Perhaps no other song in the King Gizzard discography holds as much importance as “The River” — a ten-minute-and-ten-second-long jazz jam released as the opener of Quarters!. Described as a turning point by Lucas, the song sets up much of what King Gizzard is known for. Mind melting jams that will slay audiences for years to come? Check. Iconic imagery that helped define the aesthetic of the band? Check. Ideas that the band will later reference to create an interconnected musical web? Check. A unique four part structure concept that defines the music itself? Check. Use of a non-standard time signature? Check.
The song has also been a prominent part of the band’s repertoire with radio performances and inclusions in films (Chunky Shrapnel, and Live in San Francisco ‘16).
“The River” goes back to 2014 when the band were living in a cabin in Upstate New York, traveling into New York City for gigs and recording dates. Stu said in an interview with Guitar World: “That song was written in the middle of summer, when we were renting a ski lodge in Hunter Mountain in upstate New York, where we recorded most of I’m In Your Mind Fuzz, but we wrote a handful of other songs there that ended up on different records, and this was one of them.”
The song is a significant compositional leap for the band, and a full dive into the use of non-standard time signatures that they had begun experimenting with on the previous album. As well as the jazzy, jammy style, “The River” uses the shuffling 5/4 beat of Dave Brubeck/Paul Desmond’s jazz standard “Take Five”, and heavily interpolates several other aspects of the song including its rhythm (‘da nana da na-na’) and uses a very similar melodic shape. While the album was very loose, Quarters! works around the concept of having four songs with a runtime of exactly ten minutes and ten seconds; a limitation that Stu said in a 2015 Reddit AMA gave the track its second and fourth sections.
“The River” was recorded primarily at Daptone Records in Brooklyn on November 3rd, 2014. Some of this session was filmed and put into the documentary BOOTLEG HOLIDAY FROM HELL. Here we get to see them not only jam the song’s second section with a different rhythm, but also put down the first nearly-final version. Other parts of the song were recorded while the band was touring Europe. At 59:51 of BOOTLEG HOLIDAY FROM HELL we see Stu prepping to record a harmonica part in a car. According to Ambrose, this was to record “The River.” In an episode of The Vinyl Guide podcast, he said “some of the harp is recorded like, in the van when we’re like, touring in Europe. We just like, put a mic through the headrest, through the back of the headrest, and I’d be sitting behind just like playing the harmonica when we’d go through the Eurotunnel to France…”
He also mentions that his vocals were done in a rented room in London. Stu said of the overdub process “we booked a rehearsal room in London and Ambrose and I went in for a day and recorded overdubs. It was a sad, lonely room with black carpet on the walls. But we needed to finish the record. We did more overdubs in green rooms and in the van too. I remember recording harmonica in in the channel tunnel.” The London session was on December 2nd, 2014.
After a behind the scenes photo was uploaded to Flightless’ Instagram in March, the music video for “The River,” created by Jason Galea, was uploaded to the band’s YouTube channel. Featuring a blend of 2D and 3D animation, live footage and sculptures, the video is a journey through the Quarters! album cover.
Starting in the top left corner (“God Is In The Rhythm”) we see a long sequence of 2D animation with a green, red and black color scheme. The next section is introduced through a transparent nonagon which brings us to a representation of the bottom left corner (“The River”) and features a number of gators running across a frozen river made of cardboard, plaster and paint before going underwater into an icy cavern. After footage of the band recording at Daptone, we’re led to another 2D animation segment representing the top right corner (“Infinite Rise”) seemingly taken from the Zonkvision film Pocket Holiday before more live action footage from Kaaterskill Falls (Green County, New York) that leads to the final computer animated segment for “Lonely Steel Sheet Flyer.”
Galea said of the project to No Film School, “‘The River’ track has four sections to it and the album was also split into four songs with the four panels on the cover linked up to the four tracks. For me, 10 minutes is a long time to sit on the same sort of visual animation style, and it would have driven me crazy to do it all the same, so I tried to emulate the four different cover sections throughout the one track. We had some tour footage that helped fill it out and connect the worlds… I guess it kind of rolls and flows like a dream sequence, which everyone can relate to in some way. I don’t think I really planned it to be much of a story, but more of a visual ride.” During the Chunky Shrapnel Reddit AMA, Galea said that he thought the 2D animation was done frame by frame in Photoshop. The video for “The River” became one of the most iconic for the band, while also setting up a number of important, recurring images in the Gizzverse. The video features nonagons throughout the second section with the gators, predating Nonagon Infinity by a full year.
The biggest development of the video was the introduction of the gators. Since their introduction, the gators have become the band’s de facto mascot and would be put on countless shirts, posters and music videos (such as “Invisible Face,” “Fishing For Fishies” and “Ya Love”). The video itself would be referenced on posters for 2019-09-03 and 2019-10-14.
The song received a single edit on a promotional CD released by Heavenly. Clocking in at three minutes and thirty-one seconds, the edit cuts off before the second section with the refrain heard before the closing instrumental of the song. “The River” was released as part of Quarters! on May 1st, 2015.
Since its release, the song has been a standard in the band’s live sets. The first known performance of “The River” was on 2015-05-30 at The Factory Theatre in Sydney and would become a commonly played song throughout the year. These performances of the song stuck close to the studio version structurally, though often featured improvisation throughout — notably during the second and fourth sections. The song was also faster than its studio counterpart, reaching breakneck pace during the previously mentioned improv sequences. Some of these performances would be included in BOOTLEG HOLIDAY FROM HELL. The song remained on setlists in this state throughout the beginning of 2016 but changed in the summer of that year as the band began to play festivals.
A shortened version of the song began to come out of “Evil Death Roll” > “Invisible Face” before sending concertgoers back into Nonagon Infinity material with “Wah Wah.” These versions range from three to eight minutes in length, either cutting off before the second or fourth section. In 2017 the full song returned to sets with jams becoming even faster at times, serving as a closer after 2017-06-09. In 2018 two variations of the song were in rotation. At the beginning of the year the full track was played often as a closer, much like 2017. Starting in late May however, the song was once again used to go into “Wah Wah” before hitting the second section. In 2019 “The River” appeared in a few forms. Some shows such as 2019-08-27 would see the song played on its own, while, more commonly, the song was put into a massive jam of “The River” (shortened before second or fourth section) > “Wah Wah” > “Road Train.” This would later be put into the tour film Chunky Shrapnel. The first section would also be teased at the beginning of performances of “Wah Wah” throughout the year. The song was played once before the COVID-19 pandemic on 2020-02-01 and would reemerge as an acoustic version for the band’s all-acoustic sets starting on 2021-12-13 at the Brunswick Ballroom in Naarm (Melbourne). These versions were noticeably longer than previous performances, hitting upwards of sixteen minutes in length.
As the band began to tour again and lean more and more into their “jam band” tendencies in 2022, “The River” returned as a complete song but often went on longer with some performances crossing the twenty minute barrier, some becoming “type II” jams. Fans have given nicknames to a few of these renditions for their unique attributes. For example, a performance of the song on 2022-10-10 (released on Live at Red Rocks ‘22) was given the nickname of “The Evil River” for its sinister and heavy second section, while another from 2023-06-11 (released on Live in Chicago ‘23) was crowned “The Dead River” for its sparse improvisation reminiscent of the Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star”/“Space” jams as well as its “Fire on the Mountain”-like chord changes. In these years fans began to row on the ground during the song as a tradition of sorts. Outside of the band, Cavs played the song during his drum seminar at Drumtek in Northcote.