Australian band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard has been known for the prolific nature of their releases, and is further solidifying that reputation with the announcement of three new albums coming next month. Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava, Laminated Denim, and Changes will be released on October 7th, 12th, and 28th, respectively. The lead single, "Ice V", arrive with a music video.
On Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava, band leader Stu Mackenzie explained their process of assigning seven song titles their own BPM and mode of the major scale. He said, “We’d walk into the studio, set everything up, get a rough tempo going and just jam. No preconceived ideas at all, no concepts, no songs. We’d jam for maybe 45 minutes, and then all swap instruments and start again.” The band completed the lyrics together in a collaborative Google Doc.
Mackenzie noted that the following album, Laminated Denim, is an anagram of their March release Made in Timeland. Both albums are made of two fifteen-minute tracks.
Mackenzie described the third album, Changes, as "a song cycle." He said, “Every song is built around this one chord progression — every track is like a variation on a theme. But I don’t know if we had the musical vocabulary yet to complete the idea at that time. We recorded some of it then, including the version of “Exploding Suns” that’s on the finished album. But when the sessions were over, it just never felt done. It was like this idea that was in our heads, but we just couldn’t reach. We just didn’t know yet how to do what we wanted to do.”
Watch the music video for "Ice V" below.
