Everything about King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard is governed by perpetual forward motion, from their music’s relentless momentum to their frequent reinventions to their tendency to release new albums with the regularity of a Substack newsletter. But while there’s a lot of joy to be had in hitching yourself to the Melbourne psych-rockers’ careening locomotive, the group’s recent track record suggests they could benefit from erecting some guard rails, with the honky-glam hoedown of Fishing for Fishies and the doomsday thrash of Infest the Rats’ Nest veering too sharply into the silly and the sullen, respectively.
Of course, the nice thing about a band this prolific is that any missteps are swiftly left in the dust and a course correction is all but inevitable, and in King Gizzard’s case, not even a global pandemic can slow their roll. On top of dropping multiple live releases, two concert films, and a slew of Bandcamp keepsakes in recent months, King Gizzard recorded two albums’ worth of new material while in lockdown, with each member of the now-sextet laying down their parts in isolation at their respective home studios. The results have been delivered in two installments: K.G., released this past November, and its freshly minted counterpart, L.W. They’re discrete records, but interlock to form a continuous double album, wrapped inside a trilogy: K.G. and L.W. are being billed as the remaining parts of a triptych that began with 2017’s Flying Microtonal Banana, where the band fully embraced the equilibrium-upsetting effects of quarter-tone tuning.
But while the works may be connected on a technical level, the K.G./L.W. combo deserves its own unique standing in the band’s labyrinthine catalog. Arriving in the wake of King Gizzard’s 10th anniversary, the albums serve the same function as the sprawling Freedom’s Goblin did for their equally industrious psych-punk peer Ty Segall: They cap a decade of furious activity by reconciling all of the band’s far-ranging influences into a complete, 360-degree portrait of the group. The wild stylistic variation in the King Gizzard canon has made them the kind of band where 10 different fans might name 10 different albums as their favorite; K.G./L.W. strives to be the one that everyone can agree on.
Bookended by two radically versions of their new de facto theme song “K.G.L.W.”—which sounds like a John Carpenter soundtrack given prog-folk and doom-metal makeovers—K.G./L.W. boasts a circular structure that recalls the group’s 2016 infinite-loop opus Nonagon Infinity. But the albums’ sense of cohesion is more than just a product of savvy sequencing. Over the course of these records, King Gizzard synthesize their entire musical palette—British psych-pop and proto-metal, German kosmische rock, West African rhythms, Middle Eastern melodies, sitar-speckled psychedelia, American roots music—into compact songs that still allow equal room for the band’s songcraft and improvisational impulses to flourish.