After teasing their next project last week, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have officially announced “Phantom Island“, their 27th studio album. The second release on the band’s own (p)doom records imprint will arrive on June 13th with some of their most adventurous offerings yet, bolstering their shape-shifting psych-garage-prog-rock with a full orchestra of strings, horns and woodwinds. To preview this new horizon, the genre-obliterating Australian rockers have shared the album’s second single, “Deadstick,” plus a music video directed by longtime collaborator Guy Tyzack.
“Phantom Island’s” radical step forward was forecasted in June 2023, when King Gizzard took the stage at Los Angeles’ Hollywood Bowl for their unforgettable three-hour marathon set. Backstage, the sextet crossed paths with members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who quickly put forward the idea of a collaboration. A year later, as they blazed through the sessions that produced the ten tracks of “Flight b741”, they worked out ten further promising tracks that didn’t fit. In a release, frontman Stu Mackenzie said they “were harder to finish. Musically, they needed a little more time and space and thought.”
“The songs felt like they needed this other energy and colour, that we needed to splash some different paint on the canvas,” Mackenzie continued. To complete these more involved compositions, the band connected with the Los Angeles Philharmonic again, as well as keyboardist, conductor and arranger Chad Kelly, who sculpted historically informed and zealously disruptive orchestrations to meld the two groups’ disparate sounds. “We come from such different worlds – he plays Mozart and Bach and uses the same harpsichords they did, and tunes them the exact same way,” Mackenzie said. “But he’s obsessed with microtonal music, too, and all this nerdy stuff like me.”
The triumphant result of this pairing is apparent on “Deadstick,” a bopping, bluesy, horn-powered thrill ride that not-so-subtly continues the Gizzverse thread from the high-flying adventure songs of “Flight b741” into a more grounded, “introverted” record. Between the smouldering triplane fuselage on the album, the second single’s lyrical fixation on “panic in the cockpit” and Tyzack’s wreckage-strewn album cover, the band makes it clear that they’ve come crashing down to earth for a more emotionally focused album. “When I was younger, I was just interested in freaking people out,” Mackenzie reflected, “but as I get older, I’m much more interested in connecting with people.”
King Gizzard will take this sonic upheaval to the stage with the “Phantom Island” Tour, which will feature a different 28-piece orchestra at each of its nine performances from July 28th to Aug. 11th.
“Phantom Island” is available to pre-order now.
The Fat Angel Sings 