King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have announced their 27th album, Phantom Island, set for release on 13th June via their own (p)doom records imprint.
Alongside the album comes a sweeping run of UK and European tour dates, including a performance at London’s Royal Albert Hall with the Covent Garden Sinfonia.
If Flight b741 was the band’s turbo-charged nod to sci-fi serials and cartoonish action, Phantom Island shifts the mood. While the adventurous spirit remains, these new tracks turn inward. “The songs felt like they needed this other energy and colour, that we needed to splash some different paint on the canvas,” explains frontman Stu Mackenzie.
Ten of the album’s tracks were written during the same sessions that produced Flight b741, but Mackenzie says these “were harder to finish” and “needed a little more time and space and thought.” That space came with the involvement of British conductor and historical keyboardist Chad Kelly, who worked with the band to arrange orchestral parts for the project.
“He brings this wealth of musical awareness to his chameleon-like arrangements,” says Mackenzie. “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. But he’s obsessed with microtonal music, too, and all this nerdy stuff like me.”
Lead single ‘Deadstick’ shows the new direction clearly, with complex orchestration elevating the track’s jazz-rock foundation. Its video, directed by Guy Tyzack, leans into chaos: “Deadstick refers to when a plane propeller stops midflight so I decided to have a massive plane made out of cardboard crash land into a beautiful location.”
The title Phantom Island sets the tone for an album that blends fantasy with existential reflection. “It’s more introverted,” Mackenzie admits. “When I was younger, I was just interested in freaking people out, but as I get older, I’m much more interested in connecting with people.”
The record is supported by a run of orchestral and rave shows across Europe and the UK this autumn. The Royal Albert Hall concert on 4th November will showcase arrangements with the Covent Garden Sinfonia, while other orchestral dates in Paris, Den Bosch and Gdansk will pair the band with local symphonies. For the more electronically minded, rave shows in venues like Electric Brixton and Berlin’s Columbiahalle will lean into the modular madness of The Silver Cord.
There’s little danger of the band slowing down. Between a summer residency tour across Lisbon, Barcelona and Athens, and their ongoing experiments in genre-splicing and sonic worldbuilding, Phantom Island looks set to be another restless chapter in the ever-evolving Gizz mythos.
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