King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard
PetroDragonic Apocalypse, or Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation
KGLW
Back in 2019, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard released their first metal record, Infest The Rats’ Nest. Personally, I loved everything about it. It was great to hear them add to their vast catalog of music by putting some metal into it.
“When we made … Rats’ Nest, it felt experimental,” says Stu Mackenzie, Gizzard King. “Like, ‘Here’s this music that some of us grew up on but we’d never had the guts or confidence to really play before, so let’s give it a go and see what happens’. And when we made that album we were like, ‘Fuck, why did it take us so long to do this?’ It’s just so much fun to play that music, and those songs work so well when we play them live. So we always had it in our minds to make another metal record.”
Never ones to repeat themselves, they set out to make another metal record, but this time, the recording process was a bit different. “We worked on it the same way we started our Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava album last year,” says Mackenzie. “We wrote a song a day, and we came into the practice space with no riffs, no tunes, no ideas, and started from scratch. And we jammed, and recorded everything, and pieced the songs together from that. I’d sketched out the story the songs would tell, and I’d portioned it out into seven song titles, with a short paragraph of what would happen in the song. I guess we kind of made the record backwards.”
Both Infest The Rats’ Nest and PetroDragonic Apocalypse have end-of-world themes, but Petro tells it from more of a biblical/fantasy perspective. And if you’ve seen the video for “Gila Monster” you know we now have wizards and lizards!
The album starts off fast and heavy with “Motor Spirit.” I give respect to any singer who can remember the line “Oh holy rabble, we art ensnared to quiver liketh rippled air.” The song “Converge” rips your face off with classic ’80s riffing as the narrator observes the destruction of earth from outer space. “From the ISS, ungodly high, chaos madness evolves below, nigh. A tempest of great force and might, a storm of such unparalleled fright.” “Dragon” is another ripper and my personal favorite, “Winged demon in the stratosphere is swooping beneath to kill with fear.” I think you get the picture of what they laid down.
You would think after putting out multiple albums in a year, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard would lose some steam, but I feel they keep getting stronger. Rarely is there a dud. For comparison, the Chili Peppers put out two double albums in 6 months (Unlimited Love and Return of the Dream Canteen, 2022), all of which sucked.
Now, I’m sure there are some KGLW fans from the 12 Bar Bruise (2012) era, sitting around smoking their Churchwarden pipes, lamenting how it all went downhill after I’m in Your Mind Fuzz (2014). But I disagree, they just keep getting better.
