King Gizzard is one of the most prolific bands of our time. It’s hard to name any band right now who is constantly working the way they do. While other bands in the history of music have done multiple albums a year, how many have done five albums a year twice? For fans this is a true blessing, but for the band it can be an exhaustive, tiring journey. After releasing five full length studio albums in 2017, they took a break with no new music at all in 2018. Only in retrospect do we know that they were recording Fishing For Fishies during this time. The drought of new material finally ended in early 2019 when the band released their first new song since New Year’s Eve 2017: a synth-boogie simply titled “Cyboogie.” Bouncy, catchy, and dark, with similarities to The Rockets version of “On The Road Again,”, the song details a depressed cyborg who has lost their humanity and resents their unnatural, mechanical life. In line with this, the song sees the return of Han-Tyumi, a cyborg first heard on Murder of the Universe who recites a reversed and pitched down passage at the end of the song.. He reduces the trajectory of human evolution over two hundred thousand years down to our ability to dance, foreshadowing that it will carry us towards our extinction. With arpeggiated synthesizers, prominent vocoder use and earworms for days, the track became a nearly instant fan favorite and opened the door for the band’s return to new material in 2019, as well as new iconography that has followed the band since.
Fishing For Fishies was originally created as their blues record, although this idea didn’t pan out as it was supposed to. Despite being fully electronic in its final form, “Cyboogie” was originally a jazzy/bluesy guitar track. In an interview with RockZone, Stu said “originally ‘Cyboogie’ came from a guitar jam. We added a couple of fun jazz changes and threw some riffs on top. We recorded a couple of takes until we decided to remove the guitars and re-record everything using synthesizers. The first versions did fit in with the rest of the album, and the same thing happened with ‘Acarine’. The harmonica was reminiscent of some of the melodies of the other songs, but it was becoming increasingly darker, so we decided to dispense with the guitars and add the synths.” When asked if this version of the song would ever be released in their 2019 Reddit AMA Stu said he had no intention of it — although this was prior to the numerous demos albums.
Liner notes indicate that a majority of the song was done at Flightless HQ in January 2018, with additional drums in May at TFS Studios and overdubs at the end of the year in Melbourne. Recording sessions can be seen/heard in How to gut a Fishie. In the end Cavs (drums), Joey (synthesizer), Cook (synthesizer), Lucas (synthesizer), Ambrose (keyboards) and Stu (vocals/vocoder/keyboards/synthesizers) played on the track, with Han-Tyumi getting a vocal credit in the liner notes. The song was mixed by Sam Joseph.
On January 27th, 2019, the band teased a new video with an image showing four stills of Stu. A few days later on the 31st, Jason Galea’s music video for “Cyboogie” was released. This made “Cyboogie” not just the first new music video from the band since “Crumbling Castle,” but the first new song since the release of Gumboot Soup in late 2017.
The video shows Stu disembodied with only his head and hands visible. He is wearing a black helmet with a microphone dangling down, pointed at his face. The rest of the band are seen in red shirts and pants with white helmets playing other modular synthesizers. On the screen of each synth is a scrolling loop of the fishie face. The video consists of the band playing the song with Joey at the end, now wearing a yellow outfit, reciting Han-Tyumi’s backwards message. Footage of the band during the filming of the video made it into How to gut a Fishie. A poster of the band on set was included with vinyl copies of Fishing For Fishies.
After the video’s release, the props went their separate ways. On February 12th, a number of the modular synthesizers were put out on the sidewalk. A photo of Eric sitting on top of them was posted to Flightless’ Instagram story with the caption “come own a piece of J.Galea memorabilia.” In the following years those who took the props would post photos of theirs online, giving a better look at the pieces. It doesn’t seem like the band got rid of all of them however as another Flightless Instagram story from March 12th shows that one of the synths was being used by the band to play Nintendo 64 games (specifically Mario Kart 64, though other games can be seen on top of the cabinet). Beyond the synths, Stu’s helmet was put inside of the counter at the Flightless 168 store with the white helmets worn by the rest of the band placed atop the back wall. Later in the store’s lifetime, Stu’s helmet joined the rest.
The music video would be referenced throughout 2019 on the band’s tour posters, making its way onto posters for 2019-07-03, 2019-07-05, 2019-08-17 and 2019-08-20. That same year a print of Stu from the video was sold by Sublation.
The same night of the music video’s debut, Gizzard released a 7” single of the song with the b-side of “Acarine.” To celebrate its release, the band hosted an event at Flightless HQ where they sold the single for $10 AUD. Footage of the release party can be seen in the documentary RATTY. The song would be released as the final song of Fishing For Fishies on April 26th, 2019. The fishie logo seen on the single’s cover would later be seen in the countdown clock for “Smoke & Mirrors” while a synth pattern from the song was later used as the basis for “Evilest Man.”
Initially the band didn’t know how they were going to perform the song live. In a 2019 Reddit AMA, Stu wrote that they hadn’t rehearsed it at all. That said, it made its live debut on 2019-06-26 at Howler in Naarm (Melbourne). Throughout 2019 the song would be in heavy rotation and it even made a quick appearance in the documentary RATTY. These renditions are much less synth-based than the studio version, with extensive use of a distorted wah-like guitar from Joey, and a different vocoder used by Stu. It was usually played as a standalone song, although it did appear in short jams for a bit, such as on 2019-09-01 where it ends on a strange key to lead into “Loyalty.” It saw two performances in 2020 before disappearing after a gig on 2020-02-21 before the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, the song has not been played live, which is surprising given the band’s expanding synth setup.
Stu brought up the idea of an acoustic “Cyboogie” in December of 2021, but this never materialized. He also (seemingly in jest) responded to a request for a reggae album with the sentence: “Reggae cyboogie.”