By the time you read this, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard will have sold more than 240,000 tickets from the 40 shows on their 2024 North American tour — by far the largest and most successful outing of their utterly unique 14-year career to date.
The Australian sextet is as bemused and slightly freaked out at this turn of events as one might expect, especially considering their at times impenetrable, 26-album discography, intimidating and ever-changing three-hour live shows, and a highly DIY modus operandi that encourages fans to bootleg their recordings and merchandise and spread the gospel via the online Gizzverse community. By no fault of Gizzard’s own, how has this music become such a magnet for jam band-loving, travel-to-every-gig Gen Z stoners, old-school prog and metal devotees, and amiable worldwide weirdos alike?
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It’s a question the band of nearly lifelong friends are trying to understand on a daily basis. So as the outside world clamored for more and more King Gizzard, the musicians themselves pulled even closer together, literally — writing uncharacteristic gang vocal parts for every song on their joyful latest album, Flight b741, and recording them in a circle around a single microphone (while wearing matching pilot jumpsuits, of course).
“The best thing about our band is how much we all champion and get behind each other,” multi-instrumentalist Ambrose Kenny-Smith says. “The collaboration is at its highest peak on b741 for sure, which is the beauty of it. You can hear how much that resonates and how strong our friendship is.” Adds vocalist/guitarist Stu Mackenzie, “It was just so, so fun. We’ve been in a band for all this time and we’ve never done anything like that before.”
And rather than, say, rehearse some of their 285-plus songs ahead of the tour, they instead pulled off an audacious plan to livestream every show on YouTube and make the accompanying soundboard-sourced multi-tracks available through Dropbox. They gave it all away for free.
“It never felt correct within the Gizzard ethos to sell it,” Mackenzie offers when it’s suggested the band are leaving potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table every night by not charging for those items. “When I was a teenager and was really starting to learn how to do this, I would have loved this from a band, even if I didn’t know the band. We appreciate how every fan-made record sounds and looks different. They’re more interesting than our actual albums in some ways.”
Built in 1923 as a paragon for viewing competitive racquet-based sports in a palatial, Tudor architecture-dominated Queens, N.Y., neighborhood, Forest Hills Tennis Stadium became the biggest U.S. venue Gizzard ever played in October 2022. Less than two years later, the band returned for a pair of mid-August 2024 shows in front of 21,000 fans, playing two distinct three-hour “marathon” sets for the faithful.
For perspective, exactly a decade before, Gizzard were slogging it out in front of maybe a couple hundred people at the Brooklyn club Baby’s All Right, while subsisting on ramen noodles and dreams. Now, people are flocking to see them play a completely different set every night, as well as (hey, why not?) a handful of acoustic concerts peppered throughout the itinerary. One show may lean into the complex, virtuosic heaviness of albums such as PetroDragonic Apocalypse or Infest the Rats’ Nest, while another will ignore that material completely in favor of Grateful Dead-dappled major-key jams, the ass-kicking, American classic rock strains of Flight b741, the all-techno The Silver Cord, or a metal-y suite about a sentient robot who destroys the universe with vomit.
This tour has also marked the next iteration of a long-in-the-works, bespoke and nearly incomprehensibly complex synth table, allowing all six members to improvise on electronic instruments simultaneously.
“After 10 years of touring America, the nerves seem to diminish,” Kenny-Smith says when asked why Gizzard seem to make it so hard on themselves night to night. “The nerves only come when we’ve decided to dig up some gem from the deep back of the catalog, and then we’re all frantically trying to listen to it in different parts of the green room. Stu’s so nonchalant and not fazed or worried about that stuff. He’s more interested in just making records and then figuring it all out in soundchecks. I guess we’ve trained our brains into being comfortable with being scared all the time.”
On night one at Forest Hills, the first hour is propelled by a constant ZZ Top-ish boogie from drummer Michael “Cavs” Cavanagh and bassist Lucas Harwood, while the closing one-two punch of “Rattlesnake” and “K.G.L.W.” is rendered in an apocalyptic roar. Eight gleeful friends jump arm-in-arm in a circle on the sardine-packed GA floor, while others rage in circle mosh pits a few feet away. As always, the music is put forth with endless possibilities.
“It’s a long way from Baby’s All Right,” Kenny-Smith jokes. “We are very lucky to do this together,” Mackenzie seconds.
Afterwards, the E subway train back to Manhattan is filled with Gizz fans happily drinking open containers of Modelo and chatting about their show counts. Behind the stage at Forest Hills, multi-instrumentalist Joey Walker and Cavanagh opt to pass out on the tour bus rather than in cushier Manhattan lodging. “Check into a hotel at 2 a.m. and then check out at 10? Fuck that,” Walker says with a laugh.
It’s another “only at a Gizzard show” scene from the outset of night two, as fans are already crowd surfing during Mackenzie’s flute solo (?!?) in opener “Hot Water.” Eventually, Kenny-Smith wedges himself inside an inflatable alligator and gets passed into the audience to sing the exotic “Billabong Valley.” The show doesn’t fully pop off until 75 minutes in, when the thrashy “Planet B” induces mass head-banging and a ferocious run of the Petro songs “Converge,” “Witchcraft,” and “Dragon” beats brains and ears into submission.
Backstage, a shirtless Mackenzie offers fruit and candies to his guests and says he’s already looking forward to a return engagement at the venue on Aug. 1-2. “I really got a sense of how special this place is,” Walker says of Forest Hills, the latest in a series of increasingly storied venues Gizzard is routinely visiting these days. “In 2022, maybe I was a little bit overwhelmed. I couldn’t really take it in. This time around, I realized, this is fucking crazy!”
Four nights later in Toronto, Gizzard has a breakthrough with the synth table following several frustrating false starts. The deeper intimacy of the band huddled around this mass of gear is apparent as they debut the Coachella dance tent-worthy “Set” and a new electronic arrangement of the Cook “Cookie” Craig-sung “The Garden Goblin.” A lyric from the rarely played “Extinction” could in many ways serve as a King Gizzard mission statement at this moment: “I can see everything I can be in the music.”
The synths are packed away and the acoustic instruments set up in their place later that week at Detroit’s Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre, where Gizzard play a ridiculous 14 songs in this stripped-down form for the first time (with no rehearsal) while garish party boats cruise through the Detroit River right behind the open-air stage. As the show gets more loose and the alcohol flows more freely onstage, Kenny-Smith tries, and fails, to board one of these watercraft, but instead settles for singing from the top of a giant truck in the parking lot, with the glee of a kid who climbed the tallest tree in his backyard.
At the lawn area on top of the venue, groups of young fans dance and sway with their eyes closed and parents play with kids outfitted in mini air traffic controller-strength headphones. It seems that at a Gizzard show, people of every varietal are welcome to take the trip and have whatever experience they desire — a vibe that helps explain the noticeable uptick of jam band-leaning converts becoming lost in the Gizzverse.
“When we went to see Dead & Company in Chicago last year, I was of the opinion beforehand that I wouldn’t enjoy it. I thought it would be annoying and boring,” Walker confesses. “What I realized was, this giant group of people is having a great time whether they’re paying attention or not. I’m into that.” Adds Mackenzie of jam band Mount Rushmores such as the Dead and Phish, whose guitarist Trey Anastasio is a diehard Gizzard fan, “they really have created an atmosphere for people to come into for a few hours and live inside an alternate reality. That’s something we’re actively trying to do too.”
It’s back to rawk the next night at Cleveland’s Jacobs Pavilion, which abuts a Cuyahoga River that literally caught on fire due to neglect and pollution in 1969. The extant cleanliness of the water doesn’t stop some enterprising fans from kayaking around to the back of the venue, where we are sharing an early evening La Croix with Mackenzie, Walker, and Cavanagh. Everyone is a little worse for the wear after Detroit, but Cavanagh is proudly sporting a Cleveland Cavaliers basketball jersey in a nice nod to the local heads. One of the boat people launches up a gift-wrapped box of macaroons, which Walker jokingly warns Cavanagh off from eating (“there’s gonna be anthrax in there!”) but then samples with a sly smile when the drummer leaves to go to the bathroom.
Talk returns to the synth table, which Mackenzie says existed as a concept for years before the first tentative attempts at utilizing it on tour in 2023. “Six of us, all making improvised electronic music at once, is something we’d never really seen done before,” he says. “Our work on this has been quite obsessive.” Adds Walker, “It’s going to constantly evolve. I love the idea that it just could fall apart at any moment. It makes us better musicians and communicators.”
While each new day in the world of King Gizzard seems to bring another milestone, the band’s September 2024 performances at the 21,000-capacity Gorge Amphitheatre, 150 miles southeast of Seattle, were something truly special.
The audience stretches as far as the eye can see, and the band seems to be enjoying every minute by teasing bits of Men at Work’s Aussie classic “Down Under” and Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” and leading the throngs in a chorus of the pig noises found on b741’s “Hog Calling Contest.” Walker phones his mom from the stage during a break to reinforce the battered GA barricade, and Kenny-Smith again surfs through the crowd, this time in an inflatable boat.
It’s the finale of the first leg of the tour, after which the band returned to Australia to finish a string arrangement-dominated companion album tracked simultaneously with b741 plus another distinct LP about which they will not yet say much. The former, which is likely to be released this spring, was heralded last October by the heavily orchestrated brain-melter “Phantom Island.”
“We chose the more rowdy, rambunctious songs that felt like they needed to all be together,” Kenny-Smith says of how the Flight b741 material was divided. “This way, it would sound like more of a party — more loose, more dad rock, more garage, more upbeat. The others seemed to be a bit more spacious, more strung out, maybe even a bit more singer/songwriter-y. They have more sparseness to them. They’re more laidback. We decided to split them up, and that’s what the 27th album is turning into.”
Gizzard then came quickly back to the States in November to headline the Forum in Los Angeles — their first proper U.S. arena gig ever in the house that Magic, Kareem, and the L.A. Lakers built back in the ‘80s. They also debuted a full-on “experimental rave set,” including the first complete The Silver Cord performance, a few days later in San Francisco.
“It’s so fucking wild. It’s unparalleled really, and it doesn’t happen anywhere outside of America, which is so cool,” Walker says of Gizzard’s ever-growing fanbase. “Even since we were here last year, something has really changed.” Mackenzie agrees: “It’s really hard to connect the music that we make with the level of intensity that people feel about it. It’s amazing and very flattering, but sometimes, it just feels weird.”
Beginning in mid-May, Gizzard will play multi-show residencies in such off-the-beaten-path European venues as a former prison in Vilnius, Lithuania, and a 2,000-year-old Roman amphitheater in Plovdiv, and in late July, the band will be back in the U.S. for their first-ever shows backed by local symphonies. Perhaps best of all: Gizzard will debut their own festival, Field of Vision, from Aug. 15-17 in the beautiful outdoor setting of Buena Vista, Co., where they will play three distinct sets amid a lineup of friends such as Babe Rainbow, King Stingray and DJ Crenshaw.
“It’s such a blessing to be able to make art for a job, and we’re continuously surprised that we are able to do these things and people haven’t stopped us and said, ‘hey, what the fuck are you doing? Go home,’” says Mackenzie. “We’re happy being on the horse, and if we’re allowed to, we’ll stay on it as long as we possibly can.”
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