King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Iron Lung
2022 · Directed by SPOD
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Best comments
1.“King Gizzard is my favorite psychedelic heavy metal jazz fusion blues band.”
More comments
- 2.“Holy fuck. I've never tripped balls sober before.”
- 3.“Bro, just eat the whole bag... you'll be fine.”
The story
King Gizzard put out three albums in October 2022. Three. In one month. Iron Lung comes from the first, Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava, and the way they made it is half the fun. The band walked into the studio each day with only a tempo, a key and a title, jammed for hours, and Stu Mackenzie stitched the best bits into songs at night. Each track sits on one of the seven modes of the major scale – the first letters of the album title spell them out, Ionian to Locrian.
The song runs nine minutes. It starts out loose and jazzy, winds up into tense guitar interplay with flute and organ, and around the five-and-a-half-minute mark Ambrose Kenny-Smith takes the mic over a heavy riff. Jazz fusion, prog and psych all in one lung.
The video comes from SPOD, the Australian musician Brent Griffin, who spent a couple of months on it. He built a fully animated cyber spiral with AI tools he'd only just started playing with, then roughed it up with effects from the early days of digital video. He called it a nine-minute descent to hell and back, shaped by the way the song keeps rising and falling. Your screensaver from 1998 took mushrooms and went to therapy.
