New Albums
KING GIZZARD AND THE LIZARD WIZARD
Butterfly 3000
The Aussie adventurers take yet another left turn on album 18
KGLW
8/10
Ridiculously productive even before last year’s lockdowns sent them off the road and into their home studios, the King Gizzard crew follow last winter’s two-part reimmersion in microtonal madness on KG and LW with their most exuberant outing to date. Intensely rhythmic and unabashedly giddy, the songs here originated as synth loops and arpeggios that were traded and tweaked by bandmates working in isolation. On rave-ready results like “Blue Morpho” and Butterfly 3000’s title track, the process essentially dissolves the band’s psych-pop and Hawkwind-ian predilections into a pulsating dayglo goo. Purists who flinched when Tame Impala began to morph into a hairier Daft Punk may be similarly nonplussed by the sextet’s turn toward blissed-out dance-rock, but everyone else will have a lot of fun.