King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard share a new video for album opener ‘Yours‘, directed by long time collaborators PHC Films. The video is the first of ten new visuals set to accompany new album Butterfly 3000, which was released on Friday via KGLW / Virgin Music Australia. Already, the album is widely and wildly acclaimed, culminating in the band’s most accessible and jubilant release to date.
The new album follows 17 studio albums, including the recently-released K.G. and L.W. Similar to its two predecessors, Butterfly 3000 was executed in isolation, recorded entirely in the band members’ own homes, their studio and rehearsal space remaining out-of-bounds. Creatively, Stu Mackenzie describes the process of making the album as a “group challenge”. The band adhered to rules which, much like Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, placed them firmly but fruitfully outside of their comfort zones. First and foremost, the band were writing this new material on unfamiliar equipment, like modular synthesizers. “As we’re not very skilled at them and don’t have the deepest knowledge of this stuff, we’d get happy accidents – lots of weird, wrong, broken sounds we flipped and looped and turned into songs.”
The group committed to writing every one of Butterfly 3000’s songs in major key, marking a profound shift in modus operandi. “We were trying to make upbeat dance music, in our own way, and we’d never gone there before,” Mackenzie says. Butterfly 3000 also abandoned another Gizzard method, what Mackenzie describes as “throwing a lot of shit at the wall and finding that magic take, or building something with 20 tracks of guitar overdub”. Instead, the new album was a process of refinement, paring tracks back to their elements and foregrounding the melodies. It’s the most considered album Gizz has ever made.
The album’s title is – like many Gizzard albums before it – the work of long-time collaborator Jason Galea, who has composed for Butterfly 3000 a mesmerising sleeve that draws inspiration from the Cross-eyed Autostereogram poster phenomena of the 90s, harbouring revelations for those willing to study it long and hard enough. It’s reflective of the album’s themes, which “are dreams and metamorphosis, change and evolution,” Mackenzie explains. “It’s a journey, it’s a fantasy. It’s one of our lightest records, and it’s come out of this really trying time. We were challenging ourselves on this album to make something we’d never done before, which is a major-key, positive, uplifting record.”
Butterfly 3000 is a triumph of King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s characteristic extra-terrestrial approach to music, to their oblique strategies, and their refusal to repeat themselves. It’s also testament to a group who – a decade and 18 albums into one of the most remarkable careers – are still able to surprise, still hungry to reinvent their own paradigm, still finding fresh inspiration in infinite possibilities. Long may they hew to their alien instincts.
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Vivid LIVE 2021
Sunday 22 August, 7.30pm
Acoustic Night – Carriageworks, Sydney
First release sold out – sign up for second release
Monday 23 August, 7.30pm
Jams Night – Carriageworks, Sydney
First release sold out – sign up for second release announcement
Tuesday 24 August, 7.30pm
Microtonal Night – Carriageworks, Sydney
First release sold out – sign up for second release announcement
Wednesday 25 August, 7.30pm
Garage Rock Night – Carriageworks, Sydney
First release sold out – sign up for second release announcement
Thursday 26 August, 7.30pm
Heavy Metal Night – Carriageworks, Sydney
First release sold out – sign up for second release announcement
