Over six hundred light years away in the constellation Cygnus floats a planet, twice as big as Earth and potentially made up of large oceans, named Kepler-22b. First spotted in 2009 and confirmed in 2011, Kepler-22b has been the basis of much thought and speculation due to its environment being potentially habitable for human beings, with some considering it a potential “Goldilocks planet” due to being neither too hot or cold. We don’t know too much about what could live on Kepler-22b, but King Gizzard has some guesses. The song “Kepler-22b” centers on someone fascinated with space but not smart enough to make it into NASA. Instead, they create their own telescope out of junk and point it towards the Super Earth, only to find another telescope pointing back, watching them.
“Kepler-22b” is nearly entirely built out of a sample of Melbourne jazz pianist Barney McAll’s “Yemaya One”, which was released on the 2005 album Mother of Dreams and Secrets. While the song is a sprawling jazz session, “Kepler-22b” takes from its opening and ending (timestamps 0:32 and 7:29). It was the result of a COVID-19 lockdown experiment regarding sampling. Stu said in a SPIN magazine article “one pandemic activity we dabbled in was trying to make music out of samples. I was doing dollar bin world music LP buying. I had to not know what it was. It had to be either one dollar or two dollars, and not in English. I was trying to figure out how to cut up samples and be creative with that. Cook and Joey and myself all fiddle around with that sort of thing, and that led to making ‘Sadie Sorceress,’ ‘The Grim Reaper’ and ‘Kepler-22b.’ Those were built out of samples that were chopped out of records we’d never heard before. They were all very fresh in that way.” The one who discovered Barney McAll was Cook Craig. In a press release for the song he said, “I actually found Barney’s record at a store in New York. I hadn’t heard any of his stuff before, but remember putting it on and being blown away straight up. I remember thinking ‘damn this is literally a sampler’s dream.’ It took me a while before I actually realized he was from Melbourne too. I guess it’s funny like that, sometimes you gotta travel halfway around the world to discover an inspiring piece of music made by someone who probably lives on the same block as you.” McCall would receive a songwriting credit for his sample.
The song was played by Ambrose (percussion), Cavs (drums), Cook (synthesizer/keyboards/bass/turntable) and Stu (vocals/Mellotron/percussion). Liner notes also indicate that the technical end was a shared effort and was recorded by Cook, Stu and Cavs. Stu mixed it and co-produced it with Cook. In early 2022 the band’s Twitter page teased the track listing of a new album through emojis, prompting fans to guess the song titles. “Kepler-22b” was represented by a planet, the number 22 and a honey bee. Seven people guessed the song’s title, with user @cyberbrunk getting the first confirmation.
On April 19th, 2022, a music video for the song by Alex McLaren and Sean McAnulty was released on YouTube featuring the band in Hawaiian shirts and a range of animation from claymation to mystimation. “Kepler-22b” was released a few days later on the band’s 20th album Omnium Gatherum. In the video The Making of Omnium Gatherum Ambrose, Joey and Stu can be seen dancing to “The Grim Reaper” in the same outfits as the music video. On July 7th, various drawings from the video were auctioned off on eBay alongside test pressings of Omnium Gatherum. All money raised went towards The Wilderness Society.
While the song had gotten special treatment with a music video release, it was never played live (outside of a quick performance at Cavs’ drum seminar at Drumtek in Northcote, Victoria) until 2023-8-22 when it debuted at the Parco Della Musica in Padua, Italy. “Kepler-22b” was only played four times that year. The song gained a longer outro which sometimes extended into a spacier synth jam. It also featured live sampling unlike anything heard at the time. While the band would expand their synthesizer set-up in 2024, “Kepler-22b” was not played.