King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: On the Road With the Most Audacious Band In Rock

Less than 20 hours before King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard began their biggest North American tour ever, in mid-August, they decided it was finally time to stop building their newest instrument.

Actually, it was several instruments—a rat’s nest of sequencers and synthesizers meant to be chained together on a rectangular slab of stage riser. It would be big enough for five of the band’s six members—cronies since they were teens and college kids in and around Melbourne—to gather around and improvise, riffing on new electronic songs much as they’ve done as a wild-eyed and perpetually restless rock band for a dozen years. Trouble was, the goddamn thing didn’t quite work.

Six weeks before tour, King Gizz—as they often call themselves and as I’ll mostly call them here, for the sake of sentence structure and rhythm—recruited a synthesizer technician, Brandon Delapp, to join their summer run for the first time. But he was home in North Carolina, while they were home in Melbourne. Stu Mackenzie, the band’s founder and ceaseless font of enthusiasms and ideas, described the vision to Delapp several times by phone, but it felt a bit like making a maze without a map.

When Delapp arrived in Washington, D.C., that Wednesday, he headed directly for Mackenzie’s suite at The Line, a sleek Adams Morgan hotel. Finally meeting for the first time, they spread cables and consoles over a side table until they ran out of room, commandeering a fleet of hotel ironing boards to continue construction. They stopped that night sometime around 10 p.m., tucking the pieces into road cases. Delapp rebuilt the rig the next day. For three shows, though, it sat just offstage, untouched, the members cautiously sizing it up, a new entrant into a familiar ring.

But in Boston, at the start of the tour’s fourth show, five-sixths of King Gizz slowly strode to the table, pushing faders and turning knobs. “DJ set,” someone heckled from the crowd. The band seemed hesitant at first, as though dipping toes into waters no human had ever seen. But by the end of that first month-long run, the table had become a curious staple of King Gizz’s three-hour sets, often wheeled onstage for a rapturous finale that seemed to hypnotize several thousand people at once, its pulses and patterns lulling them into a fluorescent haze like the forests of Mirkwood.

“Modular synthesis has always been the endgame for me, and I put so much effort into it,” mustachioed guitarist Joey Walker later tells me. At 36, the oldest member of the band, he came to King Gizz only after a childhood obsession with electronica. He played guitar every day after school until bedtime, but he really wanted to be a DJ or producer. The pandemic gave him space to dig back into his devices—and pull King Gizz toward them, too.

“But I’ve tried to hold my tongue, not telling them that they should do this, or that is the best process,” he continues. “The only way to get better is finding out things for yourself. And now, they’re doing amazingly amazing.”

Photo: Maclay Heriot, 2024

Delapp toiled to make the table more responsive and intuitive, to get the band to trust both it and him so that “amazingly amazing” might happen every night. But by tour’s end, he knew the rig would be completely different when the band returned to the States six weeks later. There were already new ideas for equipment and configurations, even custom cabinets. “Working for them, part of the fun is part of the challenge,” Delapp says. “‘OK, we made this work really well. How can we change it until it doesn’t?’ It is ongoing and ever-changing.”

That philosophy—experiment, succeed, dismantle, start again—has made King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard arguably the most interesting and boundless rock band in the world right now, no matter how you may feel about the music they make. And if you fancy their farrago of garage-rock and thrash metal, warped soul and astral prog, acoustic eccentricities and nascent electronica, they might just be the most inspiring one, too.

Indeed, after an era of rock-is-dead handwringing, King Gizz play for ecstatic throngs every night—a motley assembly of heshers in Motörhead shirts, hippies in Dead gear, and teenagers in dragon pajamas or lizard costumes. This zealous audience, affectionately known as The Weirdo Swarm, collectively hang on the band’s every pivot, from the blown-out rock of their early days to the shout-along metal that emerged later, with detours into soft jazz or spaghetti-Western fantasias on any given night. There are acoustic sets, rave sets, moments that border on the maniacal rap of vintage Def Jux. They are currently finishing an orchestral record and will tour the States in 2025 with assorted symphonies.

“I’m interested in that,” Mackenzie tells me with his sly smile the first time I meet him, backstage at Colorado’s Red Rocks Amphitheater in September, “because I don’t know how to do it.”

What’s more, they’ve become rising stars in part by rejecting music-industry convention, whether streaming every show for free, releasing five records in a single year (twice now), or giving their recordings away to fans and letting them manufacture and sell the music themselves. King Gizz have officially issued 26 studio albums in a dozen years, but the number of variants and fan-made releases is either a completist’s dream or nightmare. They have built their own label and merchandising behemoth, all while encouraging a hyperactive bootleg culture online and in parking lots. King Gizz have never spent money on advertising, either; they are, after all, a marketing team’s idea of hell, rarely sticking with a sound for more than a few albums at a time.

And now, they are looking for new ways to make it all more interesting, and also harder—to bring a beginner’s mind to the art and business of being this band. How can a newly enormous act continue to act like upstarts? King Gizz wants to keep having fun by continuing to risk it all falling apart.

“We used to worry about playing really tight, but we’ve put that to bed,” Mackenzie tells me in late November, stretching his legs across a backstage couch after playing another amphitheater in St. Augustine, Florida. “The challenge now is, like, let’s actually play together, create, splash some paint on the canvas in real time. Let’s do that in the most intense environment we can and see what we create.”

He is talking about why he and his bandmates now prefer the stage to the studio as a place to experiment. He is talking, too, about the table. As expected, the band and Delapp redesigned it for the second leg of their American tour, adding more modular synths and a rainbow of wiring so that all five players could pass rhythms and motifs back and forth in real time. It is now such a part of what they do, of their quest to change, that they’ve consecrated it with a name: Nathan.

Photo: Maclay Heriot, 2024

The next night, at a decommissioned World War II mattress factory on the edge of Miami, the crew, Delapp included, push Nathan onstage during the middle of the tour’s final set. Over 20 minutes, King Gizz segue between a madcap anthem about endless exploration and another called, well, “Extinction.” It fades into a technicolor wash, drummer Michael Cavanagh’s featherlight touch on the cymbals belying his recent devotion to mastering heavy metal’s double-kick. The hesitation is gone now, but Nathan will never be the same. It’s time to take it apart and begin again.

“Thank you, Nathan,” Mackenzie says just as Delapp arrives to cart Nathan back to the side of the stage. “We love you.”

“What kind of a fucking name is that?” Jon Salter remembers demanding in July 2014. “I mean, what the hell?”

At that moment, ten years ago, Salter was the general manager of ATO Records, the label cofounded by Dave Matthews that had enjoyed recent success with the likes of Drive-By Truckers, Alabama Shakes, and My Morning Jacket. But during a meeting at the label’s Wall Street office, Salter pined for a loud psych band like Black Mountain, the crew of Canadian heavies whose early albums he’d loved. He thinks he might have mentioned Tame Impala, too.

In the open-air office, Emily Dingus heard Salter’s desires. She was a new summer intern, up from the University of Georgia’s Music Business Program and a year from graduation. She’d barely spoken to the boss. But she had a fresh obsession. King Gizz had arrived in New York just before Dingus, sponsored by a sizable grant through an Australian brewery’s battle of the bands.

They’d electrified Michelle Cable, a veteran American booking agent who had worked with their heroes in the Oh Sees, when she saw them during a work trip in Australia. She booked a US tour, so they passed part of their summer sleeping on her floor, playing and recording at every opportunity. “They were hard slogs that first year,” remembers King Gizz’s Ambrose (Amby) Kenny-Smith, one of the band’s several Swiss Army Knife-like multi-instrumentalists and its resident comic. “We squeezed every penny.”

Photo: Maclay Heriot, 2024

King Gizz seemed to be playing in Brooklyn once a week that summer, all seven members crowding the stage at the 280-capacity club Baby’s All Right. Soon after her internship began, Dingus happened upon one of those shows. “I had the worst whiplash afterward, from headbanging so hard,” she says. “It was like going into a movie without a preview, and it’s the best movie you’ve ever seen. There was so much energy and chaos.”

So that day at ATO, Dingus spoke up. Sure, Salter was confused by the name. (He was neither the first nor last, mind you: “It’s a fucking stupid name, and it definitely puts people off,” bassist Lucas Harwood tells me, laughing. “But it is just a name.”) It stuck enough for him to listen. He had a few calls with the band’s first manager, drummer Eric Moore, but decided a crew of seven from Australia might be too expensive and burdensome to foster. But a year later, with Dingus long since back in Georgia, Salter finally saw them at Bonnaroo.

“It was like a fucking freight train, so intense and so thrilling. And there were a couple thousand kids, losing their minds,” gushes Salter, now ATO’s president and head of A&R. “I remember Ambrose putting his knee on the monitor and blowing his harmonica, those big blue eyes wide open. I’d never seen anything like it.”

Salter acted fast, announcing that ATO had signed King Gizz just three weeks later. They would license the records from Flightless, the label Moore and the band had launched a few years earlier back home. Dingus, now Jason Isbell’s tour manager, was never paid or really acknowledged for her A&R recommendation. And though she still sees the band live as often as possible, she’s never met them and doesn’t think they know about her tip. (Cable, who’s now King Gizz’s manager, thinks Dingus is probably right about this.) Still, the scenario is perfectly emblematic of the band’s choose-your-own-adventure approach, of the back doors and unconventional choices they would continue to take.

Photo: Maclay Heriot, 2024

To wit: When they gave Salter their first album for ATO a few months later, he again wondered if the guys with the silly name were joking. He’d fallen for their rock show and loved blown-out albums like I’m In Your Mind Fuzz, but this was a 12-song acoustic circus called Paper Mâché Dream Balloon. It sounded more like a vestige of the bygone freak-folk moment than the freak-scene psychedelia he’d craved. “Don’t worry,” he remembers they promised. “We got a big one right after this.”

They were right: Released six months later, Nonagon Infinity was not only King Gizz’s first truly great album but also a promise of what they might still become. The hooks were coiled like heavy metal, while the music pinballed among prog, garage, and even jazz. Juxtaposed with Paper Mâché, it suggested a boundlessness for which Salter and ATO had not bargained. He instantly understood he could trust them, even when they asked to release five albums the next year. ATO called the pressing plant, got the deadlines, and said yes.

“Stu always did and still does have this endless enthusiasm for doing exactly what we want to do, for kicking against the trodden path just for the sake of it,” Harwood, the bassist, tells me, laughing backstage in Miami. They’ve been playing together since Mackenzie joined Harwoods’s high school band, Houses.

“If someone tells us ‘This is how you should do something in the industry,’ even if it makes logical sense, this thing happens in his brain,” he says. “I can’t do that. We have to do it differently.”

The band’s deal with ATO became more flexible over the years, so that the label essentially licensed one album at a time. Salter knew the arrangement wouldn’t last forever, especially after he flew to Australia for one of the band’s festivals there. He saw their studio, lined with the art of Jason Galea, the prolific painter who has designed most of their covers and posters and runs their live visuals. Salter glimpsed their Australian merchandise operation and warehouse and understood the exit plan, their future.

“They weren’t a band who wanted to be on the radio or TV or wanted to do press, even back then,” remembers Dave McClain, who had graduated from intern to marketing coordinator to project manager during his 13 years at ATO. “In 2017, I told my wife, Bianca, that I knew King Gizz were going to realize they had all this power and leave ATO. They could start their own thing and run it with one person.”

Photo: Maclay Heriot, 2024

In early June of 2020, the call McClain and Salter had expected finally came: King Gizz were leaving ATO and starting a new label all their own. This was the height of pandemic lockdowns and the first weekend of protests after George Floyd’s murder—maybe the worst timing for McClain to lose what had become his favorite band. It was, he sighs, one of the sadder nights of his life. “But I also realized that, if I were going to split out and work with the band,” McClain remembers, “this had to happen.”

Peter and Nyx Smorodin writhe against the front row’s fence, their arms stretched toward the stage as if they’re trying to reach the face of God. When they are not shouting, they are beaming, their faces lit by the stage lights as if they are part of the show. Waves of crowd surfers pass overhead and into the photo pit ahead, to be herded to the exit by security guards with tree-trunk arms. Nyx, transfixed, pays it no mind. “It made my brain explode,” she told me of the first time she saw King Gizz, just before the St. Augustine show began in late November. It is happening again.

The Smorodins flew to St. Augustine last night from Washington, D.C., then woke up early to be the first two people in line for the sold-out show. But, really, the Smorodins brought each other here. A lifelong music obsessive, Peter, 60, is a prog devotee who dismissed King Gizz a decade ago because he, again, couldn’t bear the name. Peter’s daughter Nyx, 17, is another lifelong music obsessive, a burgeoning metalhead who dug into the genre when she wanted to know about the harder roots of the emo she enjoyed. Peter introduced Nyx to Yes’ Close to the Edge, and Nyx introduced Peter to Metallica’s Kill ’Em All. And just this summer, they essentially found Nonagon Infinity—a perfect intersection of their individual interests—together.

“I came running to you with it. We went on this drive late at night, and I put the whole thing on, front to back,” Nyx tells her dad a few weeks later as they sit on her bed, surrounded by King Gizz and Carcass posters. “From there, it was a full-fledged obsession.”

That obsession was galvanized several weeks later, when they saw the band in Washington, D.C., the night after Mackenzie and Delapp pieced together that first iteration of Nathan. It was epiphanic. The week after that, they left home the moment Peter’s day job was done and drove seven hours to Cleveland to catch their second show, streaming King Gizz’s acoustic set that night in Detroit along the way. In Cleveland, Harwood handed her a setlist, which now sits at the end of her bed “to remind myself of the amazingness this world has to offer,” she says.

When the band announced next year’s orchestral tour in October, Peter instantly bought tickets. But as father and daughter watched nightly livestreams of the second leg of the summer run, they became restless. Nyx has struggled with mental illness, especially anxiety and depression, for years, and Peter knew how happy the band made his daughter, how it was her balm. When she came home from school one afternoon, he told her to pack for Florida. “It gave me something to do and look forward to, which helped me just feel better,” she tells me. “That little push made me start living a little more.”

For a moment, the final leg of this tour was actually in doubt. Two weeks before it began, Kenny-Smith was tooling around a new skate park near his house with Galea. He started skating when he was six, even entertaining notions of dropping out of school and heading to the United States as a preteen professional. (His mom wasn’t into it.) He felt off at the skate park that day and wondered if he might warm up first, but this was second nature. When he went to grind his board against a curb, his legs got twisted. He slammed his elbow between the ground and his gut. He could feel his bone swimming, the olecranon of his elbow cracked. There was surgery, one-handed rehearsal, and a hand that, as he puts it, “looked like Prince Charles.”

Photo: Maclay Heriot, 2024

Now 32, Kenny-Smith is the youngest member of King Gizz, the last one to join. His father was a musician, and he first showed an interest in music because he thought it might keep his parents together. (It didn’t.) He made an EP of songs about school when he was eight, busked around town, and spent his earnings buying blues records his pops already owned.

He wanted to be in King Gizz the moment he saw them, but he long worried that, as the harmonica kid who didn’t know much about the keyboards he played, he’d soon get the boot, unable to keep up with their evolution. He kept a day job the longest of anyone else and didn’t let his other band, the perennially great Murlocs, lapse, should he ever be cut from King Gizz. That, of course, hasn’t happened, and he’s now literal family with Walker, who’s been dating Kenny-Smith’s sister, Edith, for eight years. Still, the cracked elbow offered a kind of existential panic.

“Jason was laughing later, because the whole way to the hospital, I was like, ‘Oh, Stu and Michelle are gonna be so angry at me. How am I gonna go on tour?’” he says in a mocking, high-pitched squeal. He even worried the rest of the band might say it was time to stop skating. Some did, but Mackenzie didn’t.

“He told me I shouldn’t give up skating, that it’s my identity, who I am, that dangerous stuff’s cool,” he continues. “Well, even if I jeopardize everyone else’s lives? But he’s the boss, so…”

Kenny-Smith is the band’s X-factor, especially on stage; he’s a jester of sorts, always ready with a bon mot as banter or some variation on “Fuck yeah” should the energy ebb. And there is a little danger to his approach, too. Early into the St. Augustine set, during a rarity called “Straws in the Wind,” he asked the crowd, “Where can I go this evening?” He slipped off the stage, his left arm still stiff beneath a tremendous black brace. “I’ll just use my instinct,” he said. He climbed a colossal concrete staircase in fits and starts, dragging a football field’s worth of microphone cable behind him and singing while greeting row upon row of fans. He eventually reached the amphitheater’s top row, as the band improvised an arid blues onstage far below.

He slowly made his way back toward them through the center of a slow mosh pit, flirting a little with the security guard who eventually pulled him over a barricade, not far from the Smorodins. “And he’s OK,” Kenny-Smith exclaimed when he got to the stage before addressing his elbow through the microphone: “Sorry about that, buddy.” He did a dainty jig, then smiled at Cavanagh like a vaguely chastened Cheshire Cat.

King Gizz’s crowds are astonishingly polite; during the last two years, tour manager Jess Lewis tells me, no one tossed to the front of the stage while crowd-surfing has tried to climb onto the stage itself. Still, the moment felt real and vulnerable: Kenny-Smith squeezing his way through a few thousand people while holding a few hundred feet of microphone cable with one good arm, all at their mercy. The rest of the band peered from the stage to find him, squinting. “It’s always just fucking mayhem,” Kenny-Smith confirms. “And we roll with it.”

Photo: Maclay Heriot, 2024

A few hours later, sitting backstage, Mackenzie and Walker tell me about a cursed era five years ago when they rehearsed religiously, sculpting a nonstop and frenetic show that left them physically and mentally exhausted. At one point, they even sorted through their accreting back catalogue to create an index of songs they didn’t know how to play. They spent months trying to learn 50 of them. That was the last time they ever practiced seriously—the last time that they put being perfect ahead of being great.

They had realized, after all, that fans were now following them from show to show, especially in the States, so they should be taking more risks—changing the sets, changing the songs, changing the sounds themselves. They could only prepare so much to be that free. “Each night is so involved now, so that it could be the best show, or, just, shit,” says Walker, winking. “That’s exhausting, too, but it’s energizing.”

“When you spend all that time rehearsing, you lose your ear, your connection. You get really good at the one thing you’re doing and stop listening to what everyone else is doing,” Mackenzie says. “We’ve gotten more at peace saying, ‘I’m going to make a bunch of mistakes, and that’s fine.’ Those things that you couldn’t write on a score are going to be more fulfilling, more magical, more interesting—at least to us.”

Early this spring, four months before their American tour began, King Gizz realized they had a problem.

They had experimented with streaming their shows for years, an almost-de rigueur practice in the world of American jam bands into which they had unintentionally wandered. But knowing that music mixed for an amphitheater is different than music mixed for, say, laptop speakers, Mackenzie wanted it to sound good. He laboriously remixed every show when it was over, letting a third-party company sync it with their video only when he was satisfied. They weren’t, then, really streams at all, especially livestreams; they were concert recordings, released weeks after the gig was done.

The bigger issue, though, was money. That is, because the band outsourced the job, their Weirdo Swarm needed to pay to watch. “We didn’t really feel like it was on brand with us to charge. It was Stu’s vision to make it free,” says Cable, their booking agent since she first brought them to the States in 2014 and worldwide manager since Moore left the band in 2020. “We wanted to do it for free and have the footage feel right, because that becomes archival footage.”

Few bands have embraced free culture more than King Gizz. Like the Grateful Dead, Phish, and a legion of associated heads, they allow tapers to capture and share their shows. But in 2017, they slowly began making that redundant with Polygondwanaland, their fourth album of that year but the first they’d issued with an unlikely ultimatum—make your own copies and sell them yourselves.

The so-called Bootlegger series now includes nearly 60 titles, spanning their earliest simple songs and demos to a sizable chunk of their 2024 tour. The idea has birthed entire labels and enabled others to invest in smaller bands, since most King Gizz merch quickly sells out. The band’s only ask: “Send us some … whatever you feel is a fair trade is cool with us.” It’s an economic system that actually trickles down. How, then, could they free their streams and make them live?

In January of this year, Dave McClain finally left ATO, first to become King Gizz’s archivist but then to help build p(doom), their new self-made label with stateside distribution through the long reach of Virgin Music. They’d released records under the imprint KGLW since leaving ATO three years earlier, but they wanted to rechristen it and expand its operations to release their friends’ music, too. This was the fulfilment of the prediction McClain made to his wife, Bianca, seven years earlier. This time, he told Bianca the band wanted some scrappy young videographers to go on tour and broadcast the shows. She knew a fellow Australian, Jackson Devereux, always looking for cool gigs. Maybe he could handle it?

Photo: Maclay Heriot, 2024

“We’d done a bit of live-streaming, especially during Covid for corporate clients,” Devereux tells me a few weeks after tour ends, sitting alongside his partner in the effort, Allen Dobbins. “It couldn’t be that fucking hard to adapt it to this scenario.”

Dobbins and Devereux laugh wryly in retrospect. As the tour began in D.C. in August, they were, as Devereux joked, “maximizing amateur equipment.” There were stutters, dropouts, and glitches in their early streams. They’d purchased a glorified cellular hotspot to transmit the shows without accounting for the interference from a few thousand cell phones; they soon realized they could just demand a hardwired data connection at venues. The pair spent the summer figuring out such foibles in real time, with King Gizz essentially encouraging them to try whatever they needed or wanted, to embrace the chaos of problems and on-the-fly fixes.

“We told the band we had some issues with lag, because the Internet connection wasn’t right. And Stu said, ‘Sick! Whatever! It’s kind of cool when it’s glitchy,’” Devereux says. “Something that we saw as a mistake he saw as something unique, an accidental bit of genius. That creation feels so rare now. The imperfection feels perfect.”

The pricey proposals for streaming King Gizz shows had involved teams of a half-dozen strangers. But by folding two former musicians into their own system and empowering them to do whatever they saw fit, they expanded the so-called Gizzverse. As the shows rolled, Devereux bantered with fans in YouTube’s live chats and helped make new band memes and in-jokes. Dobbins developed an onstage camaraderie with the band, so he delivered unexpectedly candid footage of how they worked. And the duo began each show with a countdown reel they’d shot and edited in-camera that same day, offering insider (and sometimes surrealist) portraits of the members, the fans, and the town itself. By tour’s end, as many as 50,000 people were watching the work of two folks who had never done this before.

“In a way, Stu is aesthetically challenged. He’s not a fashionista. He’ll wear the same pair of pants the whole fucking time,” says Devereux, laughing. “But he is a person who creates for creation’s sake. The aesthetic comes from that.”

The band has long bought into that very idea; as stylistically broad as it is big, their discography hinges on such. As they began to slink toward heavy metal a decade ago, Cavanagh—or Cavs, as everyone calls him—had only dabbled in the genre. Motörhead ranked among his favorite bands, but he’d never bothered with the double-kick drum that gave the band so much of its intensity. But in the studio with Mackenzie and Walker in 2019, the time to try arrived.

“Before we did Infest the Rats’ Nest, I couldn’t play double-kick. And even when we did it, I still wasn’t that good at it,” he tells me. “My technique is still not that good, but if we were to go back and re-record Rat’s Nest, I could maybe get some tighter takes. It’s just very physical—you’re using every limb of your body.”

Soon after he walked off stage in Miami, I watched Cavanagh plunge his hands into a bucket of ice meant for backstage beer, insisting it was the best way to recuperate. As we talk now, he’s on his way to a Melbourne osteopath he sees twice a week when not on the road. They work on strength, alignment, recovery—things that help him be the drummer that can go from double-kick mayhem to near-metronomic electronica for three-hour sets that never repeat.

Cavanagh’s why-not approach to double-kick drums epitomizes King Gizz’s plan for trying anything new: first, give it a go, and then figure out what you don’t know. Repeat as often as possible. “We’ve been throwing ourselves in the deep end constantly,” he says. “We’re used to that.”

Mackenzie admits he safeguards that sensibility more than anything, that in a band that appears to be precious about so very little it’s the one thing they must maintain—innocence, the beginner’s mind, the exuberance of the unknown. They forego producers and, by and large, have always worked in the Melbourne studio they carved into an old warehouse. They don’t add new equipment in an effort to sound as good as someone else. In short, they don’t want other people’s pressure to alter their internal environment.

“I know we have a beautiful and insular little world. When we go to make a record, we don’t know what we’re doing,” he says in a jubilant rush, Walker enthusiastically nodding alongside him. “We learn everything on the go, and we support each other. I’m very protective of that, because I know it would take one bad experience to destroy that naiveté.”

King Gizz began in the smallest possible way—with a dedication to home-recording. “Some friends would say, ‘We started a band!’” Mackenzie told Tape Op in a 2022 interview. “I’d ask, ‘Can I come record you? I have this shitty little Tascam machine and I’ll come around and set up a couple of mics. I just want to record music.’”

The band’s ranks slowly grew, both through the music industry program at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and the fabled rock scene of Geelong, an hour southwest along Port Phillip Bay. They were a wild live crew, with 10 or so people sometimes shoved onto a stage for a gig. But that initial impulse remained—having an idea, or a few songs, and simply documenting them, no matter how they sounded. Only when King Gizz began traveling overseas to play, especially to the States, did Mackenzie realize it was strange to not sound one way.

Photo: Maclay Heriot, 2024

“I thought what we were doing was normal,” he says now. “And then I became more self-aware of the band’s identity in other people’s eyes after living inside our tiny bubble. People, especially the press, would say, ‘Oh, it’s so interesting you do that.’ Is it? I just thought we did that because that’s what people do.”

A decade on, that animating tension has made King Gizz one of the world’s biggest rock bands, especially with members under the age of 40, and one of very few acts that can play and consistently sell out amphitheaters across this country. I talked to dozens of fans about why they loved the band, and, at some point, everyone mentioned that constant sense of subversion—that King Gizz could and probably would do most anything. Whether they were the gateway or the endpoint, King Gizz offered something unconventional, unexpected.

The question that looms, then, is how do you maintain that subversion in an industry that prioritizes growth and paths of least resistance, musically or operationally? “We have done the wrong thing so many times—started our own companies, stepped away from proper corporate label deals. The safety nets have been removed,” Mackenzie admits. “It is harder to do things that feel as scary anymore.”

How do you remove all safety nets, as King Gizz has repeatedly done, when thousands of people will now pay to be wherever you are? They are, at least, finding new ways to try, to do things differently. Sometimes, the surprises are decidedly modest. This year, for instance, they released only one album, the bluesy and raucous Flight b741; when Simoen van der Meent, who manages the band’s merchandise empire from Australia, asked Mackenzie how many color schemes he wanted to press, he told her to surprise everyone by just making it black.

Other bets are bigger. Their first American show ever, back in 2014, was the Austin Psych Fest, just before it changed its name to Levitation. Cofounder and director Rob Fitzpatrick tells me he’s booked thousands of bands during the last 15 years. The ones whose stars continue to rise, he says, will return to bigger stages and work with bigger businesses with deeper pockets. King Gizz never has. They’ve returned to Fitzpatrick and Levitation when in Austin.

In mid-November, a week before I rendezvoused with the band in Florida, they stopped there to play at Central Texas’ biggest amphitheater, tucked inside a Formula One racetrack and capable of fitting 14,000 people. This would be the biggest show Fitzpatrick had ever booked, a substantial risk for everyone involved. It nearly sold out.

“Normal people move on and work with a bigger promoter. They just keep working with their friends. Gizzard is giving indie promoters cred and opening doors,” Fitzpatrick says. “It made me very happy to write a giant check to a band like that, the biggest check I’ve ever written. I hope to pay them much more.”

They continue to empower fans in radical ways, too. Where most bands permit only professional photographers into a photo pit for the first three songs of any given show, King Gizz allows almost all photographers who already have a ticket into the pit for the entire show, if they apply in advance and sign a code of conduct. They then send photos to the band, helping build its archive. (McClain, at p(doom), collected 8,000 photos from the first leg of this year’s tour alone.) That policy has enabled fascinating first-person documents of King Gizz, like the epic 2023 tour travelogue, Grow Wings and Fly, by a superfan who works in the film industry, Carter Tate.

At every show, Lewis, the tour manager, holds a security briefing so that venue personnel know that this aberration is the band’s prerogative, even as crowd-surfers cascade over the photographers’ heads. “I have to tell security, ‘Some of these photographers have been to 70 shows. They know exactly what it’s like to be there,’” Lewis tells me. “I say, ‘It’ll all go fine.’ And it usually does.”

King Gizz is so invested, too, in the bootleg culture that has emerged from their music that they sometimes host fan merch fairs at the shows themselves, even helping fans rent The Forum parking lot recently. Backstage in Colorado earlier this year, Mackenzie handed me a stack of unofficial posters, stickers, and shirts they’d collected during their three-show stand there. He beamed like a kid in an infinite candy store, stunned by the creativity of people who admired his creativity. It’s all being collected in a storage unit.

“Some venues think we don’t want bootleggers out there, because it cuts into our merch sales. We actually encourage it,” says Cable. “The band encourages their fans to be participatory, and their fans love it. That will keep growing.”

That growth, of course, is complicated. Lewis tells me she worries about the control they could lose as they move into still-bigger venues and how to maintain humane working hours and camaraderie for a tight-knit crew, even as the workload balloons. What’s more, five of the members are married now, four of them parents. They could tour almost constantly and sell out most anywhere they choose. Nyx and Peter Smorodin, remember, made that last-minute trip to Florida when they realized that next year’s orchestral tour meant they might not see a proper King Gizz rock show until 2026. The demand is there, but King Gizz is no longer the entire life of its six members, husbands or fathers all.

At the same Red Rocks show where Mackenzie proudly brandished that fan merch, he lamented that he couldn’t commingle with as many members of the Swarm as he once had, because there are simply so many now. As if to prove the point, Harwood walked to the sound booth with me a few minutes later to hear Dead Slow—his debut album with Heavy Moss, a new band of old friends back home—premiere over the sound system two months before its release. He was hidden from plain sight, but the moment one person spotted him, dozens ran to the railing that surrounded the backstage entrance. He grinned broadly for selfies and signed some records, then disappeared down the stairs toward the safety of the dressing room.

“How was it out there?” I heard King Gizz multi-instrumentalist Cook Craig, whose own new album as Pipe-eye had also been played on the PA, ask him later.

Harwood grinned again, a little sheepishly this time: “Crazy.”

Before the show in Miami even ends, guitars begin going into cases, lifted one at a time from a rack labeled “To Australia.” King Gizz started their year of touring back in March. There have been extended breaks, of course, but, as Cavanagh tells me, it can feel impossible to “switch off” during those spans, because you’re still thinking about songs and sets, scheming what’s next. “Especially with Stu,” he says, “he has to be doing music.”

Now it’s time to go home for a proper break. After King Gizz lash their way through “Gila Monster,” a wonderfully silly bit of mythological metal, they take an especially long time saying goodnight, blowing kisses and trading hugs and thanking each crew member by name. They pose for one last group photo with several thousand fans as their backdrop and parade as one unit through an abandoned warehouse toward their dressing room. They whoop and clap and keep hugging. In 10 hours, four of them will fly home to Australia. Harwood will head to Japan to take a vacation with his family, while Kenny-Smith will spend a few days on the beach with the crew.

But first, there’s a surprise. A directive slowly drifts backstage to distract Harwood, to keep him on the other side of the room. The moment the show ended, at midnight, Heavy Moss’ album was finally released. Maddie Racoosin, the band’s production coordinator, had called around and found a baker willing to print the album cover on a thick, square sugar cookie caked in white sprinkles and tied at the top with red ribbon. There were rows of plastic champagne flutes, lined up in a distant corner.

When someone finally summons Harwood, Lewis Stiles, the drummer for great Australian openers King Stingray, hoists him above his head and parades him around in a victory circle. Most everyone joins in a chorus of “Bassman extraordinaire!” as Cavanagh sprays champagne from a bottle. “Put him down, put him down,” Walker urges, smiling though rightfully worried about the low ceiling and concrete floors.

It strikes me as the ideal King Gizz finale: While most bands would be celebrating the end of an eight-month tour, the biggest one of a career that only seems to be growing, they are instead fêting new work on their new label. The hoorays don’t seem like put-ons, either. Along with Craig, Harwood is the King Gizz member least likely to be in the spotlight, forever doing his job where the shadows of the stage lights begin. Sure, the cookies had less flavor than Civil War hardtack, but they ate them, anyway, delighted for their friend.

As I head for my car and they leave to catch their flights home, that is what sticks with me the most about King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard—not the inexhaustible genre-jumping or concerns about future growth or the mounting legion of fans who will follow them anywhere. It’s friendship, joy, a trust in one another to try whatever they want, now or next. That’s what compelled Mackenzie to start recording music in the first place, and it’s what makes King Gizz so fun to behold now, the moment you get over the name and the imposing discography.

“We’ve had an endless amount of musicians come hang out and see this vibe, and they’re like, ‘You guys actually want to spend time with each other, support each other, be vulnerable with each other?’” Walker told me the night before, stretched out on a couch alongside Mackenzie. The rest of the band played a rowdy game of ping-pong in the next room.

“It’s incredibly rare what we have, and we recognize that now,” he continued. “We’re all best friends. We just feel privileged to all be together, as this entity.”