Having released 25 albums across the past 14 years, psych-rock juggernauts King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard like to stay in the fast lane. The Melbourne outfit’s 26th, Flight b741 , touches down less than a year after its predecessor, The Silver Cord , and is the sound of a group that has decided the best way to make music is to chuck all their ideas at a wall and embrace the ensuing mess. The band have pitched the project as a departure from the concept records they’ve been churning out since the pandemic – whether that be the climate crisis rumination PetroDragonic Apocalypse or the aforementioned Kraftwerk-influenced The Silver Cord .
Of course, not having a theme is a theme in itself. To that end, the vibe throughout this chaotic and often exhausting affair is of everyone trying slightly too hard to let you know how much they’re enjoying themselves. It’s like being trapped at a house party where the host has brought his old Rolling Stones vinyl down from the loft and won’t take the bolt off the front door until he’s played every last one.
King Gizzard have always had one foot in the past, their primordial psychedelia owing a debt to the late 1960s and early 1970s. Here, they’ve gone full pastiche. On opener “Mirage City”, frontman Stu Mackenzie sounds like Noddy Holder fronting a sleep-deprived Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Meanwhile, the rumbling blues onslaughts of “Raw Feel” and “Field of Vision” hark back to Primal Scream in their “let’s pinch the .