, just due to just the nature of the notes you were using.
PetroDragonic Apocalypse (2023)
After making the Ice, Death, Planets album, and making Changes, those are meandering, jammy kinds of albums, and the temperament of them is a lot more placid. I think often we’ll just be like, “Fuck, we need to expel some energy or something.” But even though sonically it is vastly different, the actual process of how we made Petro is similar to how he made those albums. Especially the Ice, Death record, it’s, that was a product of all of us jamming, stitching the jams together, and then creating the song out of that. And then writing lyrics as a collective. Then we were like, “Fuck, I reckon that would work really, really well if we tried to do a metal version of that.” So that’s where we went with that. When I look back on the recording, the Petro record, it felt so sunny. It was just so fun to do that stuff. I see Petro as a playful, tongue firmly planted in cheek album.
We made that Butterfly 3000 record, which is purely electronic, and we haven’t really had enough time or wherewithal to incorporate a lot of that style into the live show. So more of the electronic stuff, I feel like are we’re going to do that and jam it moving forward. Therefore it’s about trying to work out a way in which we can do that. What gear do we get? How do we fucking implement a MIDI so we can all be in time?
We’ve just started doing that on this tour, and I’ve got my modular synthesizer. I feel like that’s going to start to really penetrate how we play live. And it’s cool for me, because I’ve always played guitar my whole life, but dance music and electronic music kind of is my jam the most. That’s what I listen to. The other guys never did at all. I would kind of be the butt of some jokes, like, “Fucking hell, go listen to your doof-music and shit.” But I feel like it’s just inevitable. If you like music, you might dismiss electronic music, but eventually, it’s like jazz. If you actually give it the time, or you experience it in the right context, it’s undeniably some of the purest form of music. So the other guys are starting to be excited by that.
I definitely know we won’t make a reggae album. But you also never know. I fucking love that shit. And we have rap songs now. So nothing is sacred in this band.
