'Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava' might just be one of the band's most unpredictable statements yet.
King Giz have taken a unique approach to album making with their latest album, Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava – which is a series of jams stitched together into songs. With each song in the album following one of the seven modes of the major scale, Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian and Locrian, and a different beats-per-minute value, it’s an incredibly dense and unexpected album filled with a wealth of musical subtext.
“We’d walk into the studio, set everything up, get a rough tempo going and just jam. No preconceived ideas at all, no concepts, no songs,” says Stu Mackenzie. “We’d jam for maybe 45 minutes, and then all swap instruments and start again.”
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“All we had prepared as we walked into the studio were these seven song titles,” says Mackenzie. “I have a list on my phone of hundreds of possible song titles. I’ll never use most of them, but they’re words and phrases I feel could be digested into King Gizzard-world.”
Flute, organ, percussion and extra guitar were overdubbed over the full working instrumentals, with the lyrics being a group effort.
“We had an editable Google Sheet that we were all working on,” says Mackenzie. “Most of the guys in the band wrote a lot of the lyrics, and it was my job to arrange it all and piece it together.”
This is the first album in a series of three that’s set to be released this month. Man, we can’t wait to see what King Gizz have in store for us for the rest of October – with Laminated Denim set to drop on October 12 and Changes coming our way on October 28.
Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava track listing
- Mycelium (7:36)
- Ice V (10:16)
- Magma (9:07)
- Lava (6:41)
- Hell’s Itch (13:28)
- Iron Lung (9:05)
- Gliese 710 (7:49)
Float along and fill your lungs with the Gizzverse by heading here.
