King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard continues to require larger and larger venues to accommodate its rapidly growing fan base, and initial dates announced this morning (Sept. 12) for its 2024 North American tour itinerary include its biggest show yet on Sept. 14 at the 21,600-capacity Gorge Amphitheater in George, Wa. That gig, as well as visits to Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Queens, N.Y. (Aug. 16), Huntington Bank Pavilion at Northerly Island outside Chicago (Sept. 1), and Germania Insurance Amphitheater in Austin, Tx. (Nov. 15), will be the lone three-hour “marathon” performances on an itinerary for which additional shows are expected to be announced.
“This is gonna be MEGA. New tunes, new places, big vibes, big love,” the group wrote on Instagram. “3 hours / no set break / endless party.” In a separate email to fans, frontman Stu Mackenzie wrote, “We’re planning a bunch of shows for next year as we speak — South America, more Europe and U.K. shows and a fat stack of USA shows. I thought we should give y’all an early heads up on a few of the larger USA shows.”
The genre-jumping Australian sextet made the leap from clubs and theaters to iconic venues such as Forest Hills and Red Rocks outside Denver in 2022, and wrapped its summer 2023 tour in June at the 17,500-capacity Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. “If I stop to take it in and think about it, it’s fucking incredible and humbling and amazing and freaky and scary and beautiful and cool that people let us play places like that. It’s just bizarre,” Mackenzie told SPIN earlier this year about Gizzard’s rise in popularity. “The other side of that is, if we started to approach certain bigger moments differently to others, we’d definitely lose something. So, heaps of gratitude. I can’t believe that many people are all coming to watch us play our songs.”
As previously reported, the group’s most recent album, June’s thrash/prog rock epic PetroDragonic Apocalypse or Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation, will be accompanied by a separate electronic music-dominated release at some point this year, with details still forthcoming.
“It’s definitely synth-y,” group member Joey Walker tells SPIN of the upcoming project, which jumps off from the electronic vibes of the remotely assembled pandemic-era album Butterfly 3000. “You could draw comparisons in many ways, but just in the nature of us being in the same room and playing and writing together, it’s vastly different than Butterfly.” Mackenzie previously told SPIN of the album vis-a-vis its relation to PetroDragonic, “I probably wouldn’t use the term ‘companion piece’ myself because I’m thinking of it like they are two records with completely different DNA and completely different personalities.”
Meanwhile, there’s plenty of fresh music for King Gizzard fans to enjoy beforehand. Walker just released Late Life Circ, the second album by his EDM alter-ego Bullant, while Gizzard has delivered the fifth and sixth volumes of its Bandcamp-only demos collections, featuring 26 previously unreleased songs. Also available is a live album chronicling the group’s complete three-night run at Chicago’s Salt Shed in June.
