There aren’t many genres with which King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have yet to experiment, but “orchestral rock” can now be checked off the list with the arrival of a new single, “Phantom Island,” and the partial announcement of a 2025 North American tour backed by local symphonies. Further information about the latter is expected this morning.
“Phantom Island” was recorded during the same sessions that produced this year’s Flight b741, which was King Gizzard’s 26th studio album. It’s also a taste of the follow-up to it, which the Australian sextet has been working on in their home studio in recent weeks. The multi-faceted “Phantom Island” is unlike anything the band have released previously, as it heavily features strings and horns played by guest musicians whose names have yet to be detailed. The extra instrumentation appears to have been recorded at Allan Eaton Studios in St. Kilda, Victoria, Australia.
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“It’s definitely very far from being finished, so it’s still evolving,” group member Stu Mackenzie told SPIN this summer of the next project. “It is related to b741, maybe in some ways more explicitly than [the twin 2023 albums] Petro and Silver Cord were, and in some ways more abstract. It’s probably slightly more of a chill one, but it’s also massive in scope.”
“We chose the more rowdy, rambunctious songs that felt like they needed to all be together,” group member Ambrose Kenny-Smith explains to SPIN of how the Flight b741 material was divided. “This way, it would sound like more of a party — more loose, more dad rock, more garage, more upbeat. The others seemed to be a bit more spacious, more strung out, maybe even a bit more singer/songwriter-y. They have more sparseness to them. They’re more laidback. We decided to split them up, and that’s what the 27th album is turning into.”
Before the 2025 North American orchestral tour, Gizzard will play three-night runs at a series of majestic European venues, beginning May 18 in Lisbon and concluding June 10 in Plovdiv, Bulgaria.
The group will begin a fresh round of North American shows Friday at the 17,500-capacity Kia Forum in Los Angeles, which will be their first proper U.S. arena concert 10 years to the day since they played in front of a couple hundred people at SUNY Binghamton in upstate New York. The 40-date tour will have shifted 240,000 tickets before it wraps Nov. 21 in Miami.
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