“I just woke up from a dream / I was in a place I’d never been or ever seen”

If you’d worried that, 15 years and 26 albums into their epic quest, polymorphous psychedelic voyagers King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard might be running out of new frontiers to traverse, new concepts to explore, new ways to radically reshape their paradigm, then let their latest opus set your mind to rest. For on Phantom Island – the 27^th entry in the Gizzard discography – our intrepid heroes add a new dimension to their ever-evolving songcraft, embracing the symphonic and embroidering their tangles of lysergic riff and melody with strings and horns and woodwind.

“Sometimes you’ve just got to know when to be open to the universe,” says Gizzard guitarist/vocalist Stu Mackenzie, referring to the role serendipity played in shaping Phantom Island. The roots of the album can be traced back to the group’s already legendary show at the Hollywood Bowl in June 2023. The hallowed venue is the home turf of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Gizz met some members of the orchestra backstage after the show. “They said, ‘You should be part of the annual LA Philharmonic series where we play alongside rock and pop bands – we could back you while you play a Gizz concert!’ And that got the gears ticking…”

The seed had been sown. Fast-forward to 2024, and the Gizz are hunkered down in their clubhouse, plugged into tiny practice amps and choogling to their hearts’ content. The results of these sessions yield that year’s Aria-nominated Flight b741, ten joyous tracks of jammy, feelgood rock’n’roll that pare the group’s usual high-concept approach in favour of bone-simple and utterly satisfying, down-home songcraft. But these sessions yielded ten further songs that didn’t quite fit the Flight b741 vibe, and which, Mackenzie says, “were harder to finish. Musically, they needed a little more time and space and thought.”

Quickly, the group’s collective mind leapt to the mooted collaboration with the LA Philharmonic. “The songs felt like they needed this other energy and colour, that we needed to splash some different paint on the canvas,” Mackenzie says. “We wanted orchestral arrangements, to recontextualise these songs.” Mackenzie reached out to dear friend Chad Kelly, a British historical keyboardist, conductor and arranger who now lives in Australia. “His worlds are usually European opera houses, symphony orchestras and music from hundreds of years ago,” Mackenzie says. “He brings this wealth of musical awareness to his chameleon-like arrangements. Chad and I have these electrifying conversations about music. We come from such different worlds – he plays Mozart and Bach and uses the same harpsichords they did, and tunes them the exact same way. But he’s obsessed with microtonal music, too, and all this nerdy stuff like me.”

Mackenzie sent Kelly the raw recordings of the ten new songs, and he got to work writing symphonic arrangements. “It was a long process,” Mackenzie says. “Chad was sending me all these arrangements I couldn’t read, MIDI files I couldn’t play [laughs]. We ended up putting heaps of trust in Chad to make it work. He knew the band and what we wanted to do.”

Kelly absolutely came through, and soon the band were in the studio with the musicians he’d assembled, listening on headphones as they gilded and enhanced the tracks with Kelly’s score. “We didn’t know we were going to have an orchestra dubbed on top when we were recording,” Mackenzie says. “If we had, that would have really changed the songs. But we went into it very free and easy. The songs were written in a very ‘improv’ way, stitched together from multiple takes or longer jams.” Making the orchestral elements and the loose rock’n’roll core recordings gel was a challenge, but absolutely the sort the Gizzard relish. Mackenzie dug out the primitive Tascam Syncaset 8-track on which he’d mixed Flight b741 and got to work. The finished result achieves something remarkable: “It feels like you’re in the room with the band and the orchestra, that we’re all in the same room together,” he grins.

And what magic they achieve in that room. The songs of Phantom Island continue the loose, jammy vibe of Flight b741, but are more melodically and structurally sophisticated, tapping deep into 70s power-pop and soft-rock. The collaborative songwriting process that characterised the previous album also carries over, the songs born in the room, the lyrics and vocals produced en masse, with the six members of the Gizz passing the microphone between them, and cooking up their shaggy dog stories.

If Flight b741 was an album of rambunctious adventure stories, Phantom Island picks up that thread, spinning its tales of quests and piracy out into the stars. But it’s a more interior album than its predecessor, more melancholy – more “introverted”, Mackenzie says. Sure, these are tales of high adventure in galaxies far, far away, but the focus is less on the action, and more on the interior lives of those adventurers, the likes of the gorgeous Silent Spirit, the Beatles-y Spacesick, the yearning Eternal Return and the sad-eyed Lonely Cosmos grounding the interstellar hijinks with existential weight, powerful emotion and the kind of insight these men have gleaned from 15 years travelling the world and leaving their homes behind to take their music to the people. There’s a wiser, more mature, more sensitive Gizz at play here, questioning their place within the universe, their responsibilities, the ties that bind.  “When I was younger, I was just interested in freaking people out,” admits Mackenzie, “but as I get older, I much more interested in connecting with people.”

Kelly’s orchestrations raise these graceful and complex songs to the sublime, transforming Deadstick into a giddy jazz-rock riot, sending Lonely Cosmos through a constellation of artfully arranged woodwind and strings to draw out the song’s powerful sense of uncertainty, the closing epic Grow Wings And Fly the most ecstatic and uplifting anthem in the entire Gizzard songbook. The group intend to bring this music and their orchestral chums to stages across the world later on this year, performing Phantom Island in its entirety and presenting unique versions of Gizzard classics, lent a symphonic edge.

The album is an unalloyed triumph, but the Gizzard boys aren’t letting this go to their heads. “I feel like an impostor doing this stuff,” Mackenzie admits. “I’m good in my little space, with my microphones and my Gizzards around me. But doing the orchestral arrangements – that was insane. But it was also super-exciting. I’m absolutely here for it. I’ll just keep pretending I know what I’m doing.”