Words by TimelandIsWacky and W.B.T.G. Slinger
Have you ever wondered how many King Gizzard songs there are? You might be surprised to know that if you tally up every track on every release, every cover performed live and every unreleased song that we can determine exists in some form, you get 346. It's enough to boggle the mind. Each with its own full story, from its first inception, through the time spent practising, recording and producing, the release cycle, promotion, honing year upon year of live performance, and the unique personal connection it forms with all of us along the way.
Today we are proud to announce that King Gizzard Song Histories — that is, as much information as can be gathered on these stories, about every single song by King Gizzard — is coming right here to the site!
It’s a colossal work at about 175,000 words in total, the size of a medium book. This project has been clinically executed by our own TimelandIsWacky, who you may remember from his detailed Chicago ‘23 Residency Retrospective, who can explain the project best in his own words:
When I initially got into King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard in 2019, there was a decent amount of information out there about the things this band does. I understood that Nonagon Infinity looped, I got the environmental themes of their discography, I knew what a microtonal guitar did, etc. These were tidbits that instantly grabbed my attention as a listener, the type of stuff that excites people first getting into the band. However, as a music nerd, my fascination with Gizzard has always run deeper than these introduction points. When talking about my favorite bands, I always found the histories of certain songs fascinating. Hearing the inspiration behind the lyrics, or who played on what, can be an eye-opening experience that can fundamentally change how you view a song. Those stories are truly valuable and yet for Gizzard they have never fully been told. While many have done what they can to preserve the history of this band, the full individual stories are scattered across the internet in various interviews, Reddit AMAs, mini-documentaries and social media posts — all of which are fading to time with many now completely lost. This is all running with the presumption that there is song info to begin with, and with Gizzard’s constantly expanding catalog, the chances of finding nothing are very high.
The best resource had been Genius, a website so unreliable in its citation and prone to Gizzverse speculation that it's hard to call it a source. The Weirdo Swarm needed a comprehensive breakdown akin to Phish.net’s history pages, the All the Songs book series, Dead.net’s Greatest Stories Ever Told articles, and The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics. King Gizzard has never had such a resource, despite their dedicated fanbase and rate of output. That is, until now.
After KGLW.net published my recap for the Chicago ‘23 shows last year, I was invited to help with the site. That October, I was prompted to lead a song histories project. With that initiative, I told myself I would document every single song the band has ever written or performed. And so, I did exactly that. Since that moment, I have written about every studio album, EP, live album, single, remix, demo, film, music video, guest appearance, radio edit, cover and unreleased song I could find. The result of this process is a biography that is over four hundred pages long.
In my opinion, this is the most comprehensive guide to the band’s songs that has ever been published.
On each of the 30 days until the band’s 2024 European Tour, we’ll be releasing it to you.
This project was largely constructed by studying the band’s various albums/films and pairing my observations with interviews from across the years which KGLW.net has thankfully gathered, archived and preserved. That wasn’t enough, however, and I knew that there were many other things worth finding. I went through the band’s social media pages to find insights on how and when they were working, and what songs were used in what promos. I went through their press releases, Gizzymail and Flightless newsletters. I discovered a number of old interviews that were untracked by KGLW.net. One of these, containing great info on 12 Bar Bruise, disappeared hours (if not minutes) after I had archived it. Sometimes I was dead set on finding a video location such as with “Muckraker,” so I looked at the interviews, pulled up Google Maps, and found it. Other times a music video would contain a source that hasn’t been tracked such as “Sam Cherry’s Last Shot” and “I Am Not A Man Unless I Have A Woman,” so I looked across the internet and tried to find what I could. There is information in these writeups that is not common knowledge, that’s for sure [editor's note: and even entire King Gizzard songs I can nearly guarantee you didn’t even know existed]. On top of this, each page has a number of links and connections for you to explore. These range from shortcuts to other related songs and shows, to scientific studies and news articles about real world events and discoveries which inspired the band’s lyrics. The end result is a “web” of information that you can get lost in for hours.
While we are now releasing these song histories for you to read, our job is nowhere near done. As this band continues to grow and change with a seemingly unending stream of music, there will always be something new to add. This is compounded by the fact that we are constantly uncovering new information about King Gizzard’s past. There are many things we still don’t know, including music video info (who made the video for “Black Tooth,” what films/TV shows are in the video for “30 Past 7,” what happened to the modular synth props from “Cyboogie”), missing radio edits (“Sleep Drifter”), song inspiration info (what song by The Clean inspired “Nein”), personnel info, and much more. There are also many songs that have no external information about them such as “Time = $$$”, or demo tracks like “Sweet Talking.” All of this means that we will continue to update the pages with relevant info as time goes on.
(Note: if you would like to submit info to the project, you can use our contact form or reach out via our social media accounts. While we’ll take any leads, we’d appreciate it if you provide sources for your claims.)
This project would not have happened if it weren’t for W.B.T.G. Slinger (Wyatt) and RattleRattleRattle (Dan), who painstakingly edited, proofread and added insight to every single song page. I also want to credit the rest of the KGLW.net team who provided their own info, uncovered some incredible facts and supported the project for months. Shoutout to Ashley and Axe who helped with HTML/markdown. Additionally, I would also like to give thanks to the thousands of fans who documented and posted about the band since 2010, and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard for creating that history to begin with. This took almost a half a year of work to set up, and I hope that these pages are a helpful and educational resource for fans both old and new.
We will be releasing song info in (mostly) chronological order over the next thirty days. You can navigate to the songs by clicking the album name, selecting a song and going to the “history” tab. For oddball categories such as covers and unreleased material that don't belong in a larger project, we have linked every song below.
You can also use the KGLW.net song list and the discography page to navigate to what you would like to learn about.
The release schedule is planned as follows, ending when Gizzard begin their 2024 Europe tour:
4/15: Teenage Gizzard
4/16: Willoughby’s Beach
4/17: 12 Bar Bruise
4/18: Eyes Like the Sky
4/19: Float Along - Fill Your Lungs
4/20: Oddments and Gripless
4/21: I’m In Your Mind Fuzz and “The Wholly Ghost”
4/22: Quarters!
4/23: Paper Mâché Dream Balloon
4/24: Nonagon Infinity
4/25: Flying Microtonal Banana
4/26: Murder of the Universe
4/27: Sketches of Brunswick East
4/28: Polygondwanaland
4/29: Gumboot Soup
4/30: Fishing For Fishies
5/1: Infest the Rats’ Nest and Chunky Shrapnel
5/2: Hear My Eyes: Suspiria and covers
5/3: K.G.
5/4: L.W. and “Fury”
5/5: Butterfly 3000
5/6: Made In Timeland and unreleased material
5/7: Satanic Slumber Party
5/8: Omnium Gatherum
5/9: Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava
5/10: Laminated Denim
5/11: Changes
5/12: PetroDragonic Apocalypse
5/13: The Silver Cord
5/14: Demos Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3, Vol. 4, Vol. 5, Vol. 6
Covers:
“All My Loving”
"Boogie"
“Boy On The Run”
“Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap”
“Every 1’s A Winner”
“Ghost”
“I Gotta Rock ‘n’ Roll”
“I Wanna Be Your Dog”
“I Was Made For Lovin’ You”
“La Grange”
“Lean Woman Blues”
“Let There Be Rock”
“Master Of The Universe”
“Ocean Deep”
“On the Road Again”
“Open My Eyes”
“Proud Mary”
“Pushin’ Too Hard”
“Silver Machine”
“Stella Joy”
“T.V. Eye”
“These Boots Are Made For Walkin’”
“Whole Lotta Love”
“You Gotta Fight for Your Right To Party!"
“You’re Not Naked”
Unreleased:
“Depressed”
“Eucalyptus Noserun”
“Gypsy”
“High School”
“I Am Dumb”
“I Don’t Love You No More”
“I Say”
“Jam”
“Love For Me”
“Mornin”
“Nonagon Intro Theme”
“OCS”
“Oh God”
“Other Side”
“Pop”
“Snow”
“Steve Nichols”
“Stoned”
“Talk Talk Talk”
“Thunderstorms”
“Torture Chamber”
“Unreleased (‘Riff Raff’)”
“Western”
“What I Do”