As if releasing three separate albums in the month of October wasn’t enough, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard today (Oct. 19) detailed a new short film by John Angus Stewart, Sleeping Monster, which will be available for paid on-demand streaming on Vimeo on Oct. 26 for 48 hours.
Gizzard frontman Stu Mackenzie tells SPIN that Sleeping Monster “is a peek into Gizz land for 30 minutes” and was filmed in Melbourne during the first several months of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Australia had one of the most strict lockdowns in the world,” he says. “We couldn’t really do anything. We couldn’t make music. But there were a few ways to legally get together, one of which was to make a film, so that’s what we did. We spent a lot of that period just filming and documenting everything as we recorded and did other things.”
Indeed, Sleeping Monster captures the band members building their new studio (“We’re six skinny, scrawny musos, but we got our hands dirty,” Mackenzie says with a laugh) and recording the album Changes, work on which began in 2017 but is finally being released Oct. 28. “It’s definitely part of the Changes world and sits alongside it.”
As such, most of the music in the movie consists of demos from Changes, and the title track is featured in the below trailer. “I kept all the loose recordings and early versions of those songs, and that’s what soundtracks most of Sleeping Monster,” Mackenzie reports.
King Gizzard will play its biggest North American headlining show to date on Friday at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Queens, N.Y. and will wrap this leg of touring with the third of three “marathon three-hour sets” on Nov. 2 at Red Rocks outside Denver. All three are available for delayed streaming through Nugs.
Wake up ya sleepyheads! The monster mash is here @phcfilmshttps://t.co/98RC6fFGn1 pic.twitter.com/zKw6aZdtFK
— King Gizzard (@kinggizzard) October 19, 2022
