Album review
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have announced a new double album that’s set to arrive on June 16. It bears the title PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation. Lead single ‘Gila Monster’ is out today, alongside an accompanying video directed by SPOD. Check it out below.
“I wanted to shoot Lord of the Rings 4 but also make a video game, so I mixed both mediums and came up with this majestic journey for truth and power in a cursed world,” SPOD said of the ‘Gila Monster’ visual. “I mixed 3D animation, modeling & live footage in a 3D video game program to create this marvelous voyage of man & beast. Friend or foe?”
The new album is described as the band’s second full-length excursion into thrash, following 2019’s Infest The Rats’ Nest. “When we made Rats’ Nest, it felt experimental,” frontman Stu Mackenzie explained in a press release. “Like, ‘Here’s this music that some of us grew up on but we’d never had the guts or confidence to really play before, so let’s give it a go and see what happens’. And when we made that album we were like, ‘Fuck, why did it take us so long to do this?’ It’s just so much fun to play that music, and those songs work so well when we play them live. So we always had it in our minds to make another metal record.”
“We worked on it the same way we started our Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava album last year,” Mackenzie added. “We wrote a song a day, and we came into the practice space with no riffs, no tunes, no ideas, and started from scratch. And we jammed, and recorded everything, and pieced the songs together from that. I’d sketched out the story the songs would tell, and I’d portioned it out into seven song titles, with a short paragraph of what would happen in the song. I guess we kind of made the record backwards.”
PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation Cover Artwork:
PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation Tracklist:
1. Motor Spirit
2. Supercell
3. Converge
4. Witchcraft
5. Gila Monster
6. Dragon
7. Flamethrower
