Exclaim!'s Staff Picks: King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard Lean into Heavy Fantasy with "Gila Monster"

BY Allie GregoryPublished May 26, 2023

Following their latest foray into thrash metal with 2019's Infest the Rats' Nest, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard returned with a promise of more "heavy as fuck" tunes coming our way with the lengthily titled PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation, due June 16 via their own KGLW.

It was only a matter of time before the Aussie psych-rockers gave the genre another shot; as frontman Stu Mackenzie said of their Rats work, "It's just so much fun to play that music, and those songs work so well when we play them live."

Earlier this month, the band previewed the forthcoming record with "Gila Monster," possibly named after the 1959 B-horror of the same name, possibly not. The song leans heavily into fantasy and "witches and dragons and shit," according to Mackenzie — a starting point dissimilar to Rats, which found the band peddling climate change politics through a fictional world set in a near-future post-apocalypse.

Still, the song will drag you straight to hell just as well as any other on Rats, with its brutal chanting chorus, crashing cymbals and Mackenzie's Hetfield-esque vocals throughout channelling some serious '80s vibes that are sure to turn beer-drenched pits from sweaty to bloody.


 
(KGLW)

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