King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s newest album is the metal-forward PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Daybreak of Everlasting Night time: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Starting of Cruel Damnation.

Jason Galea/Courtesy of the artist

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Jason Galea/Courtesy of the artist

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s newest album is the metal-forward PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Daybreak of Everlasting Night time: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Starting of Cruel Damnation.

Jason Galea/Courtesy of the artist

Among the many surest methods to really feel out of the loop proper now’s to take a look at live performance listings and see that artists you have by no means heard — and even heard of — are in some way large enough to play very giant venues. Nowadays, it is a revelation that may strike with out warning, irrespective of who you might be or how intently you retain up with music. The streaming ecosystem has created the perfect situations for fortunate area of interest artists to develop their viewers with out leaving a cultural bubble, and there are such a lot of cultural bubbles to go round that a couple of are sure to exclude you.

The Australian band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard is a major instance: an act with no hits and modest media protection who however instructions multi-night runs at amphitheaters all through the US: Crimson Rocks. The Hollywood Bowl. Forest Hills Stadium. That it comfortably shares these areas with family names is much more spectacular contemplating its personal title, a mouthful of inner rhyme so egregiously foolish that loads of music critics, curators and journalists nonetheless disregard its existence fully.

The important thing to understanding the King Gizzard phenomenon is a willingness to think about disparate classes in dense overlap, effectively past something our post-genre pop period might need ready us for. The group’s six musicians stay on the middle of a impossible Venn diagram: stylistic chameleons on par with Beck and Damon Albarn, prolific at a fee that outpaces even the famously hyper-productive Guided By Voices, mounting fully unpredictable stay exhibits with the jam band ethos of Phish. Led by 32-year-old main songwriter Stu Mackenzie, they’ve launched 24 studio albums since 2010, 5 of which dropped in 2022. (Two of these, the MGMT-ish Omnium Gatherum and the groovy jazz-fusion opus Ice, Loss of life, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms, and Lava, are good entry factors for the uninitiated.) The data are typically organized round style and musical excessive ideas — storage rock, numerous flavors of psychedelia, digital excursions, prog, blue-eyed soul and several other albums exploring the possibilites of microtonal tuning.

The band’s newest, PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Daybreak of Everlasting Night time: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Starting of Cruel Damnation, is its second foray into full-on thrash metallic. Because it did on model predecessor Infest the Rats’ Nest from 2019, the group makes use of the style and its conventional obsession with loss of life and destruction as a automobiles for envisioning local weather catastrophe — and ensuing class warfare as the rich try to flee.

“Converge,” a very brutal minimize from the brand new album, splits its perspective between MacKenzie embodying the fury of nature itself as he describes “a storm of unparalled fright” in a low growl, and multi-instrumentalist Ambrose Kenny-Smith’s falsetto refrains standing in for humanity. As soon as it has established the destruction of civilization as a given, the report ups the ante by bringing witchcraft and massive rampaging dragon monsters into the narrative. All of the over-the-top action-movie enjoyable, nevertheless, is balanced with real-life dread, the tone fastidiously pitched to keep away from winking away the seriousness of precise impending disaster for the sake of a thrill.

What’s maybe most exceptional about PetroDragonic Apocalypse is how absolutely and authentically King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard inhabits the goal aesthetic. A primary-time listener may fairly peg it because the work of a full-time metallic band, studied within the teachings of Slayer and Megadeth. This capability to function in any of its chosen lanes with most dedication, sincerity, and uncooked ability will be the actual cause the group has been capable of develop its viewers so steadily. Every new report works like an episode of an ongoing serial, presenting the musicians’ ceaseless whims, experiments and reinventions as the weather of a grand journey. (Working example: Petrodragonic Apocalypse is just the primary of a two-parter about local weather anxiousness, the chaotic yin to a forthcoming yang in a yet-to-be-revealed style.)

And for the listeners, King Gizzard’s intuition to burn by concepts as rapidly as doable has its personal odd however simple profit: permission, uncommon amongst superfandoms, to care solely concerning the artistic excursions that swimsuit their very own tastes. When new materials is in fixed and numerous provide, the stakes get a little bit decrease, and a drastic change in path looks like much less of a betrayal. In different phrases, when you’re not feeling the group in Metallica mode, you possibly can relaxation straightforward realizing it will most likely come again round to, say, funky psychedelia earlier than too lengthy.