THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “The companion album to 2024’s Flight B741 — with songs recorded during the same sessions — Phantom Island sees King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard expanding their sonic palette to include a full blown orchestra. Blending their signature psych-rock energy with sweeping orchestral arrangements, King Gizzard take you on a psychological journey into the mind as it creates its own “phantom island” of illusions, fears and chaos.
The Australian sextet’s prolific nature has led them to release music at a frenetic pace, and their intense desire to seek out new sounds and follow new creative paths means that every one of their multitude of releases sounds different from the last. Phantom Island, their 27th album (not including scores of live releases) and second release on the band’s own (p)doom records, is no exception. It contains some of their most sophisticated work yet, bolstering their shape-shifting psych-garage-prog-rock with a full orchestra of strings, horns and woodwinds.
Phantom Island’s story began in June 2023, when King Gizzard took the stage at L.A.’s iconic Hollywood Bowl for a three-hour marathon set. Backstage, they crossed paths with members of the L.A. Philharmonic, who put forward the idea of a collaboration. A year later, as they blazed through sessions that generated the 10 tracks of Flight b741, they worked out 10 other tracks that didn’t fit.
As frontman Stu Mackenzie explained, these outliers “were harder to finish. Musically, they needed a little more time and space and thought. The songs felt like they needed this other energy and colour, that we needed to splash some different paint on the canvas.”
The band connected with the L.A. Philharmonic again, as well as keyboardist, conductor and arranger Chad Kelly, who crafted historically informed, disruptive orchestrations to meld the two groups’ disparate styles and approaches. “We come from such different worlds — he plays Mozart and Bach and uses the same harpsichords they did, and tunes them the exact same way,” Mackenzie said. “But he’s obsessed with microtonal music, too, and all this nerdy stuff like me.”
The result continues the thread from the high-flying adventure of Flight b741 into a more grounded, reflective record. Between the smoldering triplane fuselage on the cover and lyrics about crash landings, the band make it clear that they’ve come down to earth. “When I was younger, I was just interested in freaking people out,” Mackenzie explains. “But as I get older, I’m much more interested in connecting.”
