Another year has flown by! We have reached the third anniversary of KGLW.net as a live website, so it is time for another update. This one is on the shorter side, reflecting how brief this year has felt. ;)

Before the regular recap, we have a bit of news:

Songfish Ownership Change

Those of you who follow us closely would know that KGLW.net is powered by the Songfish Setlist Engine. This engine has been a long-term solo project of phish.net developer Adam Scheinberg, who earlier this year came to the realisation that its needs had grown bigger than he could continue servicing by himself (at least a dozen sites depend on it!), and so the service found a new owner in Andy Robinowitz. Also having recently acquired BillyBase, Andy is an experienced web development entrepreneur and manages a capable team with their ambitions set on the jam band web space, and a strong vision for its future. The handover has been in slow early stages while everything is considered properly from the ground up, but we’re pleased to see that Songfish function updates have just begun trickling through again this month (see the new album distribution chart in your attended show stats overview). Andy has only been cooperative, and understands our vision as a fan project, so we are looking forward to seeing some of our intended features come to life as it all eventually comes together.

Content Recap

With the site function itself steadier than ever, most of our content during the past year has been development or iteration of existing major site features.

• TimelandIsWacky first brought us King Gizzard Heardle in 2023, and now, after an extended period of down time, it is finally back, hosted on our own domain! If you aren’t familiar, Heardle has you guess a new song every day from a short snippet, which extends with each subsequent guess; see how few you can get it in and let us know on the forum.

• W.B.T.G. Slinger launched the Biography of Gizzard in February, a long-form full band biography covering the maximum reasonable amount of detail. This has been in the works for a few years now, and maybe a few more before it catches up to the present day; several instalments have come throughout the year, and stay tuned for the next one just around the corner!

• Last year we launched the Gizzies, a community-voted awards ceremony. The response was great and the band has put in another fantastic year so we are looking forward to the next iteration soon.

• How to best track notable live versions is something we have gone back and forth about since the site launched, so this year we are pleased to finally introduce a balanced system to help site users find rare or significant versions of all our favourite songs.

• Rspro continued the much loved tour infographic series with a highly detailed entry of EU stats. Ever wondered how the rate of banter increases as a tour progresses? You might be surprised at how much information is gathered here, and how beautifully it's presented.

• After much deliberation we have added the various bands and other music projects that are directly King Gizz related into the site tracking, for example Ill Times. This is to better serve a few stats/tracking edge cases such as a Bullant Gizzard afterparty set featuring other band members.

• Now that the band publishes almost all live show recordings themselves, the Brent’s Recs series is drawing to a natural close after 9 volumes of extremely thoughtful live tape recommendations. Stay tuned for the final installment (volume 10) coming soon!

• The place to listen to live show recordings is a British team member Jamie’s project, which entered v2 in June tapes.kglw.net. We also now have an Android app thanks to work by Pieces. Since Oct. ‘24, we have gone from 218 to 280 shows available! That’s 28% more live Gizz!

• Tour Guides! Timelandiswacky has led us through three tour guides (third to be released shortly) this year. US 2025 and EU 2025.

• One of our most popular blog posts got an update. That’s our Anatomy of a Gizz Show by Rowdy.

Thanks

Very special thanks to Cwar, always with a solution ready. The archiving, hosting, and insight he offers to the site is indispensable — in the kind of under the radar way that you might forget about while things are going right. This is so often the case that we totally forgot to acknowledge him in last year’s post. Sorry!
KQ also flies under the radar with his work for the site, however his deep and diligent research and archiving of early band material is invaluable.
Timelandiswacky deserves our special recognition for his contributions this year. Last year, he completed the monumental task of writing all of our song histories. He has continually kept these updated. He led our Tour Guide efforts (see above) and also hosted many of our setlist threads on the forum as well as reddit. His knowledge of the band is truly immense, as you can see from his scores on Heardle. Our team is truly grateful to Timelandiswacky for sharing his time and his talents with us.
Photon is one of our newest regularly contributing members, providing a solid batch of high quality photography for the site, and a general taste that fits in very well.
Thank you to Gizzhenge/Brent for the spirit you instilled in our project; we’re looking forward to the final Brent’s Recs.
Thanks to the rest of the permanent team for holding everything down, Justin, Birds, Max, Axe, Drew, and Wyatt; Ashley at the helm of the setlist notation; Yoshi, rspro, Eric, Rowan, Rowdy, lucid, and Jamie all with contributions across the site; TimelandIsWacky and Dan for everything written and Greylocke for her art.
Congratulations on your wedding, Axe! Your expertise is critical. Wedding congratulations also go to Max! You make us seen and keep us moving. Congratulations to Chris on your baby, who will surely keep him moving! We also want to thank our forum crew for hanging with us. Come join!

Of course the biggest thank you to King Gizzard themselves, and particularly the growing team around them including management and their touring crew that make it all happen. They’ve all given us another huge year of incredible music and community. From their freshest experiments using orchestra, leading to a totally new type of Gizzard show, to the highly anticipated reincarnation of the bespoke Gizzard festival experience at Field of Vision! I want to make particular note of our gratitude for the band and their art, as for what would be the first time in their history it seems there is no completed studio material ready for release. Combined with rumours of a quiet 2026 for touring, we may be in for a low-key year.

We are recruiting: Do you love live Gizz? We mean really love live Gizz. Like love live Gizz so much that you would listen to every available recording of the band from 2018-2021? And you’d even annotate all of the teases, segues, and notable bits? And wouldn’t even care that many of the recordings are shit? Well we have the role for you! That is serious. We do have that need, but we are also generally interested in bringing on new Gizz fans who would like to contribute. We’re especially hoping to find content writers for our blog. Reach out to [email protected] if you’re interested.

For our team, the best feeling is encountering our site in use: seeing one reddit user respond to another with a link to our site or riding the shuttle into town during Field of Vision and noticing a person in front of you check our site for setlists. We love passing out stickers and hearing that the recipient already knows us and pores over their stats after every show. During Night 1 of FoV, a guy told me his favorite part of the site is Brent’s Recs; I got to tap Brent on the shoulder and introduce them.
Also at FoV, our team was fortunate enough to meet Gizz staff Michelle, Maclay, and Dave who shared kind words about KGLW.net and we got to share our admiration for them. Stuff like that feels pretty good, as we’re all just doing this for the love of it and to make a resource that people like us value. So, those encounters mean a lot.
And it’s getting increasingly more likely that kind of thing will happen as our site received over 1.5 million visits this year compared to just under 1 million last year and under 400k the year before. We also now have over 4,500 registered users, nearly 2,000 more than this time last year.
All that is to say, we’re feeling appreciated, and that’s motivating for Team KGLW.net.

Words by AlteredBeef and W.B.T.G. Slinger.