King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - The Dripping Tap (2022) [Hi-Res]

Today, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard announce their first-ever double album, Omnium Gatherum, which is coming soon via their own label KGLW. Today, they share its epic 18-minute lead single, “The Dripping Tap.”

Following 2020’s KG and 2021’s LW and Butterfly 3000, Omnium Gatherum was the first time King Gizzard recorded together as a band since the COVID pandemic hit, and Melbourne placed its citizens under a series of prohibitive lockdown measures. Omnium Gatherum’s sprawling 16 tracks of gonzoid prog jams, dizzying pop nuggets, rubber-legged hip-hop odysseys and passages of pure thrash-metal abandon offer plenty for Gizzard fans and neophytes alike to chew on. Typically, Gizzard albums pursue a single theme or style – for example, Infest The Rat’s Nest’s eco-themed metal barrage, or Butterfly 3000’s new age trance-pop, or Nonagon Infinity’s endless garage-prog contortions – and part of the thrill of Omnium Gatherum for the group was the opportunity of new ideas without committing to deliver an entire album in that vein. It’s the perfect entry point for newcomers, and a solid treat for the faithful as well.

Lead single “The Dripping Tap” is an 18-minute krautrock/garage-psych jam – an ecstatic pile-up of motorik vibes, giddy pop and gleefully gonzo crescendos. It’s unmistakeably Gizzard, with its restless, interlocking riffs and supernatural changes of mood, but it pushes the Lizard Wizard jam archetype a quantum step or three further. The album’s title, Mackenzie says, is “literally Latin for ‘a collection of miscellaneous people or things’” – a fitting sobriquet for Gizzard’s first-ever double album, and their boldest, most ambitious, most far-reaching release yet.