King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Infest the Rats' Nest [ATO]

Why you'll love it

This ATO pressing comes in a gatefold jacket with a download card. Infest the Rats' Nest reached No. 2 on the ARIA chart and No. 3 on US Independent Albums, and it was up for the ARIA Award for Best Hard Rock or Heavy Metal Album.

This edition

• Gatefold jacket
• Download card included
• Poster included

About the album

A band that put out five albums in 2017 alone was always going to get round to thrash metal eventually. For Infest the Rats' Nest, three of King Gizzard's usual seven, Stu Mackenzie, Joey Walker and drummer Michael Cavanagh, plugged in and went full Motörhead. Mackenzie said the plan was to be more extreme and more intense, just to see how it would take shape, and a newly bought Gibson Explorer turns up on every song.

Side A lives in the near future. "Planet B" opens the record, "Mars for the Rich" swings a riff Black Sabbath would nod at, "Organ Farmer" takes on intensive farming and "Superbug" slows into sludge worthy of Sleep or Melvins. Side B turns to science fiction, following rebels who flee a ruined Earth for Venus across "Venusian 1," "Perihelion" and "Venusian 2," until "Self-Immolate" and "Hell" bring the story to its fiery end. Shredding, double kick drums and the band's usual odd time signatures all pile in.

Pitchfork called it the band's most succinct and single-minded statement to date, and AllMusic counted it among their most musically compelling. They even built a first-person shooter browser game named after "Mars for the Rich," which is a good deal more than we've ever done to promote a record.

Also at Kops: more King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard on vinyl · browse Metal

Tracklist

Listen

On Flightless / ATO (cat# FLT-053), the 2019 album.