Sanjoy Narayan on King Gizzard, a lizard wizard and the chameleons of rock

The band’s music can't be pinned down to a genre. Experiments extend beyond music too... they once released a batch of songs for anyone to produce as vinyl LPs.

By the time King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard (often shortened by fans to King Gizz) released their latest album, the mysteriously titled Flight b741, earlier this month, I had lost count of how many studio albums the hyper-prolific Australian outfit had released, in their 14 years.

That number turns out to be 26. But it doesn’t include about 16 live albums, several compilations, and scores of singles and music videos.

King Gizz have garnered a significant popularity, especially within

Listening to the new album, Flight b741, feels like entering a time machine that whisks one back by more than half a century. But listen to the lyrics, and there’s a difference...

Pick up 2013’s Float Along – Fill Your Lungs and play the first track, Head On/Pill (warning: it is nearly 16 minutes long), and one finds oneself on a trip not much different from the opening lyrics of the song: “Just yesterday I sat across from my legs / They weren’t connected to me / And I couldn’t see ’cause my eyes were in me / Hold me up straight while I screw my / Head on / Head on.”

The album is a cosmic adventure, a quintessential psychedelic rock experience featuring sitars, wah-wah pedals and spaced-out production that guarantees a trip.

Instead of that trippy offering, if one were to chance upon another of their 2023 albums, PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation, one would find an unadulterated heavy-, thrash-metal album with all the aggression, speed and vocal growl of that sub-genre, which is especially conducive to near-violent headbanging.

King Gizz’s technical wizardry is remarkable. Not only are several of the band members multi-instrumentalists (frontman Mackenzie, for instance, sings and plays keyboards, flute, bass guitar, percussion, sitar, piano, organ, violin, clarinet, saxophone, zurna [a Central-Asian wind reed instrument] and the drums), they are able to traverse everything from psychedelic rock to garage rock and acid rock to progressive rock, indie rock, heavy metal, and everything in-between.

On the 2015 album Quarters!, they showcase their ability to blend jazz elements with their unique style, featuring four tracks, each exactly 10 minutes and 10 seconds long.

And, on Flying Microtonal Banana (2017), the band tuned their instruments to intervals smaller than the traditional semitone in Western music, to blend elements of psychedelic rock, acid rock, krautrock and Middle-Eastern music.

Gizzheads love the group’s unpredictable approach, which, in fact, extends beyond the music. In 2017, King Gizz put their master recordings for an album online and said anyone could use them to produce vinyl LPs. Even the band doesn’t know how many of these independent releases exist — probably hundreds.

(To write in with feedback, email sanjoy.narayan@gmail.com)