King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard

Murder Of The Universe is a face-melting musical assault concerned with the downfall of man, the death of the planet....the murder of the whole goddamn universe.

"We're living in dystopian times that are pretty scary and it's hard not to reflect that in our music," says front man Stu Mackenzie. "It's almost unavoidable. Some scientists predict that the downfall of humanity is just as likely to come at the hands of Artificial Intelligence, as it is war or viruses or climate change. But these are fascinating times too. Human beings are visual creatures – vision is our primary instinct, and this is very much a visual, descriptive, bleak record. While the tone is definitely Apocalyptic, it is not necessarily purely a mirror of the current state of humanity. It's about new non-linear narratives."

Lit by thunderclaps and lightning, Murder Of The Universe inhabits a sonic landscape of death, decay, ossification, fossilisation, rebirth. It is a place occupied by wandering shape-shifting beasts, bleeding skies, pools of blood, great fires and mushroom clouds; a planet rent asunder by conflict. It may take years for its true importance to be appreciated. There are simply no capital letters large enough to convey the EPIC nature of this collection.

Their tenth album in five dizzying years, the first eight tracks of Murder Of The Universe alone sees songs doing battle with one another ('Altered Beast' Pts I to IV and 'Alter Me' Pts I to III), as man, beast and automaton collide in a death grapple. Flesh and bone meets mud and metal as the listener is treated to funereal fugue pieces ('Some Context'), primordial drone-sludge ('The Reticent Raconteur'), demonic doom-chants ('The Floating Fire'), cyborg-narrated kosmiche workouts ('Han-Tyumi, The Confused Cyborg') and technicolour Outback proto-metal ('Vomit Coffin').

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