King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard greeted the day with not one, not two, but three singles from the band’s upcoming album, The Silver Cord. Out October 27th, KGLW’s second album of 2023 finds the boundary-busting Australian psych rockers on the dancefloor for a synth-heavy, seven-track set that will come along with “expanded editions” of each song.
The three singles—”Theia”, “The Silver Cord”, and “Set”—serve as the first three tracks on the album. They arrive alongside a seamless music video directed by the band’s longtime visual collaborator Jason Galea. The trilogy opens with a jog through “Theia” before transitioning into “The Silver Cord” and sending the band into the deep end of weirdness with heavily distorted vocals. Ending the journey on the in motion with “Set”, Ambrose Kenny-Smith controls the mic and spits a verse that only inflames the desire for the band’s allegedly completed hip-hop album they have said will never see the light of day.
Stylistic chameleons by nature, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have jumped to a completely new end of the musical spectrum on what they’re calling their 25th album (who can really be sure at this point?). The creative ball first started rolling when drummer Michael “Cavs” Cavanagh purchased a Simmons drum kit, “an iconic relic of 1980s futurism.”
“The Simmons kit is really sick, actually,” grins singer/guitarist Stu Mackenzie. “It has this little ‘electronic’ brain all the drum-pads plug into, and while the sounds it can make are pretty rudimentary, we soon decided we wanted to commit to it as the drum sound for this next record. We set Cavs’ Simmons kit up in the center of the room, and then dragged every synth we had in the practice space or lying about our houses into the studio, and plugged everything in. It was chaotic. It was probably the coolest our studio has ever looked, to be honest.”
King Gizz approached The Silver Cord with the same improvisational mindset that informed predecessors PetroDragonic Apocalypse; Or, Dawn Of Eternal Night: An Annihilation Of Planet Earth And The Beginning Of Merciless Damnation and Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava. The band came into the studio and jammed these songs into existence, a far cry from the sextet’s previous electronic excursion—Butterfly 3000—which they crafted from a social distance during COVID-induced lockdowns. Underscoring that open-ended indulgence is the fact that, for the first time in the band’s history, King Gizzard will release two versions of the same album. The Silver Cord will arrive in both standard and extended editions, with the latter featuring lengthy dance versions expanding the songs far past their core structures.
“The first version’s really condensed, trimming all the fat,” Mackenzie explained. “And on the second version, that first song, ‘Theia’, is 20 minutes long. It’s the ‘everything’ version – those seven songs you’ve already heard on the first version, but with a whole lot of other shit we record while making it. It’s for the Gizz-heads. I love Donna Summer’s records with Giorgio Moroder, and I’d never listen to the short versions now – I’m one of those people who wants to hear the whole thing. We’re testing the boundaries of people’s attention spans when it comes to listening to music, perhaps – but I’m heavily interested in destroying such concepts.”
Those extended versions will serve the band well when King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard return to the U.S. next summer for a run of marathon concerts. The shows in New York, Chicago, Quincy, WA (at The Gorge, which will mark the band’s largest headlining concert to date), and Austin will witness KGLW delivering three-hour concerts touching on their expansive discography—which will assuredly continue to grow by summer 2024. For tickets and a full list of tour dates head here.
Below, check out the official video for the first three singles from the upcoming King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard album, The Silver Cord, available for pre-order October 12th.
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – “Theia” / “The Silver Cord” / “Set” [Official Video]