King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard on Tuesday offered an advance preview of Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava with the new single, “Iron Lung”. Out on Friday via KGLW, IDPLMAL is the first of three albums from the Australian psych rockers set for release this month.
Clocking in at just over nine minutes, this latest single only bolsters frontman Stu Mackenzie‘s claim that the band has entered its “jammy period.” In fact, all of Ice, Death, Planets was culled from marathon jam sessions that saw the band members change instruments every 45 minutes. The result is one of the most eclectic collections of music from a band that has already proved elusive to categorization. “Iron Lung” takes the indefinability even further as jazzy brass and delicately deft drumming intermingle with fuzzy vocals and acid rock guitar.
“‘Iron Lung’ (along with the other songs off this record) is the ultimate collab,” Mackenzie said. “We wrote the lyrics as a group and created the music out of improvisation. Spontaneous creation. The best kind. And that’s why I’m proud of it. Hope you dig.”
The single arrives alongside a music video from Australian musician SPOD that is as hallucinatory as the song itself.
“When I heard this track I had just started delving into fully animated AI videos and thought what a good opportunity to use something I barely understand mixed with my love of effects from the dawn of digital video,” SPOD (a.k.a. Brent Griffin) said. “So I poured myself into a cyber spiral for a couple of months and this is the result. I love how the song seems like endless ascending & descending cycles culminating in these dramatic explosions and lifts, so it felt like a perfect fit to dive into a 9 minute descent to hell and back. Unfortunately I still dream that I’m spiraling into the eternal abyss and I’m not sure I exist anymore.”
Also set for release this month are Laminated Denim and Changes. Out on October 12th, Laminated Denim consists of two 15-minute songs and is an anagram for Made In Timeland, the group’s vinyl-only album released at the band’s rescheduled New Year’s Eve festival in Melbourne back in March. Finally, on October 28th, King Gizzard will release the band’s fifth album of the year, Changes. The studio effort has been in the works since 2017 when the group also released five albums in a single year.
“I think of Changes as a song-cycle,” Mackenzie said. “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.”
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Check out the music video for “Iron Lung” by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. All three of the band’s upcoming albums are available for pre-order through the Gizzverse. KGLW will stage their long-awaited marathon concerts at Red Rocks Amphitheatre on October 10th and 11th and November 2nd. Livestream tickets and multi-night packages are available via nugs.
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – “Iron Lung” (Official Video)