The wait is over as King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard returned from an uncharacteristic five-month studio silence with their first release of the year, “Gilla Monster”. The track will appear on the Australian psych juggernauts’ new thrash metal double album, the impossibly titled PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation, out on June 16th via KGLW.
PetroDragonic Apocalypse, or its abbreviation PADENAPEBMD, is a return to the thrash style the band first explored on its 2019 concept album, Infest The Rats’ Nest. Frontman Stu Mackenzie, guitarist Joey Walker, and Michael “Cavs” Cavanagh represent the core headbangers of Gizzard’s six-man infantry, and recording and performing the ecologically themed speed metal album reinvigorated an early love for the genre that served as the impetus of their musical identities.
“When we made Rats’ Nest, it felt experimental,” Mackenzie said. “Like, ‘Here’s this music that some of us grew up on but we’d never had the guts or confidence to really play before, so let’s give it a go and see what happens’. And when we made that album we were like, ‘Fuck, why did it take us so long to do this?’ It’s just so much fun to play that music, and those songs work so well when we play them live. So we always had it in our minds to make another metal record.”
On PetroDragonic Apocalypse, Gizzard doubled down with a double LP that combines the previous thrash experiment with the band’s more recent approach to songwriting. As displayed throughout the group’s prodigious five-album output in 2022, KGLW has taken a more jam-friendly method of songwriting. Tracks nearing the ten-minute mark dot the four sides of PetroDragonic Apocalypse, as the band’s new improvisation-based recording style meshes with their long-held affinity for heavy metal.
“We worked on it the same way we started our Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava album last year,” Mackenzie said. “We wrote a song a day, and we came into the practice space with no riffs, no tunes, no ideas, and started from scratch. And we jammed, and recorded everything, and pieced the songs together from that. I’d sketched out the story the songs would tell, and I’d portioned it out into seven song titles, with a short paragraph of what would happen in the song. I guess we kind of made the record backwards.”
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“Gilla Monster” introduces PetroDragonic Apocalypse musically and thematically. Crushing power chords chug along as the band’s twisted breakneck lyricism tells of a fowl creature devouring Wiccans and bringing the same level of doom and destruction that the music suggests. Visually, the story is told through SPOD‘s cinematic music video, which was heavily inspired by the Lord of the Rings franchise, a concept that meshes surprisingly well with thrash metal almost like a 21st-century Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon.
“I wanted to shoot Lord of the Rings 4 but also make a video game, so I mixed both mediums and came up with this majestic journey for truth and power in a cursed world,” SPOD said. “I mixed 3D animation, modeling & live footage in a 3D video game program to create this marvelous voyage of man & beast. Friend or foe?”
While announcing details of the band’s 24th album, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard surprised nobody and revealed that they are almost done with their next album. The yet-untitled disc is another seven-track concept album born around the same time as PetroDragonic Apocalypse and fermented from the same improvisational method.
“I’m not a tortured artist, I’m more of a mad professor,” Mackenzie said. “And after a bunch of records crafted out of jams, we’re very much ready to make records in the old-fashioned way of writing the songs before we enter the studio, once these ones are done.”
Check out the new King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard single “Gilla Monster” and click here to pre-order PetroDragonic Apocalypse. Scroll down for the full tracklist and album artwork.
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – “Gilla Monster” (Official Video)
