King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard just released The Silver Cord. It is their second album this year and their 25th album overall.
Back in June, the band released PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation. This second album of 2023 is shorter in title length, but not in a lengthy runtime. The new album has two versions. In the first version, the opening track is 3:24 minutes long. In the second version, that opener track becomes a 20-minute jam session. But not a second is wasted.
In a press release for the new record, Stu Mackenzie, Gizzard’s singer/guitarist explained the reason for different versions. “The first version’s really condensed, trimming all the fat. And on the second version, that first song, ‘Theia’, is 20 minutes long. It’s the ‘everything’ version – those seven songs you’ve already heard on the first version, but with a whole lot of other sh*t we record while making it. It’s for the Gizz-heads. I love Donna Summer’s records with Giorgio Moroder. And I’d never listen to the short versions now. I’m one of those people who wants to hear the whole thing. We’re testing the boundaries of people’s attention spans when it comes to listening to music, perhaps – but I’m heavily interested in destroying such concepts.”
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s Bandcamp page for the album lists in detail the instruments used. Experimental instrumentation is a key part of what makes their music “Gizzardly.” In the same press release as above, Mackenzie discusses the band’s interest in unique drum sounds. “The Simmons kit is really sick, actually. It has this little ‘electronic’ brain all the drum-pads plug into, and while the sounds it can make are pretty rudimentary, we soon decided we wanted to commit to it as the drum sound for this next record. We set Cavs’ Simmons kit up in the centre of the room, and then dragged every synth we had in the practice space or lying about our houses into the studio, and plugged everything in. It was chaotic. It was probably the coolest our studio has ever looked, to be honest.”
The Silver Cord is available to listen to on your favorite streaming service.
