King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Teenage Gizzard (picture disc) [ORG MUSIC]

Why you'll love it

This edition is a picture disc. It gathers the band's first singles, the Anglesea EP, "Trench Foot" and the previously unheard "Life Is Cool," and it reached No. 48 on the UK Independent Albums chart.

This edition

• Picture disc

About the album

Every prolific band has to start somewhere, and King Gizzard started in Anglesea, the coastal Victoria town where Stu Mackenzie grew up. Before the microtonal guitars, the five-albums-in-a-year stunts and the heavy metal detours, they were an informal jam band from Melbourne playing scrappy surf rock for the fun of it.

Teenage Gizzard gathers their earliest known recordings. The 2010 singles "Hey There" and "Ants and Bats" and "Sleep" and "Summer" sit beside the four-track Anglesea EP, their first official record, plus "Trench Foot" and "Life Is Cool," the last two recorded in Carlton. Mackenzie produced, and Ambrose Kenny-Smith, who joined in 2011, sits out most of it. The sound is fuzzy, surfy and lo-fi, full of the energy that would fuel everything that came next. ThePsychRock called it high-energy rock the whole way through.

These songs weren't even available digitally before this collection, so it's a proper bit of history for collectors. The band once lost a battle of the bands in Anglesea to a group called Hole in the Shoe; twenty-odd albums later, we think they've taken it rather well.

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

Tracklist

Listen

On ORG Music (cat# ORGM-2210), a reissue of the 2020 compilation.