King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard Bring New Songs, Marathon Shows & More To NYC + Boston (2024)

The Aussie rockers played two shows at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens and another at The Stage at Suffolk Downs in Boston.

By Andrew Bruss Aug 20, 2024 • 3:51 pm PDT

took their transdimensional brand of improvisational psychedelic garage rock throughout the greater Northeast, burning through three shows in four nights in New York City and then Boston, and in the process demonstrating their bonafides as an act you shouldn’t take your eyes off of for even a moment.

The NYC shows at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens were billed as three-hour marathon performances, but in light of the fact that their Boston set stretched well past two hours, the marathon moniker may have been a bit of an exaggeration. The Melbourne-bred sextet puts on a show night after night that doesn’t just rival their peers in length but also in sonic scope. Their first album dropped a dozen years ago. They’ve put out another 25 albums in the time since, covering genres ranging from psychedelic and garage rock to electronica, jazz and thrash metal.

But what’s proved even more impressive than the variety in their discography is the way they’ve accomplished it. Beginning with 2017’s Flying Microtonal Banana, KGLW has put out a series of albums performed with custom-made microtonal instruments, meaning they flipped off the 12-note chromatic scale and embraced musical concepts more common in classical Turkish and Indian music by playing on modified fretboards that have numerous frets built in between the conventional half steps Western music revolves around.

If that wasn’t enough, frontman Stu Mackenzie told his fans to hold his beer, and the group went down to the Moog Synthesizer factory in Asheville, North Carolina to make custom synths to use on 2023’s The Silver Cord.

All of this material and more was performed for their crowd over those three nights and what stood out was that depending on the genre being played, the crowd adapted accordingly. There were circle pits during material off their thrash metal albums (which measure-for-measure can keep tempo with Cliff Burton-era Metallica material) and during their fits of psych rock rampage, the audience went crowd surf crazy with multiple bodies at a time flowing over the rail from the crowd and into the photo pit.

But what you won’t see in any other crowd is the Live Action Roll Playing (LARPing) that their fans engaged in during the show. Ticket holders came dressed up as rats (a la 2019’s Infest the Rats’ Nest), dragons, lizards, wizards and lizard wizards, slaying inflatable dragons bouncing overhead while faux-battling fellow moshers. At one point a feverish circle pit stopped their stampede to cheer for one particularly heroic ticketholder who held his toy sword to the air as though he were one of the Thundercats calling down a strike of lightning.

All of the fantasy elements present in their crowd stem from a series of interconnected narratives that run throughout their albums that have come to be known as the Gizzverse. While fans are quick to note that 2021’s Butterfly 3000 isn’t canon, the narrative isn’t as fluid as The Who’s Tommy, or the MCU for that matter, but is tied together by a series of tales of monsters and men from all manner of space-time touching on themes of environmental destruction and the demise of civilization. This is most prevalent on 2017’s Murder Of The Universe, which tells the tales of the Altered Beast, the Lord of Lightning and the Cyborg Han-Tyumi. During their second show in New York City, they played more material off this album than any other.

The first of their two shows at Forest Hills Stadium went heavy on some of their most popular material, working in an array of tunes off 2014’s I’m In Your Mind Fuzz and 2016’s Nonagon Infinity which is arguably their most popular release to date. Over two nights, no song got as loud a singalong as the album’s opening number, “Robot Stop.”

Where Night One focused heavily on their psychedelic garage rock and Night Two went hard on heavy metal, their show in Boston bucked the trend by making eclecticism the theme of the set. Before the show started, fans were speculating on what material we might hear based on the gear that was already on the stage. Unlike New York City, the stage was absent any of their custom microtonal instruments. This speculation went into overdrive when their stagehands brought out a table riddled with all kinds of synths, sequencers, Eurorack modules and effects that looked like some kind of Soapbox Derby synth superstation.

The band came out of the gate with a half hour of electronica that featured material off of The Silver Cord and 2022’s Changes but also took a tune called “The Grim Reaper” off 2022’s Omnium Gathering and made it better than the album version thanks to the deviation of the arrangement into the electronosphere. The synths made for some poppy moments but also took the band into some abstract territory that brought to mind the very early Kraftwerk material that predated the Krautrock icons’ mainstream success.

By the time their stagehands took the synth table away, thunder and lightning opened in the sky in time for a quartet of thrash metal tunes highlighted by a performance of “Perihelion” featuring a member of the audience named Timmy on guitar who had held up a sign requesting the song in honor of his late friend Joey who’d recently died in an avalanche. The crowd chanted Joey’s name as the band invited his friend Timmy up onto the stage before the kid completely slayed the expert-level guitar riff. It was a moving tribute that showcased the connection this band has with their fan base.

King Gizz has been finding innovative ways to connect with their fans going back to their decision to allow the public to use official concert recordings to start their own record labels, selling the bootlegs for a profit. All the band asked in return was for some of the pressings for themselves. They’ve long championed inclusivity at their shows, embracing their status as FreakLords and imploring aggressive acceptance from their fan base as well.

Every night before they take the stage, there was a message displayed on their screen reminding the crowd that the mosh pit is for everyone of all ages, sizes and genders and if they see any “dickhe*ds,” to notify security. Their fans cheer for this message night after night and follow through on the instructions as demonstrated by all of the young women dressed for summer who were safely crowd surfing at the same rate as the guys in attendance.

Not only are they allowing photographers to shoot their entire show, every single night, but what truly shatters the mold is that they are streaming every concert of this tour live on YouTube and will be sharing the soundboard recordings for future fan-made Bootlegs. In light of the scheduling, financial and physical limitations many music lovers have from going to concerts, serving up an entire couch tour for free is as bold a statement regarding inclusivity as it gets in the music industry.

This tour is still young and with more marathon sets and two acoustic performances ahead, there’s no telling what direction the band will take. This is an act that is almost guaranteed to disappoint if you go to a show expecting to see a certain kind of performance because odds are, you won’t get it. King Gizz is the rare act that tries to stay true to their sound while aggressively expanding those sonic boundaries in as many directions as possible.

Microtonal guitars and custom synths are just a few of the tools they’ve wielded to accomplish this goal, but what is maybe the most impressive thing about this act is that no matter how far-out a direction they take, how bizarre the concept or technically challenging the instrumental modifications, they always sound like King Gizz. Their essence is never lost in the experiment. It’s made them one of the most formidable live acts in the world and only a dozen years into their journey, they’re still getting better. And weirder.

Boston Photos by Bryan Lasky

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Video, Audio & Setlists (via KGLW.net)