Only a matter of weeks since King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard released their twelfth studio album (and fourth for the year), Polygondwanaland, the band have thrown fans yet another curve ball, dropping two new singles without any sort of fanfare.
Considering that King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have released four full-length albums in this year alone (something that took Tool 13 years to do), you’d think now would be the time for the sprawling collective to take a break and do something that isn’t music-related for a change.
Just last week the group’s frontman, Stu Mackenzie, gave fans an update on what was still to come for 2017, ensuring everyone that the group are still on track to release another album this year, bringing their total to five for the last twelve months. “Some of my favorite songs of the year are on the fifth record,” said Mackenzie. “It’s more song-oriented than album-oriented. But things are still possible to change.”
However, in typical King Gizzard fashion, the group decided to surprise their fans once again by releasing not one, but two new singles online today, with hardly any sort of announcement.
You might remember the rambling post that accompanied the band’s last single, ‘Crumbling Castle’, but that sort of thing is nowhere to be found on ‘All Is Known’ and ‘Beginners Luck’, the two tracks which were shared onto Facebook by the band earlier today.
Fans were quick to listen to the new tunes, with some noting that ‘All Is Known’ has been hanging around in the band’s live sets for quite some time now, which fits into Stu Mackenzie’s claims that the new record is full of “songs that didn’t work in any of the the rest of the four records”. The track shares some musical similarities with the work on Flying Microtonal Banana, so there’s every chance it was recorded during those sessions.
So the only question now is when will we see the new record? ‘Crumbling Castle’ preceded Polygondwanaland by just under a month, but with the band claiming that record number 13 is still on track for a 2017 release, you can probably expect it sometime within the next fortnight or so.