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Melbourne's King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard are a once-in-a-generation group playing a heady combination of psychedelia, prog rock, freakbeat, jazz, heavy metal and Krautrock at a breathless punk pace. A concept album to end all concepts, their new record Murder Of The Universe is a face-melting musical assault concerned with the downfall of man and the death of the planet.
Lit by thunderclaps and lightning, MOTU inhabits a sonic landscape of death, decay, ossification, fossilization, rebirth. It is a place occupied by wandering shape-shifting beasts, bleeding skies, pools of blood, great fires and mushroom clouds; a planet rent asunder by conflict. Like in the band's frenzied live show, snippets of their breakthrough records I'm In Your Mind Fuzz and Nonagon Infinity resurface throughout the new album to haunt their latest sound.
"We're living in dystopian times that are pretty scary and it's hard not to reflect that in our music," says frontman Stu Mackenzie. "It's almost unavoidable. Some scientists predict that the downfall of humanity is just as likely to come at the hands of Artificial Intelligence, as it is war or viruses or climate change. But these are fascinating times too. Human beings are visual creatures – vision is our primary instinct, and this is very much a visual, descriptive, bleak record. While the tone is definitely apocalyptic, it is not necessarily purely a mirror of the current state of humanity. It's about new non-linear narratives."