Words, photos, and charts by BetweenTheEars

In fall 2025, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s long-simmering romance with electronic music culminated in the debut of an entirely new performance format: a series of ten fully electronic, improvisation-heavy “rave shows” spanning two continents and 22 days. Launching on 10/24/25 in Melbourne, Australia and continuing with nine more shows across Europe, the rave series dropped nearly 24 hours of electronic madness for the fanbase to digest (23 hours and 13 minutes, to be specific!).

As Stu put it, “We're just going to show up with our patch cables and our modular eurorack pyramid and we are going to have fun. It’s very improv … we will put a few songs in the setlist for people to jump into and then we will just rave.”

In this blog post, we’ll dive deep into what was a boundary-pushing series of performances. We all know the improvisation levels were high, debuts and new electronic arrangements were being dropped left and right, and the sets were long. But just how long were the songs, how many debuts did we get, and how did the set lengths compare to recent tours?

By leveraging and analyzing the trove of setlist and song timing data we keep here on kglw.net, we can put some numbers behind these three major themes that emerged from rave tour – and hopefully unearth some new insights into the insanity. For those curious about our methodology and dataset, we’ve included a brief discussion at the end of the post.

Soundboard recordings for the entirety of the rave tour have been made available by the band via the official bootlegger program, and both SBDs and AUDs can be streamed right here at tapes.kglw.net.

Without further ado, let’s jump right in.

Debuts, Debuts, Debuts!

Rave tour offered up a seemingly endless buffet of debuts in the form of never-before-heard new songs, live debuts, and new synth-table arrangements of old favorites. In total, we witnessed:

• 2 new song premieres: JOJAM, LUSEQ
• 8 live debuts: 2.02 Killer Year, Blue Morpho Butterfly 3000, Hell’s Itch, Dreams, Fishing for Fishies, Candles, No Body
• 11 synth table arrangement debuts: Hell’s Itch, MOTU, Fishing for Fishies, Cyboogie, Magma, Ice V, The Bitter Boogie, Muddy Water, Perihelion, Candles, No Body

…and all over the course of only 10 shows! For those who like to read the KGLW tea leaves, many of these debuts were foreshadowed during a previous Reddit AMA by the band.

With the exception of Vienna and Copenhagen, each show contained at least one debut or new table arrangement. The folks in Melbourne (2.02 Killer Year, Blue Morpho, JOJAM, and Butterfly 3000) and Tillburg (Ice V, Muddy Water, The Bitter Boogie, Fishing For Fishies) hit the jackpot, with each show featuring a whopping four debuts or new table arrangements. The band reached deep into their catalog, sourcing debut material from one-third of their discography (9 of their 27 albums: Butterfly 3000, Ice, Death…, Murder of the Universe, Fishing For Fishies, Paper Mâché Dream Balloon, Gumboot Soup, Infest the Rats' Nest, Changes, and Omnium Gatherum).

All told, the band spent 3 hours and 50 minutes playing debuts or new table arrangements. That’s 1 out of every 6 minutes (16%) for the entire rave tour! Lets see what this looks like when we plot it out over the course of the tour.

Improv For Days

One of the defining features of the rave shows was the amount of improvisation. The “table sections” of KGLW shows have long been fertile ground for experimentation and improvisation, but the rave shows took things to a new level, pushing improv to the forefront and making it a defining feature of the new show format.

That focus on improvisation was reflected in song lengths:

• The average song length was 15:19, with London 11/2/25 coming in with the longest average song length at 16:33. That’s more than twice the typical average song length of 7:36 (taken from a sample of the first 10 shows of the 2025 Euro Residency tour).
• 46% of all song performances were longer than 15 minutes. Of the 38 songs eclipsing 15 minutes, 17 songs passed 20 minutes, and four touched the half hour mark! The honor for the longest rendition of tour goes to the Copenhagen “Extinction,” which we clocked at 33:18. Don’t sleep on this one; it features an especially unique dub section starting around 17:46 on the bootlegger.

While debuts and bustouts throughout each show offered novelty and variety, the band actually shrunk the number of songs in the setlist rotation, leaning heavily on their existing repertoire of table-ready songs when it came time to get loose and jam:

• 6.1% of the entire tour (1:24:52) was spent playing “Kepler 22b,” the most play time of any song. Hot on its heels was “Extinction” at 1:18:34, achieved despite one fewer play (four) than “Kepler 22b” (five). Other songs with more than one hour of cumulative play time included synth table stalwarts “The Silver Cord,” “Set,” “Gilgamesh,” and “Swan Song.”
• “Theia”’s average length was 25:30, the longest average play time of any single song from the rave show run. While “Theia” appeared on only two occasions, the folks in Manchester and Prague got lucky with the two longest renditions of this song to date.

Here’s how each of the 37 songs played stack up against each other. In particular, note the heavy reliance on material from The Silver Cord, while still showcasing material sourced from a large swath of their discography.

Longer Shows, Shorter Setlists

Given the band’s general adherence to a pre-written setlist created to fill a predetermined show length, the number of songs on the setlist has a significant influence over the amount of improvisation required to finish the show at the right time. In other words, the amount of jamming included in these shows was a premeditated decision. The band averaged only 9.1 songs per show, which is more than 40% less than the 15.7 songs/show played during the 2025 Euro residency tour, despite significantly longer shows that added nearly a half hour to the usual two-hour set length. At an average show length of 2hrs 19minutes, rave sets dwarfed the non-marathon set lengths from the spring European Residency tour, whose shows weighed in with an average 1hr 57min runtime. At this point, a marathon rave set seems entirely achievable, as our analysis indicates it would require adding only two additional songs to the setlist to make a 3-hour show.

The show- and setlist-craft displayed by the band shows they took the rave concept seriously, crafting performances that kept the grooves rolling, and stopping as little as possible, just as you’d see at a traditional rave. The band paused between songs during only 10 of their 81 potential opportunities. And more than half of pauses were due to technical difficulties or pauses to introduce opener Maddie Ashman to sit in and jam. In fact, there were four shows (Melbourne, both London shows, and Tilburg) where the music never stopped at all and segues were made throughout the entire show.

These weren’t just your typical “>” segues, either. Of the 71 transitions that were performed by the band, more than half (40) earned a coveted “->” setlist notation, indicating an interwoven total segue between songs. In particular, we’re partial to the “Magenta Mountain” -> “Sense” -> “Kepler 22b” sequence to close out the second night in London, a sequence of sublime setcraft that saw the band blend these songs together into a massive 50-minute-long crescendo to close out the show.

The rave tour featured a relatively tight song rotation of 37 unique, table-friendly songs over 10 shows. Contrast this with the first 10 shows of the Spring 2025 European Residency. Those shows featured nearly three times as many unique songs (102) while featuring only one additional song per night (10.2 songs/show), compared to the rave tour (9.1 songs/show). Despite the restriction of having to utilize 25% of their rave tour repertoire each night, the band was still able to achieve a good amount of variety in the setlist, repeating zero songs as openers or closers. And the band appeared unfazed by the limited songlist, even electing to leave several songs previously performed with electronic arrangements on the table (or rather, off the table, as it were). “Down the Sink,” “Change,” and “Gondii”… we miss you and hope to see you again in the future!

What’s Next?

The bar has now been raised, and a new precedent has been set for the synth table’s capabilities. Where does the rave show concept go from here? Will we see more full-blown rave tours going forward, similar to the adoption of the residency model? Comments from Stu and Joey and the recent Mango Sticky Rice release point towards the band continuing to pursue electronic genres in studio and on stage.

On the other hand, the reduced frequency of acoustic shows (none in 2025, and only seven from 2022-2024) and a lack of future scheduled orchestral shows may point to a full series of rave shows being a one-off intended to scratch a particular musical itch, with the concept gradually fading as the focus transitions into new, unexplored genres and performance styles.

Realistically, perhaps we’ll get something in between, where occasional rave shows pop up within tours – à la the Forest Hills rave show scheduled for this summer – but the synth table repertoire will likely continue to be performed as a discrete section within a standard setlist featuring blocks of thematically-linked songs. This approach has appeared to be the band’s go-to from 2022 to the present, as the December 2021 Princess Theater Residency concept featuring fully-themed nights (Acoustic, Jam, Microtonal, Garage Rock, and Metal) has yet to be repeated.

Regardless of what happens, we’re here for it! Not only to listen to and enjoy, but to analyze and dissect as well. Curious about what other insights are contained within the kglw.net dataset? Take a spin over to our My Stats section, where you can build custom groups of shows and generate summary stats on your own. Also available is our Stats Filter, which can be used to generate datasets for any combination of song, tour, venue, performance type, or date criteria.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more musical and numerical analyses from the site team right here on the King Gizzette!

Inside our methodology: The dataset we’re using is the kglw.net setlists and song times for the 10 rave shows from Melbourne (11/24/25) through Sweden (11/15/25). We’re making as few alterations to the data as possible so as not to put our finger on the scale. This means that the dataset includes occurrences of “Maddie Jam,” “drum solo,” and songs that were aborted due to technical difficulties. Two potentially new songs, "JOJAM" and "LUSEQ," are also included. These tunes, whose existence has yet to be officially confirmed or denied by the band, were included on the stage setlists used by the band and we are treating them as standalone songs in this analysis, just as we currently do in our setlists. The dataset is accurate as of the publication date of this piece, but we note that the setlists are a living document and may change in the future.