“Furman, the artist hailing from Chicago, Illinois, has become defined by her directness. Her music tackles queerness and transness, as well as notions of young romance and mental health, often from the perspective of ripe anger and frustration”
Melbourne’s 60’s tinged psych-rock punks The Murlocs brought their outrageous live show to euphoric crowds at LEVITATION festival last weekend and will perform at Red Rocks Amphitheatre tomorrow alongside King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard with whom they share several band members. In celebration of their national headlining fall tour kicking off a week from today, the band has unleashed the “Living Under a Rock” (Live at the Forum) video. The electrifying video gives fans and critics an early taste of their explosive live performance.
“Melbourne’s 60’s tinged Psych-Rock outfit The Murlocs recently played at Levitation and will perform at Red Rocks Amphitheatre today alongside King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard with whom they share several band members. In celebration of their national headlining Fall tour kicking off soon, the band has unleashed the “Living Under a Rock” (Live at the Forum) video”
“Australian-psych rockers The Murlocs have steadily accrued a dedicated following over the past decade and have largely stepped out of obscurity and into the indie spotlight. With six studio albums and a rigorous touring schedule – including tours with fellow Melburnians King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard – Uncle Murl are about to embark on a headlining U.S. tour. They glimmer on stage and riff around gloriously. We chatted with the Murlocs’ lead vocalist, harmonica player, percussionist, keyboardist, guitarist, and all around mastermind, Ambrose Kenny-Smith, before they hit the road”
“Over the last thirty years, Kathleen Hanna has been at the forefront of punk and politics. From pioneering the genre of riot grrrl with Bikini Kill to melding third-wave feminism with electro-pop in Le Tigre, Hanna’s music has always rallied against the norms of the day. But despite the music’s specificity, many of the messages still feel frustratingly vital. Chatting with Maps ahead of Bikini Kill’s 2023 Australian tour, Hanna discusses her frustration with the band’s relevance: “I wish that this band had no business being on a stage again” she tells Fee, “the thing that’s really upsetting is that [we’re] still relevant”
“Australian psych-rock band, The Murlocs will perform at Red Rocks Amphitheatre tomorrow alongside King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard with whom they share several band members. In celebration of their national headlining fall tour kicking off a week from today, the band has unleashed the “Living Under a Rock” (Live at the Forum) video. Frontman Ambrose Kenny-Smith shares, “Some people live a sheltered life by choice and some people are born into it. ‘Rapscallion’ has had enough of living under a rock. It’s time for a fresh start.”
“Fresh off of performaning at LEVITATION in Austin and with a show at Red Rocks Amphitheater with King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard (with whom they share several members) tonight, 60s psych twinged punk band, The Murlocs, are kicking off their headlining North American tour with a bang and bringing their energetic and outrageous live show on the road, heading to Philadelphia on 11/7 and criss crossing the continent over the next three weeks”
“King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, the pretty-much-every-genre rock band from Australia, boarded a tour bus in Montreal at 2 a.m. one night this month and arrived in Brooklyn nine hours later. No gig until the following night, in Queens: a rare day off. “I passed out for an hour at the hotel, grabbed a chicken burrito, and here we are,” Ambrose Kenny-Smith, one of the band’s singers and multi-instrumentalists, said that afternoon. “Here” was a skate park under the Kosciuszko Bridge, on the Brooklyn side of Newtown Creek. “On off days, we try to go for a skate,” he said. “It keeps the mental health in check.””
“The Melbourne-based band has put out five studio albums, but their latest is perhaps the most impressive both in music and creativity. Rapscallion, which was released on September 16th on ATO Records, is a 12-track coming-of-age novel in album form. It depicts a wildly squalid odyssey featuring various peculiar characters, partly inspired by frontman Ambrose Kenny-Smith’s own adolescence as a nomadic skate kid. The band self-produced the album at their home studios during the pandemic which helped maintain their DIY approach while applying darker, more primitive themes to their music. Kenny-Smith said that he hopes “when people hear the album they really dig deep into the world of the story we’ve created, and it gives them that same sensation of traveling into the unknown.”
“King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard have shared their thoughts on their freshly-dropped album ‘Changes’, saying their 23rd studio effort is “the most complex we’ve ever done”
“The Melbourne band, one of the most formidable live acts in the world, also somehow finds time to release more albums than almost anyone, with an admirable degree of quality control. This month they’ve already released two albums, the Can-inspired cut-and-paste exercise Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava (for which they jammed their way into songs in the studio and edited them together afterwards) and the motorik rave-up Laminated Denim (comprising two 15-minute songs, each one written at 120 bpm to mimic the pulse of a ticking clock). Today they’re back with the last album of this October outpouring”
“The band’s North American tour is a breathtaking live comeback for them, even by Gizz standards. In just over a month, they’ll play a headline set at Desert Daze; four marathon three-hour sets, three of them at the picturesque Red Rocks amphitheatre; and a stadium show in New York supported by Black Midi, Leah Senior and Jonathan Toubin”
From humble beginnings as a goofily named, “hey, why not?” college project in Australia to releasing 23 different genre-jumping albums since 2009, King Gizzard has suddenly become one of the most talked-about bands in rock, seized upon by jam band-loving Gen Z stoners, Metallica and Tool devotees jonesing for like-minded heavy riffage, suburban dads still holding a candle for AC/DC and Pink Floyd, and Discogs-loving record nerds perpetually in search of the next great buzz. At a time when many established artists can’t make the economics work to tour at all and many listeners cling to the notion that “rock is dead,” there’s something quite extraordinary about what King Gizzard is doing
“John Dwyer and the rest of the OSEES are in Austin this weekend, playing all four nights of Levitation fest, and have holiday shows in NYC in December (Brooklyn Made on 12/16 & 12/17). After that they’ll head to Australia in February for six shows”
“Having already toured with Freedom Band earlier this year, Ty Segall will begin his solo acoustic tour on November 4 in Portland. The first part of the tour is with Emmett Kelly, while East Coast shows — including Brooklyn’s Music Hall of Williamsburg on November 15 — are with Charles Moothart. He’ll head to Australia and New Zealand in the new year”
“The discography of Australian sonic explorers King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard is littered with grand conceptual flourishes, ambitious schemes and missions often seemingly impossible. Be they reinventing the electric guitar to explore the outer reaches of Middle Eastern psychedelia, soundtracking climate change nightmares with blood-flecked thrash-metal, finding new possibilities within archaic synthesisers or composing the world’s first ever infinitely looping psych-prog mobius strip, the impossible seems something the Gizzards eat for breakfast”
“The Aussie rock explorationists recently dropped ‘Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava,’ and have two more releases planned within a month. What binds them beyond mere prolificacy is King Gizzard’s infectious curiosity and creativity”
While songs like “Fake French” and “Well Well Well” glide between rap and post-punk influences, Hanna’s lyrics on “FYR.” feel ever more prescient in a post- Roe v. Wade America. In one of the cheekier references to the film Psycho, Hannah sings: “One step forward, five steps back/ One cool record in the year of rock-rap/ Yeah we got all the power/ getting stabbed in the shower/ And we got equal rights on ladies’ night”
“In All of Us Flames, Ezra Furman pens a record for the apocalypse, but it’s not at all hopeless. This apparent contradiction becomes slightly less mysterious when you consider the circumstances in which the album was made. All of Us Flames was written almost entirely during lockdown, when Furman was raising a young child and beginning to embrace her identity as a trans woman. The result is a powerful meditation on finding community in the face of solitude, with melodies that are at once morose and euphoric, all anchored by Furman’s silvery vocals. Her unique brand of intellectual but deeply-felt art-rock has won her devout fans, including comedy legend Sarah Silverman, who called Furman to chat about Judaism, baby jokes, and the overlap between comedy and music.”
“The C.I.A.—the band comprising Ty Segall, his wife Denée Segall, and the Cairo Gang’s Emmett Kelly—have announced a new album: Surgery Channel arrives January 20 via In the Red. Today, the group has shared lead single “Impersonator,” along with a music video directed by Joshua Erkman and Denée Segall. In the clip, Denée Segall’s face morphs as other images—of Miss Piggy, Pinhead from Hellraiser, Gollum, Chucky, and more—are projected on top of it. Check it out below, and scroll down for the LP artwork and tracklist”
“The C.I.A., the project of Ty and Denée Segall and Emmett Kelly, have announced a sophomore LP, Surgery Channel, out January 20 via In The Red. It follows their self-titled 2018 debut. Surgery Channel was written in 2021 and recorded by Mike Kriebel at Ty’s own Harmonizer Studios”
“Ty Segall, his wife Denée, and the Cairo Gang’s Emmett Kelly formed a band called the C.I.A. back in 2018 and released their debut album that same year. Now they’ve recorded a follow-up to it, which is called Surgery Channel and will be out early next year. Today, they’re sharing the album’s lead single, the demonic and pulsing “Impersonator.”
“Hate Dancin’” appears on Changes, King Gizzard’s third album of October and sixth album of 2022. The psych band originally began working on the album way back in 2017, but they weren’t satisfied with their recordings until now”
This Friday, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard release Changes, their third album of October 2022 following Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava and Laminated Denim. That will also be their fifth album of the year, not counting the remix album they dropped in January. They’ve just shared the video for “Hate Dancin'” from the album and it’s on the group’s poppier side. “I started writing a song about how I hate dancing, but then I realized that I love dancing,” says KG frontman Stu Mackenzie. The video has the band showing off their moves and you can watch that below.
“It was originally going to be the fifth album that we made in 2017,” the band’s Stu Mackenzie said in our recent KGLW cover story. “We had it locked in to be the fifth record. And we recorded what we thought was going to be the album in 2017. It just wasn’t fully realized at that time. We didn’t have the musical vocabulary to actually complete this idea.” On Changes, “we’re kind of flicking between key like every chord change on every song,” he explained. “It’s these two keys, and they shouldn’t be in tune with each other, basically. We’re sort of flicking between them the whole time.”
“I had the great fortune of seeing Bikini Kill recently and have been buzzing since. I have been going to concerts my whole life (I am 55) and good ones always linger, but this one hit different. It is less the music following me, and more the energy and feminist badass-ery that Bikini Kill imparted upon the thousands of us who were there”
“King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have released new album ‘Laminated Denim’, the second of three the ultra-prolific psych-rockers will share in October.
The album was released on Wednesday (October 12), and consists of two tracks – ‘The Land Before Timeland’ and ‘Hypertension’ – both of which are exactly 15 minutes in length. ‘Laminated Denim’ serves as a spiritual successor to earlier album ‘Made In Timeland’ (which its title is an anagram of), which was released physically in March of this year before arriving digitally yesterday alongside ‘Laminated Denim’ “
“King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard launched its new album, Laminated Denim, last night (Oct. 11) against the backdrop of two marathon three-hour performances at Red Rocks outside Denver. The vinyl (with an actual denim cover) was available early at the merch stand yesterday, and the music itself was debuted over the PA during each show’s intermission”
“Laminated Denim is an anagram of Made in Timeland, the album the ever-prolific psychedelic band released in March. Like that project, Laminated Denim is comprised of only two songs — “The Land Before Timeland” and “Hypertension” — that both run for exactly 15 minutes. To coincide with its release, King Gizzard have also uploaded Made in Timeland to streaming services for the first time”
“King Gizzard are very busy this month; in addition to being on tour in North America they’re releasing three albums in three weeks. Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava was released last week, and now here’s Laminated Denim, the band’s 22 album in 10 years. They call this a “spiritual successor” to Made in Timeland from earlier this year — “Laminated Denim” is also an anagram of “Made in Timeland” — and it consists of two very jammy 15-minute songs, “The Land Before Timeland” and “Hypertension.”
“It also happens to be 10 years to the day since they released their first, 12 Bar Bruise. In the decade since that record’s fried echo-chamber psych-surf shenanigans, King Gizz have tried their hand at (among other things) a Spaghetti Western epic narrative, heady jazz fusion, dreamy psychedelic folk, prog-metal short stories, woozy soft rock, brain-melted boogie, charred primitivist thrash, panoramic synth-pop, and extensive experiments with microtonal composition — most of it merged seamlessly into the zany garage-punk jam-band vibe that has made them one of the most infectiously fun live acts in the world. They’ve also documented that concert experience via umpteen live albums and official bootlegs freely uploaded for their fans to download and distribute how they see fit. It’s a rare group that can convincingly blur the lines between Phish, Neu!, King Crimson, and the Osees while never sounding like anything less than themselves”
