If we didn’t know any better, we’d swear King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard were just trolling us at this point. On Friday, the Melbourne psychedelic collective dropped the first single from their new album, the first of five that they plan to release in 2017.
Yeah, you read that right.
Fans of King Gizz likely recall that the band originally planned to release four albums in the new year. Apparently, they decided this figure wasn’t impressive enough. Not even after considering that they only recently unveiled their eighth album in four years.
“We’re actually working on four separate projects at the moment, which hopefully we can release next year sometime,” King Gizz frontman Stu McKenzie previously told triple j‘s Gemma Pike. “Four Gizzard albums, I guess next year, that’s the idea,” drummer Eric Moore added.
Now speaking to The Guardian, Mackenzie explains how the band have upped the ante by increasing that number to five, starting with Flying Microtonal Banana. It’s a quintessentially King Gizz-esque title and it was created in quintessentially King Gizz-esque fashion.
“I figured I’m no good at chilling,” Mackenzie told The Guardian. “Over the years I’ve tried to keep myself super busy so I don’t go insane. If I’m going to be a musician and a creative person, I may as well be a productive creative person.”
Creativity was the name of the game for their new effort. The band even built their own instruments to make the new album, crafting modded guitars with extra frets that give the band access to microtones – the spaces in between the classic notes that most ears are familiar with.
“We were messing around with microtonal tuning,” Mackenzie told The Guardian. “Without getting too technical, it’s like dividing the musical notes so there’s one extra space: 24 notes an octave instead of 12. It opens up a bunch of possibilities.”
“Everything you do sounds wrong,” Mackenzie said of the three guitars and the bass they had purpose-built for their new songs. “You’re culturally attuned to a certain set of frequencies. Our challenge was to make music that didn’t sound too wrong within those parameters.”
As for the rest of the five-album plan, Mackenzie says the records are already cooking in that hyperactive brain of his, though he wouldn’t reveal any further details. Only that one of the records will follow the same “trajectory” as this year’s Nonagon Infinity and another will be a collaboration with some “jazz dudes”.
No doubt Mackenzie already has some big plans for 2018.
