Murder Of The Universe is the second of five albums from King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard set for release in 2017. Broken down into 3 distinct 'chapters', the 21-track album is concerned with the downfall of man and the death of the planet. The album was recorded at Flightless HQ in East Brunswick, Melbourne Australia in early 2017 and produced by the band's Stu Mackenzie. Lit by thunderclaps and lightning, Murder Of The Universe inhabits a sonic landscape of death, decay, ossification, fossilisation, rebirth. It is a place occupied by wandering shape-shifting beasts, bleeding skies, pools of blood, great fires and mushroom clouds; a planet rent asunder by conflict. A disorientating experience, the album hinges on three distinct sections that rise from larval beds, and whose lyrics should be carved in stone, squeezed from moss, discovered in ancient runes. And all the while a passing cast of characters imbue the tale with both human and non-human emotions. Additional narration is provided throughout by Melbourne folk singer Leah Senior and 'UK Charles', an automated robotic voice programme that the band downloaded for free, and who features as the cyborg character, Han-Tyumi. Snippets of earlier recordings breakthrough collection I'm In Your Mind Fuzz and Nonagon Infinity resurface throughout like ghostly shadow form to haunt their latest sound. In years to come King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard will be judged not by their separate albums, but by a body of work where themes, melodies, motifs, riffs and ideas resurface and recur, each album peeling back a layer of the onion to glimpse at past and future alike. "We've always thought of our albums as portals through which you can move from one to the other," says Stu. "Or maybe each album is a bridge to the next part of the story. Songs sync together, records can be played in loops and past ideas recur or are reprised, and then woven into new textures. These ideas aren't necessarily contrived though...sometimes these just happen."
1 A New World
2 Altered Beast I
3 Alter Me I
4 Altered Beast II
5 Altered Me III
6 Alter Beast III
7 Alter Me III
8 Altered Beast IV
9 Life/death
10 Some Context
11 The Reticent Raconteur
12 The Lord of Lightning (Pt. 1)
13 The Lord of Lightning (Pt. 2)
14 The Balrog
15 The Floating Fire
16 The Acrid Corpse
17 Welcome to an Altered Universe
18 Digital Black
19 Han-Tyumi, the Confused Cyborg
20 Soy-protein Munt Machine
21 Vomit Coffin
22 Murder of the Universe
