Back in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a Swedish neurosurgeon named Lars Leksell faced a problem which he was dedicated to finding an answer to. Sometimes patients had tumors and lesions that were small enough that conventional surgery couldn’t really help. Leksell’s idea to solve this issue was a bit wild. Instead of opening up the head, they could use radiation. If one were to concentrate the protons into beams and then aim them at a specific small target, you could create a level of radiation large enough to kill the tumor/lesion without harming what’s around it. The idea sounds crazy but this is the driving idea behind modern radiosurgery. Leksell, alongside Ladislau Steiner and Börje Larsson, would invent the Gamma Knife in 1967. The machine has been adopted across the world to fight brain tumors and has no doubt saved many lives. Forty-nine years later the band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard would name a song after Leksell’s innovations, a song that in fact has nothing to do with radiosurgery. “Gamma Knife” focuses on a quest for physical and spiritual youth and a narrator willing to cut through skin for the purpose. With its high energy, references to other points within the Gizzverse and a unique drum solo, it’s one of the band’s most popular tracks, to the point of it making appearances in TV shows. As of writing, “Gamma Knife” is one of the most played songs in their live career. It has one of the band’s most popular music videos as well. There aren’t many King Gizzard songs that have the same staying power as this one.
Joey noted in an Uproxx interview that “Gamma Knife” was one of the the first times they had experimented with time signatures that would go on to define a whole album, as opposed to standing out different from the the rest of the tracklist. It’s also a first for Cavs, as it features a drum solo during its instrumental break, though he wasn’t initially convinced to do it. As Stu said to Flavorwire “Cavs is a brilliant drummer, but he’s very modest. He’s not an ego drummer who wants to do a big solo… He was like ‘No, no, I don’t want to do a drum solo.’ And then I think when this song came around, it’s got that kind of like — maybe 11/8 or a bar of six and a bar of five in a row? — so, I think he had this thing where this guitar thing was happening where he could do, like, a drum solo or drum break that wasn’t really self-indulgent. It took a bit of convincing, which I guess is a testament to his low ego.”
The first known appearance of the song was on February 23rd, 2015 when Joey posted a video of Ambrose recording a harmonica part for an early version of the song to his Instagram page. Unlike the final version, this was recorded at A Secret Location Sound Recorders with Paul Maybury. The band were recording the album at the time but ended up taking a break to work on Paper Mâché Dream Balloon. It (to our knowledge) debuted at the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival in Manchester, Tennessee on 2015-6-12. There’s a trend with Nonagon Infinity material to start with unused lyrics and even some different instrumentals and “Gamma Knife” is no different. Looking at 2015-6-19 for example, we hear some radically different lyrics, get a different section before the drum break after the first chorus, and totally miss the “gamma” yells by the band. The song lacked its complete identity even by early 2016 (2016-2-15) and it wasn’t until 2016-2-28 that the lyrics we know had finally been set. In a live setting at this point, it wasn’t always given the “People-Vultures” outro. Going back to 2016-2-28 we can hear that the song abruptly ends without moving into the next track. An early version of the song, as well as rehearsal footage, can be found in the documentary BOOTLEG HOLIDAY FROM HELL.
“Gamma Knife” would be recorded at Daptone Records in Brooklyn, New York by Wayne Gordon with vocals recorded at the bungalow of Michael Badger.
The song was teased in a promotional video for Nonagon Infinity on February 25th and debuted on Apple Music’s Beats 1 radio show. A music video and single were released that same day. Directed by Jason Galea and Danny Cohen, it features the band playing in robes at Emerald Lake Park in Victoria. Each member’s face is painted a different color and as the video progresses, various monks (referred to as wizards by Galea) in cloaks of each color make their way to the band before plunging their daggers into the ground, creating the shape of the nonagon. At the end of the video the band and the old men are scattered across the ground with a massive egg in the middle, setting up the video for “People-Vultures.”
Originally Cohen and Galea envisioned the video close to early Black Sabbath television footage with the band playing the song on stage but went in a more psychedelic direction. Cohen stated that the concepts for “Gamma Knife” and its sister video (spinning camera and giant creature with the band) were originally one but split to make a story, leading to the concept of the unfinished Nonagon Infinity movie. Going into the project Cohen felt that the videos shouldnt’ stray far from what Galea had set up previously and that “Gamma Knife” was inspired by the Alejandro Jodorowsky’s films El Topo and The Holy Mountain. The video’s spinning camera was achieved by cameraman Joel Betts who ran around the tripod with everyone else in the crew running behind so they wouldn’t be in the shot. As for the color of the monks/wizards, this was a reference to an old version of the Nonagon Infinity cover which featured nine distinct illustrations representing the nine songs on the album, each with a differently colored background . The cloaked monks/wizards would later reappear in the video for “Invisible Face” and the video for “The Lord of Lightning vs Balrog” with the blue monk/wizard making an appearance in the “Black Hot Soup" music video. He would later be called the “Soup Wizard” on the poster for 2022-04-19. The yellow wizard (referred to as simply “wizard”) would appear on the poster for 2019-07-05.
Jodorowsky’s influence on the video was direct, so much so that he would contact Cohen on March 8th, 2016. The contents of the email are unknown, but he would later state his appreciation for the video on Twitter. The videos for “Gamma Knife” and “People-Vultures” were combined and released on June 5th, 2016. Nonagon Infinity was released on April 28th, 2016 with “Gamma Knife” as its third song, sitting between “Big Fig Wasp” and “People-Vultures.” The song would end up hitting number sixty-one on Triple J’s Hottest 100 of 2016, and was nominated for the APRA’s Song Of The Year category. In 2017 the band used a live version of the song in a promotional video for Gizzfest III.
Following its release, the song was heavily played on tour. Despite its consistent rotation, the song has not evolved much since Nonagon’s release, only being moved in the setlist over time. In early 2016 the song was typically played at the beginning of the show as a standalone song before being played as it appeared on Nonagon Infinity in May. Going into 2017, as the band was introducing new material (such as their microtonal output), “Gamma Knife” was getting pushed towards the middle of shows before ending up at the back by the end of the year. This year also saw the disappearance of “Big Fig Wasp”, leading to combinations like “Robot Stop” > “Gamma Knife.” In 2018, the recently removed song would return, but the set placement for Nonagon would stay the same. 2019 setlists were loosely structured which meant that the ”Gamma Knife” could be placed anywhere, a trend which has continued to this day. The only noticeable change came in 2023 as the band introduced a loose middle section before Cavs’ drum solo. Outside of the band, Cavs played the drum break during his first drum seminar at Drumtek on September 21st, 2022.