King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard announce three new albums and share ‘Ice V’
Prolific Australian rockers King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have announced three albums which will all be released in October. The band are known for releasing albums at an alarming speed, famously dropping five stellar albums in 2017, including the incredible Flying Microtonal Banana.
So far this year, the band have released Made in Timeland and Omnium Gatherum, making 2022 the second year for them to drop five new records. According to the band, these new albums are as follows: Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava, Laminated Denim, and Changes.
Lead singer Stu Mackenzie has shared some exciting information on the first release, Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava, dropping October 7th. Opting to make seven songs, each with a different BPM value and mode of the major scale, Mackenzie said: “Naturally, each day’s jams had a different flavour, because each day was in a different scale and a different BPM.”
He continued: “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.” As for lyrics, the members co-wrote the words on a collaborative Google document.
Laminated Timeland, set to release October 12th, is an anagram for the previous 2022 release Made in Timeland, and is composed of just two 15-minute songs, very reminiscent of their 2015 album Quarters. Mackenzie didn’t give much away about the album apart from the song titles, ‘The Land Before Timeland’ and ‘Hypertension’, which suggests that this album may connect to Made in Timeland.
Finally, there will be Changes, released October 28th, which Mackenzie says the band have been working on since 2017. He saidL “I think of Changes as a song-cycle. 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.”
Mackenzie suggests that Changes is “not necessarily our most complex record, but every little piece and each sound you hear has been thought about a lot.”
Check out ‘Ice V’ from upcoming Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava below.
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