With just three days until the release of its third album of 2022, Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard has revealed a very trippy animated video for another song from it, the nine-minute “Iron Lung.”
“When I heard this track, I had just started delving into fully animated AI videos and thought, what a good opportunity to use something I barely understand mixed with my love of effects from the dawn of digital video,” says Australian musician SPOD, whose real name is Brent Griffin. “So I poured myself into a cyber spiral for a couple of months and this is the result. I love how the song seems like endless ascending and descending cycles culminating in these dramatic explosions and lifts, so it felt like a perfect fit to dive into a nine-minute descent to hell and back. Unfortunately I still dream that I’m spiraling into the eternal abyss and I’m not sure I exist anymore.”
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As for the song itself, “Iron Lung” begins with a sedate, jazzy feel before slowly cracking to life with tense electric guitar interplay and splashes of flute and organ. At the 5:37 mark, multi-instrumentalist Ambrose Kenny-Smith takes over from Stu Mackenzie on the mic, singing “frog breath,” “neck paralysis” and “pins and needles like a voodoo evil” atop a wickedly heavy riff.
“That was me trying to be like Bon Scott or something,” Kenny Smith tells SPIN of the song. “That riff is mega. I think I just got to it before Stu could and screamed and squealed.” Gizzard debuted the song live last Friday during its headlining set at the Desert Daze festival near Lake Perris, Calif.
Two more new Gizzard albums will arrive in the days ahead: Laminated Denim on Oct. 12 and Changes on Oct. 28. Meanwhile, the band’s three distinct three-hour performances at Red Rocks outside of Denver will be available as delayed streams shortly after the fact through Nugs.
Gizzard is on tour in North America through Nov. 2, the third of three non-consecutive Red Rocks gigs. Kenny Smith and Gizzard’s Cook Craig will then be on the road stateside with their other band The Murlocs through Dec. 2 in Los Angeles.
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