How King Gizzard Conquered the World — While Staying DIY

About two and a half hours into King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s Aug. 16 show — the first of two nights at the 13,000-capacity Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, New York — bandleader Stu Mackenzie realized they were going to come up short on their three-hour set. “We didn’t put enough songs on the set list,” he recalls. “That doesn’t usually happen to us. Usually we’re cutting songs.”

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Part of the problem was that they hadn’t actually spent much time rehearsing for the tour. Back home in Melbourne, Australia, he and the band’s five other members — Ambrose Kenny-Smith, Joey Walker, Cook Craig, Lucas Harwood, and Michael Cavanagh — had used the previous three weeks to work on an “improvised techno album” instead. Never mind that they were in the process of putting out Flight b741 , their 26th studio LP, or that they had 27 headlining dates coming up, or that they were working out the kinks of how to livestream every show, for free, for the very first time. Preparation isn’t really their thing. Making new music is.

Mackenzie was fine with not having everything totally worked out going into the tour. “I really like the nervousness, the kind of anticipation, maybe not feeling fully locked in,” he says. “That’s something I get energy from, for some sick reason.” But now, that left him on stage with a nearly full stadium of riled-up fans, and not enough music to satisfy them. So in the middle of a song, he got a tech’s attention. “I called them on the talk-back and said, ‘Do you happen to have a Sharpie?’” Mackenzie, 33, continues. “They brought me over a Sharpie in the middle of the song. I counted backwards from the bottom of the set list, how many minutes each song would go for. And I was like, fuck!”

He quickly thought back to the last set they had played in New York, as well as the previous night’s set list and what they had planned for tomorrow, so as not to repeat anything. “In the middle of a song, this is really starting to break my brain,” he remembers. He settled on “Nuclear Fusion” — a hypnotic, sludgey track off 2017’s Flying Microtonal Banana — signaled to the band, and pulled a young fan onstage to sing along. “It was pretty bang on after that,” he says.

The members of King Gizzard are used to thinking on their feet. Though they’ve been together since 2010, over the past few years the band has become a dramatically bigger force in live music, going from small clubs and daytime psych festival slots to sold-out amphitheaters across the country. Since starting as teenagers in Melbourne, they’ve released more than two dozen studio albums, recording, producing, and pressing them themselves. They’ve built a legion of fans with this DIY ethos — their subreddit is in the top two percent on the social media site, with fans calling themselves the “Weirdo Swarm,” à la the Beyhive or Swifties — and even given out full albums and live show recordings for free for anyone to turn into records, so long as they send a few back to King Gizzard. Their plan to livestream this tour (except for Philadelphia, where they were told they weren’t allowed) springs from the same philosophy. “I just want people to have access to our music, at the end of the day,” Mackenzie says. “That’s what it’s all about. I’m a millennial — I grew up downloading music on the internet. I’m a child of, ‘Everything is free,’ for better or for worse.”

TRYING TO FIT King Gizzard’s music into a genre can be difficult. Some records skew metal, others psych-rock, or electronic, or jazz, or, like Flying Microtonal Banana , take a left turn away from Western music constraints entirely. All of them have a signature, chaotic feel that edges on manic. And in the past few years, they’ve attracted the unexpected label of “jam band” due to their devoted live fandom — though being literally followed around is not new for them. “Touring the states and starting to see people come to multiple nights, that’s something that happened to us when we first started touring here, even though we were playing more or less the same set every night,” Mackenzie says. “But maybe they saw something in us that we didn’t see.”

Mackenzie explains that when the “jam band” label was first slapped on them, he didn’t really know what to think. He was familiar with the Grateful Dead albums American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead , but he didn’t get the obsession. “I never understood the psychedelic live show thing, because it just wasn’t a cultural phenomenon in Australia,” he says. “It just didn’t click. I thought the Dead were kind of like a country band. Great songs, OK, sure, but I never understood that.”

Now he gets it. “In some ways, the spirit is the same,” he says. “The way we’ve made records, and we’ve made music, is very loose and free, and has always been open and about improvisation, and about winging it. I think we exist within the hippie ideals, even though we’re fucking deep-down punk rock millennials as well.” (Multi-instrumentalist Kenny-Smith, who has been in the band since he and Mackenzie were teenagers, wasn’t any more familiar with the jam band phenomenon, but appreciates its effects: “I think the coolest thing going on with this tour is all those Weirdo Swarms that they’re doing — meeting up before every show this tour, donating their bootleg merch and different things. And then they do a big raffle, and then all the money goes to a local charity.”)

This spirit of experimentation is all over Flight b741, even if it has more in common with Steely Dan than Phish. “We wanted to shoot from the hip with this one,” Mackenzie says. The two albums they put out in 2023 — The Silver Cord, a set of electronic tracks, and PetroDragonic Apocalypse , which dove head-first into metal — had been “very intellectually thought-out,” he says. They were also difficult to make. “Sometimes that’s a good move as an artist, [to] push yourself and challenge yourself, but we were ready to do something that was just natural,” he says.

When they were recording last October, the members came in with scraps of ideas — “a napkin sketch,” as Mackenzie describes it. “We had a rule: Don’t come in with too much. Everybody in the band is capable of writing [the] guitar part, the singing part, the drum part, and saying, ‘Can you play this?’ And sometimes we’ve made records like that, and we’ve written a lot of songs like that, where it’s been someone’s vision, then everyone puts their own stamp on it. And for the most part, [with this record], we really wanted to avoid doing that.”

With three of the six members imminently expecting children with their respective partners, they went into the studio, working sensible, bank-hour shifts to write and record the album in a matter of two weeks. Kenny-Smith says he was excited by the approach. “It felt really nice for [Stu] to be like, ‘Oh, let’s just go back to basics and to do this thing,’” he says. “Everyone just started throwing their two cents. So that sort of brought a whole other element of good energy for the record.” The result was something closer to traditional rock, with Seventies arena overtones and hints of glam, once again a departure from King Gizzard’s past albums while sounding very much like themselves.

Part of the secret of their intense productivity is the almost mystical reverence they give the studio. “In a lot of ways, the safest place that we can be is onstage, and that’s the best,” Mackenzie says. “In the studio, however, I want everyone to feel like we don’t know what we’re doing. We’re feeling really naive, or we’re learning something, and we’re out of that depth, because that’s where we’ve always made the most interesting, creative things.”

That’s also why they’ve eschewed working with producers. “As soon as it has ever become about what anyone else would like, or what anyone else wants us to do, the whole thing just shuts down,” he says. “We’ve never had any outside help making records. We’re still making records the exact same way that we made them at the very start.” To that end, they launched Flightless Records in 2012, to release their own music and that of other local Melbourne bands — including Amyl and the Sniffers — and by 2020, that was taking so much work that touring drummer Eric Moore fully left the band to run the label. Also in 2020, King Gizzard launched KGLW records — now called p(doom) — to exclusively release their own music. Earlier this year, they announced they’d be putting other bands’ music out, too. Though they’ve partnered in the past with labels like ATO and Heavenly, overall they stand out as a strikingly DIY success story.

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On this tour, Mackenzie is giving up a bit of the creative control in order to livestream each show on YouTube — something he’d considered for years but that took time to fall into place. Documentary filmmakers Jackson Devereux and Allen Dobbins record each performance in real time, with the sound mix (helmed by longtime King Gizzard audio engineer Sam Joseph) coming straight from the live mix of the show. It’s not a traditional way to livestream — most acts would make sure to have a separate sound mix going out to the stream — but it’s one that fits in with their DIY approach. “I think a lot of people would look at this operation and be like, ‘You guys are absolutely insane,’” Mackenzie says. “That is not what you’re supposed to do. So many things could go wrong at any moment, but I think making it free allows you to have a few teething problems along the way, and figure it out in good faith.”

There were some technical difficulties at first — sound would be spotty, streams would cut out. But devoted fans were quick to point out errors on Reddit, and members of the King Gizzard team went through the message boards looking for ways to troubleshoot. “You can kind of get a gauge on it sounding good. It’s like, is it all working? Is there a problem?” Mackenzie says. “We actually do check the Reddit [threads] — a lot of people who work within the Gizz ecosystem do to just gauge the temperature on stuff. It’s amazing for that.”

Though Mackenzie himself doesn’t spend much time on Reddit, he’s found other ways to connect with fans. Take the Bootlegger project, which got its start in 2017, during a particularly productive period for the band. “I think I had a guilt trip about asking people to buy five albums in a row,” Mackenzie says. “So we decided to make one of the albums free.” They picked Polygondwanaland , which combined the darker polyrhythmic themes of the previous year’s Nonagon Infinity with the weightless quality of 2015’s Paper Mâché Dream Balloon . (“It was the one that we worked the hardest on,” he explains of choosing Polygon . “I didn’t want to do the easiest one, because that felt cheap. It wasn’t necessarily my favorite, but it was the only record that you couldn’t argue was the shit one.”) They uploaded the raw tracks for the few fans they figured might be interested. “Before we knew it, there were hundreds of physical products, physical pressings. It was the most incredible reaction — it was the thing that blew us away more than anything maybe we’d ever done at that time.”

Since then, they’ve released demos, live shows, and an Australian bushfire benefit album (only after, Mackenzie notes, it had already made more than $100,000 for the cause) — and, as they announced last week, multiple live tracks from each show on this tour. “There are record labels which are proper businesses now, which began by pressing Polygon ,” says Mackenzie. “It’s just the most incredible, beautiful thing. I’m really proud of that as just being something that feels like tangibly has made the world a more creative place.”

Their biggest connection to the fans, though, has been through extensive touring. According to the fan site KGLW.net, which documents every show they’ve played — many including set lists and fan videos — they’ve done more than 900 shows in 45 countries over 52 tours since 2010.

A lot has happened over that time — becoming adults, partners, and parents — but they feel confident in their breakneck pace. “I think even before we were parents, we were aware of our sanity,” Mackenzie says. “We learned some lessons early on about going away and for too long, and it [being] unhealthy, even for our own personal dynamic. We do truly love each other, which helps. We have had our disagreements and arguments and fights and things like that, but I think we really do want to look after each other. And we’re lucky to have that, because I don’t think that every band has that.”

That’s not to say growing up hasn’t added its share of difficulties. “Being a parent changes you, for sure,” he says. “I have two kids, and I hate being away from my kids. Primarily the thing that gets me is that they miss me — that’s actually way harder than me missing them. However, I feel more grateful than ever to be doing it because it’s hard enough to just, like, keep the train on the track as an adult human being on planet Earth. Just being able to do it with kids, and with the band, and how busy we are, it’s just something I’m very grateful for.”

ON TOP OF EVERYTHING ELSE, King Gizzard is in the process of making a movie with Guy Tyzack and Maclay Heriot — they’re not sure what form it will take yet, but the filmmakers (and their cameras) sit in on our interview in the back of a pool house in the Forest Hills Tennis Club, where the first U.S. Open took place. The show has just ended, and Mackenzie is still buzzing from his three hours onstage. It’s a funny scene, a private gathering that feels more like a mid-2010s house party than a glamorous after-hours affair. (Comedian Eric Andre can be seen jumping into the pool later that night.)

They have strong roots in New York, and the two shows at Forest Hills are a homecoming of sorts. Ten years earlier, the members of King Gizzard were crashing on floors in Brooklyn and playing any slot they were allowed at DIY spaces like Wild Kingdom, along with more established clubs like Baby’s All Right and the Knitting Factory, all while recording upstate near Hunter Mountain.

“I think we became adults here, in some ways,” Mackenzie tells me. “[In] 2014, we’re between the ages of 21 and 25 — we’re babies! We’re kind of figuring it out. Just trying to figure out how to, like, even just have enough money to eat ramen noodles, just live and try to play as many shows as possible. I think we grew up a lot, and together, and became a family.”

Kenny-Smith remembers it as a time of intense creative energy. “When we came in 2014, it felt like it was really buzzing and vibrant,” he says. “And New York is obviously just the best place to be [in your] young twenties. Just so eye-opening.” He remembers recording in the Catskills, holed up for days, often going into separate corners to write songs or play GoldenEye 007 on Nintendo 64, venturing out only for gigs or groceries. “I felt like I was Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone , just throwing whatever the hell I wanted into this trolley,” he says. “Go there once a week and stock up on two-minute noodles and microwave popcorn and whatever we could get our hands on to survive as we bunkered down.”

Over the next few weeks, they’re going to play some places they’ve been before — three nights at Red Rocks in Colorado, one at the Gorge in Washington State — and some they never have, like St. Louis and Richmond, Virginia. Seeing their band’s popularity explode has been a mind-fuck, for sure, but one that the band is learning to embrace. “There are obviously a huge amount of artists who play to a lot more people than we do, but it’s gotten to a point that feels abstract,” Mackenzie says. “It’s like flying in an airplane. In the airplane, you can’t really think about the fact that you’re 40,000 feet up in the air. If you did, you would probably have panic attacks. And I think that’s how a lot of the fandom around King Gizzard feels to me: It’s amazing the technology exists to be in the sky. It’s amazing that there are all of these thousands of people turning up to see us every night. But it’s also completely abstract.”

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