King Gizzard are one of the best bands currently going right now, if you havent heard at least 10 Gizzard albums by this year of our lord 2025 what are you even doing? I wrote an album rundown of their discography and I’m going to drop a portion of it in three chunks over the next couple weeks until their new record comes out.

Band Members:

Stu Mackenzie- bandleader and the only member to not have a solo project because Gizzard is his project. If every other member left Stu would be the guy to keep it going. He doesnt have the most pleasant voice ever but he can pull off a decent number of different styles, from gentle falsettos to throat singing growls. He also produced, engineers, and mixes most of the bands stuff. Sometimes he plays the flute.

Michael “Cavs” Cavanagh- My personal fav musician in the band. He has a distinctive style that is instantly recognizable. I dont know of many other drummers who you could recognize by the way they play a single-stroke roll. He doesn’t quite have the chops of some of his influences, he’s not Jaki Liebezeit but he can come close when he wants to. He’s a better metal drummer than many too (I’d take his drumming over Lars Ulrich any day), and he’s fantastic at navigating odd time signatures.

Joey Walker- Strongest guitarist in the band. Most conventionally normal sounding vocals. All around cool bro. Has the best mustache. Has an electronica side project called Bullant.

Ambrose “Amby” Kenny-Smith- Harmonica percussion keys and sometimes saxophone. The frontman of the band who rarely actually fronts the band. You could compare him to Pigpen from the Grateful dead since he brings that bluesy harmonica swagger. He’s got the most fully realized solo career with The Murlocs, who are like a more power pop/garage rock version of Gizzard and are a pretty worthwhile group in their own right. I wont be covering them but if you want to hear a band that sound like Gizzard but “normal” then The Murlocs are where you want to look.

Cook “Cookie” Craig - Primarily keys, frequently 3rd guitarist. Vocals kinda sound like John Lennon crossed with Kermit the Frog. Most underrated member. His solo music sounds like Mort Garson’s Plantasia. He’s also a member of The Murlocs with Ambrose.

Lucas Harwood- For a while he was kind of a “part time” member of the band, playing bass live but only coming into the studio here and there. A lot of the bass parts on the studio albums are played by the other members. on some albums he only plays on one or two tracks or not at all. But unlike Eric he’s pretty well integrated into the band now and actively contributes songwriting and vocals, has a side project called Heavy Moss.

Eric Moore - the bands manager in the early days, and his membership in the band was kind of a meme (credited as playing “nothing” on some of their albums). Officially he was the 2nd drummer which looked cool in pictures and onstage, but he was no Mickey Hart. He just copied Cavs most of the time and struggled to keep up with the more progressive material. There are a handful of neat double drumming moments here and there but not that many. He left the band once his superfluousness became too much to bear.

Sometimes I see people bitching about the band having too many albums. Which as long as the band continues to rule I will see as a very silly opinion. Gizzard can put out more great albums in one year than most bands put out in their entire career, somehow this is a bad thing? Frank Zappa had a gazillion albums and a bunch of them are genuinely kinda awful yet we all still love him. King Gizz have no bad albums!
They are also a killer live band, and are distinctly different live than in the studio. They’ve come to be grouped with “jam bands” since they do jam a lot (they love mashing up quotes and lyrics from different songs on the fly), change their setlists every night, have fans that tour to multiple shows and a whole little community forming around the shows. But with most jam bands the studio albums are an afterthought whereas Gizzard have both awesome live shows and a great studio discography. so you get the best of both worlds. They’ve started posting full shows on youtube for free now too which is a great way to sample the band, I definitely recommend checking those out. One cool thing about their shows now is that unlike the albums which usually stick to one sound per record the shows mix a bunch of different styles together, so you get a metal section, a microtonal section, a psychedelic jam section, an electronica section and so on.

If you’ve never listened to them before I do think going chronologically is the best way to discover the band. In spite of the genre hopping there is a pretty clear sense of growth and development over their career that continues to this day. They’ve put out 27 records yet it still feels like they’re only getting started.

12 Bar Bruise
A blast of youthful garage-surf energy. Except half of the tracks are forgettable, and the production is lo-fi in a “we recorded this on our iPhones” kind of way. Kinda reminds me of the Flaming Lips. They are little babies who barely know how to write songs or how to produce an album or even how to play their instruments. but the core King Gizzard sound is present right from the start. Everything drenched in delay, Stu going “WOOO!”, incessant driving rhythms, bluesy harmonica, a spoken word song, and so on. You’d never guess where the band would go from here by this album alone, but it totally fits as their debut.

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Eyes Like the Sky
There are no songs here, merely backing music for a cowboy story narrated by Ambrose’s dad. It’s amusing that so early in their career they’re already doing wacky left turns like this. It’s a fine little radio play thing, but there isn’t much point in listening to this more than once or twice. Most people put this at the bottom of their discography rankings, and I’d agree with that, not because it’s bad but because it’s so skippable. It is notable though that as soon as their second record they were taking big left turns.

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Float Along - Fill Your Lungs
This feels like the band’s actual debut record. Really sets the tone for what comes later.
It’s one of the few to not have much of a concept, other than maybe “Stu got a sitar” but the part with sitar is barely half of the album. So Gizz comes off as a more or less conventional-ish psych rock band on this record and do a pretty solid job of it.
Head On / Pill is their first psych-rock/prog epic, and gives the kind of “first song on the first album” mission statement vibe that makes you stand up and take notice. the musicianship is still primitive. the “soloing” in the song is mostly just lots of crazy noise to cover for their lack of technical ability, and the beat is just the same groove over and over. but that also describes many awesome krautrock songs, and that influence is very prominent, especially on Michal Cavenagh’s drumming style. (I once blew my friends’ minds by playing them Can’s “Mother Sky” which is only a few tweaks away from being a King Gizzard song.). Ambrose is wearing a Neu! T-shirt on the cover so the influence is as clear as could be.
The middle of the record is a blend of less memorable but still enjoyable psych rock tracks. Not too far removed from being E6 songs, and influence that would pop up a lot in their early era. They’re all good songs but the messy production doesnt always suit them. Let Me Mend the Past would become Ambrose’s signature song live but on the record it kind of blends in with the rest on the album. They close things out with the dreamy title track which is in 5/4 establishing the onslaught of odd time signatures that would soon come to be a hallmark of the band.

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Oddments
Considering that this was billed as an odds and ends album and Eyes Like the Sky wasn’t really an album the band kinda sneakily built a pretty large discography before anybody had even heard of them.
A couple amusing novelty tracks (one song is a minute long, two songs under 30 seconds, another song is a fake jingle about Vegemite) and a handful of nice lightweight tunes.Several years after this album came out “Work This Time” took off as their most streamed song for some reason. This early laid back psych-pop version of the band is very Elephant 6 adjacent. Inessential but a pretty fun album.

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I’m in Your Mind Fuzz
Classic early Gizzard, fuzzed out to the max. This is where they started to gain an audience in North America. The album also introduces a few more signature Gizz-isms and the band’s aesthetic is firmly established. the majority of the songs seamlessly flow into one another and where one ends and begins isn’t always clear. Musical and lyrical themes recur between songs (“conceptual continuity”). The line between multi-part songs and suites/medleys of shorter songs are blurred. Is the “mind fuzz suite” one long song, Or is it a series of shorter very similar sounding songs? It’s both! kind of? Live versions would end up topping the studio versions, and as a result its an album I dont listen to too often, but this is still a very significant record for them.

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Quarters
Four tracks exactly 10:10 in length. The band isnt really capable of legitimately playing proper jazz but they come out with some groovy tunes all the same. The song portions are more psych-pop kinda stuff though most dont have too much staying power with the exception of early Gizzard classic The River, (it might be a knock-off of “Take Five”, but there’s nothing wrong with that). Adding odd time signatures to their bag of tricks set the band down a path of getting a lot better at their instruments really quickly. The band would get much better at jamming instrumental sections like these in the future (and future live versions of “the river” would go to amazing places), but they’ve already come a long way from the noise-solos of “head on Pill”.

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Paper Mâché Dream Balloon
fun and accessible. Cute little acoustic album. This was their newest album when I first started listening to them and it charmed the pants off of me while also giving no clue as to what else the band had in store. Very quaint Elephant 6-ish psych-pop. The band’s songwriting had further developed and there are plenty of catchy tunes here. Can’t imagine anyone would dislike this.

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Nonagon Infinity
The culmination of their early era and their really big breakthrough. One of their most iconic records. They took the idea of blurring the lines between when songs end and begin across the entire record which is designed to loop seamlessly if you play the last song into the first (shades of The Wall’s “isn’t this where…we came in?”) and repeats the title chorus throughout the record during transitional sections. The whole thing does sound a bit samey throughout (not helped by the rough lo-fi production which is still one of the band’s weaker aspects at this stage imo) but that’s kind of the point. once you get into the album you are able to separate the different songs and pull apart how many kickass riffs are on this thing. A prog rock onslaught that I once considered to be untoppable as their best record, until they topped it later on multiple times. Relentless fuzzy garage psych that never lets up, loaded with some of their catchiest riffs and vocal parts to date. The odd time signatures really take hold in the band’s music here and this is the first album where I was eyeing prog archives for not listing these guys (they’re on there now).

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Flying Microtonal Banana
In 2017 Gizzard completely blew things open by putting out 5 albums in one year. Starting the year off they introduced another King Gizzard staple, the microtonal instruments. They wrote all the songs on instruments modified to be able to play quarter-tones and that gives the whole record a dark arabic vibe and it’s pretty sweet. The band occasionally has a reputation for writing choruses that just repeat the titles of their songs but most of that is cus of the song Rattlesnake, and oooooh do they say that word a lot of times. Sick tune though.

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Tune in next week for the next 9 albums!