Released months apart from one another, K.G. and L.W. are interrelated yet self-contained albums from King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard.
“They’re sort of like one big project,” says singer and guitarist Stu Mackenzie. “I still wanted to give each of them an arc so they make sense alone, as opposed to a 40-whatever-minutes experience thing. That was the trick as well, to have them each have an arc. I didn’t want it to be like a Harry Potter movie split in two. I didn’t want it to sound like that. It’s not meant to be a cliffhanger. They’re both meant to both have an arc.”
On K.G. and L.W., King Gizzard returned to making microtonal music as they did on Flying Microtonal Banana.
On making microtonal music, Mackenzie says: “We became interested in this idea of the notes between the notes, and try and write some music that is microtonal, that has extra notes that aren’t usually accessible in Western music.”
To play these extra notes, King Gizzard used customized instruments, which they had made for Flying Microtonal Banana.
“We modified a bunch of guitars, bass, some harmonicas, and a keyboard just so we could play together in this new tuning,” says Mackenzie. “It’s funny, when you pick up a microtonal instrument, even if it’s guitar, which is an instrument I’ve played for so many years, you just feel really scared on it. It’s like, ‘What the fuck is this thing? I can’t play it! I can’t do this.’”
Mackenzie regards this disorienting feeling as a source of inspiration.
“It’s actually super inspiring to go back to basics on an instrument you’re pretty familiar with,” he says. “And it does kind of inspire a lot of creative choices and writing ideas and stuff.”
“Maybe that’s the reason why we made two albums,” Mackenzie adds. “Because we talked about doing a microtonal thing for so long and by the time we actually did, there just were heaps of songs. Heaps of songs came out. So, we made two instead of one.”
Both records were written and recorded simultaneously.
“The sessions for KG and LW were totally intertwined,” says Mackenzie. “Some of the songs from LW were written well before songs from KG, and vice-versa. We still finished KG before LW, and most of the earlier songs we wrote ended up on KG, it’s just kind of the way it panned out.”
King Gizzard wrote many of the songs on K.G. and L.W. a while ago.
“There’s songs on K.G. and L.W. that were written in 2018,” Mackenzie says. “There’s quite a few that were written in 2018.”
“I think the thing with King Gizz that people aren’t aware of the way we usually work is every record we make usually still takes two years, it’s just there’s always an overlap,” he says.” I find it very hard to finish a song and be quite happy with it quickly. Usually, there’s a lot of concurrent projects.”
Writing and recording K.G. and L.W. occurred in isolation, which was a unique experience for the band.
“We wrote both of those records and recorded almost all of it in a pretty strict Melbourne, ‘iso’ kind of period where we couldn’t see each other,” says Mackenzie. “It was definitely strange. We just had to learn to work in a new way, which we had never done. Over the years, we’ve done a lot of recording where it’s not everyone in the room, maybe it’s one or two people, three people or something like that, and other people overdub. We’ve done that a lot, but we’ve never made a record where literally everyone is in a different room for the entire process, and just kind of sending stuff online to each other constantly and sort of chipping away at songs that way.”
While this process was different for King Gizzard, the band managed to make it work.
“That was a new way of working, and it took a while to get the knack of, but I think we learned some things along the way and I think it colored K.G. and L.W., and it helped make those records sound the way they do,” Mackenzie says. “So, for instance, Cavs, our drummer, had never really recorded a lot of stuff. I guess he wasn’t super interested until he kind of had to with lockdown and everything. We were just like, ‘Dude, we need drum recordings.’ And he’s like, ‘I don’t know how.’ We kind of helped online and stuff, or over the phone, or whatever, set up a few mics around his drum kit, kind of get him set up to record, and he kind of overdubbed all the drums on both records. There’s a lot of cool things that happened like that, that feel nice and sort of wholesome amongst the darkness I suppose.”
K.G. and L.W. offer truly diverse listening experiences as albums on a whole and within the tracks. Doom-sludge bangers like “The Hungry Wolf of Fate” on K.G. or “KGLW” on L.W. contain elements that are chill. Other songs like “Honey” on K.G. or “O.N.E.” on L.W. are tranquil yet heavy.
“The original idea when we were first starting out was to widen the palate, make it sonically more-free than Flying Microtonal Banana,” says Mackenzie. “It’s allowed to go heavier. It’s allowed to go softer. It’s a bit more of a rainbow palate.”
“I often just talk in colors when I’m talking about music because I just think it is sort of an accurate way of describing things,” he adds. “We were just trying to do something that is a bit more rainbow, like, a bit more sonically varied, not even more interesting texturally, just more varied texturally. Fuzzy sounds and hairy sounds and mellow sounds and smooth sounds. All of the kinds of sounds this time. Usually, that’s not what I’m into, but we sort of allowed ourselves to do that with these two records.”
Reflecting on the making of K.G. and L.W., Mackenzie considers: “I think being written during a pandemic, and I don’t want to speak too much about that shit, because everyone is so sick of hearing about it, but I think that it does add anxiety to the writing, and it is an anxious record, and it is a sort of paranoid record. Like, if you read the lyrics, there’s a lot disappointment in humanity.”
Unlike on some previous albums, there is not necessarily an overarching narrative in K.G. or L.W.
“Some of the albums do have fairly direct narrative-based storytelling throughout,” Mackenzie says. “Rats’ Next you can read from start to finish, and you don’t have to fill in too many gaps in your mind. It sort of does read like a story, and that’s what we tried to do that one. With Murder of the Universe, it’s three chapters, three stories. Eyes Like the Sky is a story you could read aloud like that. Some of the other ones have loose narrative arcs woven through them. These two don’t in any kind of linear kind of way. There isn’t a sort of linear story that happens from beginning to end on these two records. I think we threw that out the window when we went for this varied palate idea.”
Nevertheless, the narrative elements within songs on KG and LW are powerful.
“‘If Not Now, Then When?’ the ultimate message is, ‘This is disappointing.’ You know what I mean?” Mackenzie says. “‘Automation’ is about being paranoid about AI and the future. ‘Supreme Ascendancy’ is about being insanely shocked and appalled about the Catholic Church. That is the rough lyrical theme that just happened. ‘Minimum Brain Size’ touches on toxic masculinity. It’s like, kind of, ‘We’re fucked, we’re the fucked-ist people, humans, creatures out there sort of thing.’ Not all our records say that thing, but I think that’s the common thread that made its way through.”
Like Infest the Rats’ Nest, K.G. and L.W. also address climate change.
“There’s definitely a handful of environmentalist type things as well, which is another thing we’re failing dismally at as a group, as a collective,” Mackenzie says. “There’s a handful of those things in there for sure, which I guess all ties into just being fairly disappointed in humanity at the moment.”
In 2021, King Gizzard performed several shows.
“The world is weird, still,” Mackenzie says. “It is what it is. I think we’re on some form of slow, upward trajectory. Looking forward to and fantasizing about being on tour again and playing a lot of shows. We’ve done a handful in Australia of real shows. I’ve done a couple of interviews lately and I can’t stop saying it was surreal, but it’s the only word I could use to describe it, because it kind of was surreal in the true sense of the word. It was like, ‘Is this real? Is this real life?’ It was quite amazing.”
While K.G. and L.W. contain elements of psych-rock, the next King Gizzard record is supposed to be psychedelic.
“We’ve got a couple projects on the go,” says Mackenzie. “The next record that is going to come out is, I think, it’s different again. I’m excited about it. I’m trying to think of what I should say. It’s definitely like a psychedelic record I suppose, more than the last handful we’ve done. It’s kind of bright and psychedelic and melodic, which is not something I would have described many of our records as, so that’s fun.”
Watch the video for “Intrasport” here:
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Photo courtesy of King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and Jason Galea.
