King Gizzard's shape-shifting subversion

To call King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard a rock band is like describing the Marvel Cinematic Universe as just a film franchise.

- BHANUJ KAPPAL

To call King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard a rock band is like describing the Marvel Cinematic Universe as just a film franchise. While that's technically true, they're also so much more—this generation's answer to Phish and the Grateful Dead; a band so prolific that Pitchfork once called them "a vinyl pressing plant in human form"; contemporary music's most mind-bending musical shape-shifters; and the architects of a thriving DIY economy based on free culture ideals. Wild-eyed and perpetually restless, the Australian experimental rock sextet delight in chaos and subversion. And, perhaps, in watching hapless music critics try to encapsulate their massive oeuvre without having a full-on breakdown.

Maybe I should just start from the beginning. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard—we'll call them Gizz for short—started out in 2010 as a psychedelic garage-rock band, firmly in the tradition of Ty Segall and Down Under contemporaries Thee Oh Sees. But things quickly got weirder. And then weirder still. Over the course of the next decade-and-a-half, the band would travel far and wide from their garage-rock roots, experimenting with krautrock, dream-pop, heavy metal, modular-synth prog, acid-friend spoken word, and too many other genres to name.

Let me run you through just a four-album run to give you a sense of the whiplash their discography can induce. The Beatles-meets-Brubeck jazz-fusion of Quarters! leads somehow into the acoustic, bossa-nova-inflected freak-folk of Paper Mâché Dream Balloon. Follow-up Nonagon Infinity—their breakthrough record—returns to scuzzy, lo-fi garage-rock before