PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation

Album review

You’ll never be left waiting too long between two King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard releases. And you'll be all the better for it. Celebrating a ten-year career just last year, with a total of 24 albums under their belt, the wizards are consolidating their status as one of the most prolific groups in history. Their breakneck pace, including five releases in 2017 and 2022 alone, does not give pause to their creativity, as they take their sound to the extreme fringes of rick, from psyche to boogie via garage. Certainly, they remain far behind other compulsive geniuses or mad scientists with ultra-eclectic and avant-garde tastes, such as Buckethead (more than 290) and Frank Zappa (more than 60), but PetroDragonic Apocalypse manages to touch those ineffable musical domains inhabited by them. If we strip the extended title down to its bare essentials, it is the dark side of two opposing styles, like yin and yang, which will soon be completed by the brightness of their 25th album (which is almost ready to be released). 

The singles Dragon and Gila Monster preceded it; the quintet’s three metalheads, guitarists Stu McKenzie and Joey Walker, and drummer, Michael Cavanagh, fully embrace their teenage love for trash, doom, and heavy metal, clearly evident in the single, Infest The Rats' Nest (2019). They recorded this single together and it is clearly influenced by Black Sabbath, Slayer, Overkill, Sodom, Motörhead and even Kreator. Here, the Australians line up tracks which last for over nine minutes, and completely let loose with creepy and hollow vocals, incisive heavy riffs, and urgent and motorik rhythms that place the drums centre-stage. They also take us to the depths of Hell with their apocalyptic sci-fi mythology, in which witches and dragons collide.

"We worked on this album in the same way we started Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava last year," Stu explains. We wrote one song a day and came to rehearsals without any riffs or melodies and no initial ideas of what we were looking to achieve. In essence, we were starting from scratch. We jammed, we recorded everything and then put together the songs from there. I sketched out the story the songs were going to tell, and broke it down into seven tracks, with a short paragraph about what would happen in each song. In a way, I think we did the album backwards. The writing of the lyrics then continues collectively and ends up combining into a whole which, as always in subtext, serves the same purpose: to raise awareness about the critical state of our planet. The most trash metal record of their large and eclectic discography, the excellent PetroDragonic Apocalypse will whip fans up into a frenzy. © Charlotte Saintoin/Qobuz