Rock is dead, or so they say: bands don’t top the charts or chart cultural trends any more; guitar is no longer the central focus of pop music. The reasons for this are myriad: the rise of hip-hop over the past 40 years has supplanted rock as the primary musical revolution, which in itself is slowly being supplanted by electronic music. The realities of the music industry and broader economy make it more difficult to support a group of musicians; it is much less expensive and easier to focus on one single person making music. Focus has shifted to producers and bedroom musicians, crafting every sound themselves in a home studio. These sonic morsels can be delivered directly to fans online, skipping the traditional need for label distribution. 

Rock is, of course, very much NOT dead. (And long may it live!) It is just not front and center, which is perfectly alright. In fact, the entire music community has become more fragmented. If you are not a giant common denominator pop star like Lady Gaga, you are not going to be sitting atop the mainstream. The internet has allowed people to find the music that they want to listen to without the radio or mainstream media, which has contributed to the lack of monoculture within music. Everyone is part of their own scene, not connected to a geographical place but distributed across the world via the World Wide Web wherever sympathetic ears reside. 

In this current moment, there may be no better home of pure unadulterated rock and roll than the Land Down Under. Throughout the history of rock, Australia has birthed a plethora of quality artists, but has especially been carrying the torch over the past 15 years. The biggest commercial success is psychedelic Perth outfit Tame Impala. Over the years, frontman Kevin Parker has moved to working with many big names across the music landscape, helping to install his sound firmly into the mainstream cultural zeitgeist. 

Yet it’s another group that is actually more instructive in how to find organice, lasting success in rock music in 2025. That group is the weirdo collective based in Melbourne known as King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. Often abbreviated as KGLW, King Gizzard started out as a relatively straightforward psychedelic garage rock band, before expanding their sound to encompass almost everything under the sun. 

King Gizzard’s initial notoriety sprung from their absolutely insane productivity: since 2011, they have released a staggering 30 studio records, 2 live albums and a remix collection. This constant output is made even more impressive by the fact that every single release is good. Yes, some may be better than others depending on you personal taste, but every one is filled to the brim with creative spark, fresh ideas, and a commitment to the bit that makes it almost impossible to not get caught up in the energy of it all. Beyond that, each release has a singular concept in either compositional approach, lyrical concerns, or genre experimentation that gives it its own personality within their catalog. Through all of the shifts in sound, each release still regains the underlying King Gizzard sound. It’s a remarkably successful run they’ve been on, one that has only truly been matched by a few artists throughout history.

Allow me to take a minute to list each of their studio albums, and the concept for each one:

Angelsea – the debut EP, lofi and embryonic

Willoughby’s Beach – a straight ahead garage psych EP, fast dirty and fun

12 Bar Bruise – the debut LP, and the fullest exploration of their early garage sound

Eyes Like the Sky – a mostly instrumental album based on the American Wild West, with narration from poet Broderick Smith and a suitably western musical motif

Float Along – Fill Your Lungs – sees the band stretch out for the first time, with long hazy soundscapes

Oddments – a collection of heretofore unreleased material, and serves as a return to shorter self-contained songs  

I’m In Your Mind Fuzz – a harder rocking offering, this establishes the core of KGLW’s sound

Quarters! – 4 tracks all 10 minutes each, incorporates jazz-fusion and jam band aesthetics

Paper Mache Dream Balloon – an all acoustic record that draws on folk

Nonagon Infinity – considered by many to be their definitive album, all tracks flow into each other and can be played in a loop, with the final track connecting back to the first

Flying Microtonal Banana – incorporates microtonal tuning, commonly found in Arabic music

Murder of the Universe – a double disc rock opera about a giant monster who eats the universe then farts out a new one

Sketches of Brunswick East – a collaboration with Mile High Club that turns toward yacht rock and smooth jazz

Polygondwanaland – a progressive rock influence release that was put out for free online, also considered one of their best

Gumboot Soup – a rougher, more roots rock collection

Fishing For Fishies – a turn to blues-rock

Infest the Rats Nest – a thrash metal album with an environmental message, another career highlight

K.G. – a return to microtonal tunings

L.W. – the third in the microtonal trilogy (and contains “Ataraxia,” maybe my favorite Gizz song)

Butterfly 3000 – a catchy, upbeat synthpop record

Satanic Slumber Party – an experimental noise release made in collaboration with Tropical Fuck Storm

Made In Timeland – All electronic instrumental release that adheres to a metronomic 60 bpms (as heard ticking in the background through the entire runtime)

Omnium Gatherum – a double album grab bag of unreleased material that ends up as a fantastic overview of everything the band does well. A couple songs incorporate rapping, which is new for them

Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava – a record in which each track sprung from group improvisation

Laminated Denim – a successor to Made in Timeland, it is also built around a metronomic count but incorporates more rock based instrumentation rather than electronic

Changes – in which the band challenged themselves to write every song in the same key

PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation – another metal album also about how mankind is destroying the environment

The Silver Chord – an electronic, synth-lead album with very long, trancy songs

Flight b741 – inspired by classic rock

Phantom Island – in which the band is backed by an orchestra

As you can see, the KGLW discography is vast and deep, with many wrinkles to their sound. It’s this very same diffusion that has helped them build such a fandom.

Social media’s place in our current moment has created a culture that encourages hyperindividualism of the online experience. The almighty algorithm tailors each person’s experience to them. This is both good and bad. Positively, it allows people to key in to special interests and delve further into the communities around them. Negatively, it puts people in bubbles of confirmation bias, feeding them surface level “engagement” to keep them scrolling. 

  In today’s social mediascape, content is king. And no one has more content than King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. Their fame grew almost entirely online, in which their universe provides a seemingly bottomless well for fans to dig into, discuss, and compare. I’ve seen ranking lists, flowchart guides and essays about what the band does and how they do it. The thing is, nothing that KGLW does is particularly revolutionary from a musical perspective. They just do it ALL. They take every sound and style and through it into a blender, mixed with their singular drive for psychedelic exploration, and create something that is unabashedly fun. 

When millennials ruled the cultural roost, rock was seen as blase – a remnant of Boomers Gen X that we were moving on from. As such, many artists that came relied on irony to engage with rock tropes. They wanted us to know that they thought it was silly, and was doing it from a meta standpoint of lampooning the past, even if they attempted to make seriously good music.

Yet by this point in time, Generations Z and Alpha are coming up with less of a connection to the tropes of rock. The music isn’t even seen as necessarily “old” or “lame.” By this point, it’s all existing at once on the internet, just another reference point. Instead of putting on a costume to ironically be a “‘rock star,” King Gizzard embraces their creative exuberance and love of the music sincerely. This resonates with a generation of listeners who have been missing sincerity unburdened by the need to not seem “cringe.” 

KGLW has leveraged their renown to becoming one of the most singular acts of the 2020s. They perform 3 hour long “marathon concerts,” in which they pull from their deep back catalog to serve fans a tapestry of sounds and styles each night, changing the set list from date to date. When I attended Austin Psych Festival a few weeks ago in Texas, I saw vastly more KGLW shirts every day than any other artist by far, and they weren’t even on the bill. In June, they are going to hold a residency at Bonnaroo – one of America’s biggest music festivals – consisting of 3 sets over 3 days, with no repeated songs. I expect all 3 sets to be packed. When it comes to modern rock, it’s King Gizzard’s world, and we’re all just living in it. Who knows how long their reign will last, but I for one am feeling pretty good about our reptilian overlords. If this is the first you’re hearing of them, check ‘em out: I’m sure you’ll find something to get your blood pumping.