“Nonagon infinity, open the door!” When King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard ringleader Stu MacKenzie uttered those words to kick off the band’s eighth album, 2016’s Nonagon Infinity, it sounded like precisely the sort of fantastical, D&D-addled gibberish you’d expect to hear on a sci-fi psych concept album made by a band with a silly name and two drummers. But in hindsight, it now sounds like he was reciting a magic spell—because since that album’s release, a lot of doors have blown open for the Aussie armada. Where the prolific group previously hovered in the shadow of one-time label benefactors Thee Oh Sees, with Nonagon Infinity’s audacious album-long suite, they became international club headliners in their own right. And with this year’s more measured but still wiggy Flying Microtonal Banana, they rose to the ranks of talk-show appearances and sold-out theaters, cementing their status as one of indie rock’s most unlikely and glorious crossover stories.
Given that the band slugged it out for six years and seven albums before finding wider success, they’re taking the concept of “strike while the iron is hot” to absurd extremes. King Gizzard have promised five new albums in 2017, of which Murder of the Universe is the second. Right now, with just six months left in the year and three more records to go, it will take a Herculean effort to meet that goal. But as Murder of the Universe proves, you can never count them out—because not only have they come up with an album that matches Nonagon Infinity’s breakneck pace, intricate interconnectivity, and conceptual scope, they’ve managed to push themselves to new levels of raucousness and ridiculousness.
If you think of Nonagon Infinity as King Gizzard’s Tommy, and Flying Microtonal Banana as the pared-down Who’s Next-style reprieve, then Murder of the Universe is their Quadrophenia moment, the album that makes its immediate predecessors feel like mere warm-up exercises. Structurally, it bears surface similarities to Nonagon Infinity—including overt callbacks to that and other Gizzard records—though it breaks up the flow into three discrete sections. Like Nonagon, Murder of the Universe’s motorik-punk momentum whisks the band through interlocking sections as if they were levels in a video game. It veers into stylistic netherworlds (prog-jazz contortions, bluesy harmonica blowouts, synth-funk breakdowns) like secret bonus coin zones en route toward explosive, boss-match-style climaxes that serve as resets for the album’s recurring melodic motifs. And King Gizzard do it so often and seamlessly that even a colossal nine-section piece like “Chapter 1: The Tale of the Altered Beast” eventually acquires the instant familiarity of a three-minute pop song.
But thematically speaking, Murder of the Universe is a sequel of sorts to the doomsday prognostications of Flying Microtonal Banana. Where that record’s nature-focused lyrics ruminated on imminent environmental disaster, Murder of the Universe explores a different agent of the apocalypse—A.I. technology—through cheeky B-movie-worthy storylines involving Frankensteined monsters and vomit-spewing cyborgs. And this time, you don’t have to parse and paste together the narrative from MacKenzie’s staccato phrasing: here, the band take the guesswork out of the equation altogether and thread ominous, “Thriller”-style spoken-word exposition throughout the album’s three movements.
The voiceovers can verge on excessive—like a porno, you’re here more for the action than the plot. As MacKenzie and steely-voiced narrator Leah Senior jostle for mic time on the “Altered Beast” suite, it can sound like he’s having a shouting match with a Poe-spouting Siri. But on the closing six-part piece, “Han-Tyumi and the Murder of the Universe,” the band’s most heavy-metal movement to date is given extra heft by its elderly orator. Sounding not unlike Sir Alec Guinness doing the intro to “Iron Man,” he manages to make a first-person narrative about a barfing, self-destructing robot both oddly affecting and genuinely horrifying, his eventual physical meltdown soundtracked by the band’s musical one. In true madcap Gizzard fashion, the band’s proggiest album turns out to also be their most visceral and vital. Murder of the Universe may be built from the band’s now-familiar krautpunk battle plan, but their ability to execute outsized architectural complexity at manic, warp-speed velocity is no less astonishing.
