You may have assumed that King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard are just not for you. This band of shaggy-haired Australian larrikins release records at such a furious clip – 25 in just over 10 years, and that’s before you even address the hatful of live albums they’ve dropped on Bandcamp in that time – that most casual listeners would be forgiven for not venturing in at all. Those albums are often concept-driven in a way that can be intimidating to those without any technical musical knowledge (three are based around microtonal tuning) or any interest in taking a massive bong rip before hitting play (2017’s Murder of the Universe is a three-part spoken-word album about cyborgs, monsters and human consciousness). And, of course, their band name is King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.
But don’t underestimate the Gizz, or the Wizz, or the Lizz, or however you want to shorten it. They’re fine pop songwriters – check 2015’s Paper Mâché Dream Balloon if gentle, bossa nova-inflected folk is your thing – and fastidious producers, expanding their garage sound to encompass funk, jazz and dance music. Their tales of monsters and witchcraft have always been more complex than they might seem on first listen – any sci-fi writer will tell you that coherent worldbuilding is far harder than it seems – and in recent years they’ve also addressed societal discord, corporate greed and the climate crisis with great empathy.
The band’s latest record, Flight b741, is being framed as back-to-basics: “King Gizzard’s most accessible and fun album,” heralds a PR email, perhaps in an attempt to win back critics exhausted by the group’s prolific output. But that belies the fact that Stu Mackenzie and co have become more sophisticated, complicated songwriters over the past 10 years, without sacrificing their sense of irreverence. Flight b741 is freewheeling and filled with the kind of crunchy, amiable riffs purveyed by the Steve Miller Band, the Doobie Brothers, Bachman-Turner Overdrive and the like, while retaining a paranoid, discontented streak that reveals the album as a product of 2024. This is, in a sense, a concept album about retreating to comfort-food music in times of strife, and finding that even the most familiar sounds can’t distract you forever.
King Gizzard aren’t slavish in their re-creation of 70s rock, which is a good thing. Raw Feel, an early highlight, captures the cram-in-the-van-and-sing-along vibe of the era’s hooks, but it’s also extremely fast and, for all its technical wizardry, has a garage rock feel that harks further back to the 1960s (and indeed to the group’s own early work). Sad Pilot tries out the swampy soulfulness of Little Feat (with a detour through rockabilly) but the band’s hooks have always been finicky and ornate; even when trying to recreate down-home good-time music, they feel like class clowns who achieve nothing but straight-As. This is not a knock, but at no point will you forget that this is, specifically, King Gizzard doing 70s-style country rock.
The rollicking feel of Flight b741 masks some of the band’s most plainly dark lyrics to date, exploring dissociation, suicidal ideation and global collapse in a casual, conversational style – it’s one of the most cheerful doomer records in recent memory. The title of eight-minute closer Daily Blues is a pun, referring to its frenzied blues workout as well as its chorus of “gettin’ fucked up daily”. On Le Risque, the band – vocals are shared across the album, and on many songs they all take a shot at singing – crave “something to thin the blood,” imagining daredevil stunts as a way to get shaken out of a stupor. “I’m feeling like a horse on ket,” on Field of Vision, is a silly image, but in this context it refers to moving through the world in a depressive haze.
Flight b741 is a striking combination of form and emotion from a band where the former has often been scrutinised by critics at the expense of the latter. It’s not the band’s most successful foray into quote-unquote serious music – for my money, that would be 2022’s Omnium Gatherum, a sweeping genre-mash that boasts both the band’s most lush production and most trenchant lyricism – but it does show they can mature without trading in what’s made them such a hugely loved band. Flight b741 charts a bumpy path, but the destination makes it worth it.
