King Gizzard

Flying Microtonal Banana is the ninth studio album by Australian psychedelic rock band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. It was released on 24 February 2017 on Flightless Records in Australia, ATO Records in the United States, and Heavenly Recordings in the United Kingdom. It is the first of five albums released in 2017, and subtitled "Explorations into Microtonal Tuning, Volume 1". The album is recorded in quarter tone tuning, where an octave is divided into 24 (logarithmically) equal-distanced quarter tones. The album earned the band a nomination for Best Group at the ARIA Music Awards of 2017.

For their 26th album, King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard swap the widescreen concepts of their recent albums for the intimacy of six good friends collaborating on the most bonhomie-laden set they’ve yet committed to wax. For Flight b741, bandleader Stu Mackenzie says King Gizzard “wanted to make something that was primal, instinctual, more ‘from the gut’ – just people in a room, doing what feels right. We wanted to make something fun.”

King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard return with new album K.G., their sixteenth since forming in 2010. In the wake of a global pandemic, it’s a collection of songs composed and recorded remotely after the six members of the band retreated to their own homes scattered around Melbourne, Australia. K.G. is a pure distillation of the King Gizzard sound, one that cherry picks the best aspects of previous albums and contorts them into new shapes via defiantly non-western rock scales.

This double-LP live album features 13 live performances hand-picked from the band’s 2019 European tour and includes a musical score written by Stu Mackenzie that adds a ‘magical touch of alien melancholy’ throughout the record. Chunky Shrapnel is an adrenaline fueled psychedelic trip that captures the energy of a live concert while also creating something tailored and unique to King Gizzard.

Omnium Gatherum’s sprawling 16 tracks of gonzoid prog jams, dizzying pop nuggets, rubber-legged hip-hop odysseys and passages of pure thrash-metal abandon offer plenty for Gizzard fans and neophytes alike to chew on. Typically, Gizzard albums pursue a single theme or style – but part of the thrill of O.G. for the group was the opportunity to present new ideas without committing the entire album to just one. It’s both the perfect entry point for newcomers, and a solid treat for the faithful.