Track 3 from Oddments (2014)

Track 4 from I'm In Your Mind Fuzz (2014)

Track 5 from Paper Mache Dream Balloon (2015)

Track 9 from Gumboot Soup (2017)

King Gizzard & The Lizard formed in Melbourne in 2010 (our honeymoon was in Australia, and Melbourne was probably my favorite city we visited, the one that I could most easily imagine living in, so I like hearing music from Melbourne). The band started out with seven members, although it's been down to six since the 2021 departure of drummer/keyboardist Eric Moore, who has focused on running the band's label, Flightless Records. 

The band has released 25 albums since 2021, and the sheer volume of their output has become kind of their defining feature, particularly after they released five albums in 2017 and then three albums just in October 2022. The quality has been really impressively high across their discography, though, as they started from a psychedelic/garage rock foundation and then made albums that stretched towards metal and dance music and jazz and, ugh, there's some rapping on some later albums too. I couldn't even cover every album in 80 minutes, but I mostly skipped collaborative albums or the records where every song is over 10 minutes long. 

I went for kind of a mix of live favorites and songs with a lot of streams along with personal favorites and songs that seemed to make the most sense in the playlist. I started listening to the band in 2017 and hadn't caught up on some of the early albums, so I'd never heard the first two songs on the playlist and really love those songs now. "Work This Time" is by far the band's top track on Spotify, which surprised me a little, it's kind of lo-fi even compared to a lot of their other songs. I've seen a theory that its appearance on the Spotify playlist 'Modern Psychedelia' is the main reason. A lot of the band's later albums have tracks running together with no gaps, which makes it really difficult to drop those songs into playlists. And there are one or two incredibly abrupt transitions here, which I try to avoid. I apologize if they annoy you as much as they annoy me. 

I have a whole thing with the 5/4 time signature: a few years ago I made an entire album in 5/4, and every year since, I've had a May 4th post with a new song and a DJ mix of music in the 5/4 time signature. Certain artists who mess with different time signatures have made multiple appearances in the series (Soundgarden, Rush, Peter Gabriel, Radiohead), but King Gizzard is the only band that I've included in all four mixes so far. "Black Hot Soup" was in my 2022 mix, and "Float Along - Fill Your Lungs" and "Polygondwanaland" and "Superposition" and "Plastic Boogie" and "Supreme Acendancy" will probably appear in some of my future DJ sets. And that's not even all of King Gizzard's songs that are partly or fully in 5/4 by a long shot (there's also "Crumbling Castle," "The River," "Theia," "The Land Before Timeland," "Flamethrower," "Wah Wah," "Atraxia," and I'm sure others I haven't noticed yet). They might be the only rock band that I can definitively say has written more songs in 5/4 than I have, and I find their use of it to be varied and inspiring.