King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard announce their new double LP album, PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation, out 16th June on KGLW, and present its lead single/video, “Gila Monster.”
PetroDragonic Apocalypse, King Gizzard’s 24th album, is where the moon becomes full, and their gnarly lycanthrope-selves take control again. It is the group’s second album-length excursion into thrash — following 2019’s Infest The Rats’ Nest — though, as you might expect from such a relentlessly creative unit, PetroDragonic Apocalypse is no mere retread of Rats’ Nest’s gory glories, but rather a full evolutionary step all its own.
The lead single, “Gila Monster”, is a first glimpse at PetroDragonic Apocalypse’s high-octane thrash greatness. The accompanying video was directed by SPOD, who explains: “I wanted to shoot Lord of the Rings 4 but also make a video game, so I mixed both mediums and came up with this majestic journey for truth and power in a cursed world. I mixed 3D animation, modelling & live footage in a 3D video game program to create this marvellous voyage of man & beast. Friend or foe?”
Check out the video for ‘Gila Monster’ – BELOW:
In 2019, the questing young dudes of King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard cracked open the door that led to full-on thrash-metal nirvana with their concept album Infest The Rats’ Nest. The LP allowed the group to tap into their inner metalhead to commune with the pre-teen heshers they’d once been. An off-the-cuff experiment, Rats’ Nest went on to become one of the group’s favourites among their discography, and the album’s neck-snapping, devil’s-horn-throwing anthems remain highlights in Gizzard setlists to this day, stirring moshpits into ecstasy every night. It had been intended as a one-off, but ever since that maiden voyage into the feral wastelands of thrash, the Gizzards have heard the siren call of metal in the wind.
“When we made Rats’ Nest, it felt experimental,” says Stu Mackenzie, Gizzard King. “Like, ‘Here’s this music that some of us grew up on but we’d never had the guts or confidence to really play before, so let’s give it a go and see what happens’. And when we made that album we were like, ‘Fuck, why did it take us so long to do this?’ It’s just so much fun to play that music, and those songs work so well when we play them live. So we always had it in our minds to make another metal record.”
However, the group were wary of repeating themselves. So when Gizzard’s core trio of metal heads – Mackenzie, Joey Walker and drummer Michael “Cavs” Cavanagh – assembled to begin writing these songs, they approached this project in a radically different way. “We worked on it the same way we started our Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava album last year,” says Mackenzie. “We wrote a song a day, and we came into the practice space with no riffs, no tunes, no ideas, and started from scratch. And we jammed, and recorded everything, and pieced the songs together from that. I’d sketched out the story the songs would tell, and I’d portioned it out into seven song titles, with a short paragraph of what would happen in the song. I guess we kind of made the record backwards.”
PetroDragonic Apocalypse owes a lot to fantasy lore, as the title suggests. “We wanted to start the story in the real world, and then send it to hell,” grins Mackenzie. “It’s about humankind and it’s about planet Earth but it’s also about witches and dragons and shit” he laughs. “Lyrically, PetroDragonic Apocalypse is fun on the surface, but profound if you dig a little deeper. Shakespeare and the Bible were definite inspirations for the voice of some of the lyrics, which play out the album’s blackly comedic and bleakly destructive tale with the highest of drama. It’s like a secondary voice on the album – it appears in each song, and it’s like words that were spoken 500 years ago, or 2,000 years ago.”
The music of PetroDragonic Apocalypse, meanwhile, features Gizzard’s finest thrash-flavoured riffage yet, channelling the razor-sharp, prog-influenced vibe of the genre’s late-80s apex – super-complex but also brutal-as-f***.
It won’t surprise anyone who’s been paying attention that King Gizzard have also almost finished work on their next album, another seven-track concept record that was begun around the same time as PetroDragonic Apocalypse, and followed its improvised, one-song-a-day method. “I’m not a tortured artist, I’m more of a mad professor,” admits Mackenzie. “And after a bunch of records crafted out of jams, we’re very much ready to make records in the old-fashioned way of writing the songs before we enter the studio, once these ones are done.”
PETRODRAGONIC APOCALYPSE; OR, DAWN OF ETERNAL NIGHT: AN ANNIHILATION OF PLANET EARTH AND THE BEGINNING OF MERCILESS DAMNATION TRACKLIST
1. Motor Spirit – 8.33
2. Supercell – 5.06
3. Converge – 6.16
4. Witchcraft – 5.04
5. Gila Monster – 4.36
6. Dragon – 9.45
7. Flamethrower – 9.21
8. Dawn of Eternal Night feat. Leah Senior (Audiobook, Vinyl Only) – 14.22
KING GIZZARD & THE LIZARD WIZARD TOUR DATES
Sun. May 28 – Boston, MA @ Boston Calling
Thu. June 1 – Grundy County, TN @ The Caverns Underground – SOLD OUT
Fri. June 2 – Grundy County, TN @ The Caverns Underground – SOLD OUT
Sat. June 3 – Grundy County, TN @ The Caverns Amphitheater – SOLD OUT
Sun. June 4 – Grundy County, TB @ The Caverns Amphitheater
Wed. June 7 – Morrison, CO @ Red Rocks Amphitheatre – SOLD OUT
Thu. June 8 – Morrison, CO @ Red Rocks Amphitheatre – EARLY SHOW
Thu. June 8 – Morrison, CO @ Red Rocks Amphitheatre – LATE SHOW – SOLD OUT
Sun. June 11 – Chicago, IL @ The Salt Shed – SOLD OUT
Mon. June 12 – Chicago, IL @ The Salt Shed – SOLD OUT
Tue. June 13 – Chicago, IL @ The Salt Shed – SOLD OUT
Fri. June 16 – Carnation, WA @ Carnation Farms – SOLD OUT
Sat. June 17 – Carnation, WA @ Carnation Farms – SOLD OUT
Sun. June 18 – Carnation, WA @ Carnation Farms – SOLD OUT
Wed. June 21 – Los Angeles, CA @ The Hollywood Bowl – 3 HOUR MARATHON SET
Sat. July 22 – Byron Bay, AU @ Splendor In The Grass Festival
Thu. Aug. 10 – Gothenburg, SE @ Way Out West Festival
Sat. Aug. 12 – Piestany, SK @ Grape Festival
Mon. Aug. 14 – Verbier, CH @ Palp Festival
Tue. Aug. 15 – Cologne, DE @ E-Werk
Wed. Aug. 16 – Luxembourg, LU @ Den Atelier
Thu. Aug. 17 – Saint-Malo, FR @ La Route Du Rock
Sat. Aug. 19 – Biddinghuizen, NL @ Lowlands Festival
Sun. Aug. 20 – Kiewit-Hasselt, BE @ Pukkelpop
Mon. Aug. 21 – Munich, DE @ Tonhalle
Tue. Aug. 22 – Padua, IT @ Parco Della Musica
Thu. Aug. 24 – Barcelona, ES @ Plaza Mayor De El Poble Espanyol
Sat. Aug. 26 – Torremolinos, ES @ Canela Party
Sun. Aug. 27 – Madrid, ES @ La Riviera
Tue. Aug. 29 – Toulouse, FR @ Le Bikini
Wed. Aug. 30 – La Rochelle, FR @ La Sirene
Thu. Aug. 31 – Lille, FR @ L’Aeronef
Sun. Sep. 3 – Sixpenny Handley, GB @ End Of The Road Festival
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