King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard returned on Tuesday with their second album of the month, Laminated Denim. The group’s 22nd album overall arrives on streaming platforms alongside Made In Timeland, which the band released back in March as a vinyl-only exclusive available at select concerts.

Laminated Denim and Made In Timeland are directly related, namely as they are anagrams of one another. They were also both born of the same concept, as the Australian psych-rockers composed Made In Timeland to serve as the set break music at the band’s planned 2020 Red Rocks Amphitheatre marathon shows. When those dates were perpetually postponed due to COVID, King Gizzard instead elected to release Made In Timeland at the band’s New Year’s Eve Timeland festival in Australia, which was itself postponed to March and rebranded Return of the Curse of Timeland.

“Well, in the immediate aftermath of that Return Of The Curse Of Timeland concert, as thrilled Gizz-fans carried their copies of Made In Timeland home from the gig in their grateful, sweaty little hands, a sense of unease swept over the six members of King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard,” frontman Stu Mackenzie said. “‘We suddenly thought, ‘Great – what are we going to do for the intermission at Red Rocks now?’”

Related: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard To Host Gizzverse Record Fair At Forest Hills Stadium Show

Just like its predecessor, Laminated Denim is made up of two 15-minute tracks, one for each night of the Colorado stand. The band finally staged its postponed marathon concerts at Red Rocks on Monday and Tuesday. As the yet unreleased tracks played over the PA, a clock on the LED screen counted down the seconds until the next set.

Due to their 15-minute runtimes, the two tracks Laminated Denim has a tendency to wander. The release is the latest symptom of what Mackenzie referred to as the band’s current “jammy period” ahead of Omnium Gatherum‘s release earlier this year. This newfound commitment to improvisation has so far manifested itself in several ways, from the 18-minute “The Dripping Tap” that heralded Omnium Gatherum to time-specific endeavors like Timeland and Laminated Denim.

The most rewarding improvisational experiment so far arrived last week with the calculated spontaneity of Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava. The recording process saw the band assign a BPM value to a song name and step into the studio for marathon jam sessions with bandmates switching instruments after 45 minutes. For the intensely collaborative effort, the musicians collectively wrote lyrics in a shared Google Doc, after which Stu spliced together selections from the four-to-five hours of jams produced each day to create the seven songs on IDPLMAV, all named after the different modes of the major scale.

For Laminated Denim and Made In Timeland, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard set out to create intermission music and that’s what they did. In the end, it serves its purpose of giving fans something to listen to as they wait for the show to resume.

King Gizzard will wrap a North American tour with shows through the end of October, featuring stops at New York City’s Forest Hills Stadium (10/21), two nights at Levitation in Austin (10/28–10/29), and more before returning to Red Rocks (11/2) to finish the trek. Tickets and a full list of dates are on their website.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Laminated Denim

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Made In Timeland