King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard have gone an uncharacteristically long time without releasing new music (10 months, to be exact), but that streak is about to end. The prolific Australian group revealed on social media today (April 24) that its next album, made entirely on its bespoke modular synthesizer setup dubbed Nathan, is “done.”
With King Gizzard’s only shows of 2026 looming in August at its Field of Vision festival in Colorado and at New York’s Forest Hills Stadium, could the new album be ready by then? For now, there are no other concrete details about the follow-up to 2025’s Phantom Island, which found Gizzard dabbling in heavy orchestration for the first time.
In tandem with work on 2024’s all-electronic The Silver Cord, the band began utilizing an early version the Nathan system onstage and has since made numerous attempts to record on it, as drummer Michael “Cavs” Cavanagh detailed in a recent interview with SPIN.
“We did a big session last year in between tours. We spent a week in the studio and we just jammed for hours endlessly. Some stuff was good. Most of it wasn’t. We’ve been chipping away at approaching the whole electronic thing in a few different ways,” he said. “We’re constantly trying to find a place, and to find ourselves, in this electronic world of ours, but it’s getting there. I was playing the drums along to, like, the table kind of thing, but then I had some electronic kit stuff I was doing as well. It’s just trying to find a place sonically. Obviously, [group member] Joey [Walker]’s techno history and background plays a part in it. It’s a big step beyond The Silver Cord.”
“Six of us, all making improvised electronic music at once, is something we’d never really seen done before,” frontman Stu Mackenzie told SPIN in the summer of 2024 “Our work on this has been quite obsessive.” Added 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.”
Beyond the synth-driven music, Gizzard was also recently in the studio in Australia with bluegrass wiz Billy Strings but no plans have yet emerged for that music’s release.