From garage-rock chaos and microtonal psychedelia to thrash metal and weirdo techno, we pick the 25 greatest songs from King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s ever-expanding catalogue.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard are a very special band to me. I also think they’re quite possibly the best band of the last 15 years. I can’t say enough about them, to be honest. Funny, then, that the first time I was introduced to them, through Nonagon Infinity, I think they were a little too weird for me. It took a whole year working at Rough Trade in 2017, with a new King Gizzard album seemingly arriving every couple of months, for me to be fully brainwashed into the Gizzverse.

By that point, the Melbourne band had already established themselves as one of the most prolific and unpredictable groups around, jumping between psych-rock, garage, prog and whatever else took their fancy. But 2017 was ridiculous even by their standards: five albums in 12 months, each exploring a different corner of what King Gizzard could be.

I first remember seeing them live at Field Day Festival in London that same year. They were playing songs from Murder of the Universe and, Jesus, did it feel intense. Coming up off something that was hitting far too strongly, all I wanted at the time was ABBA. Anyway, it wasn’t until Sketches of Brunswick East came out later that year that I really started to appreciate them. That opened me up to the band, but Polygondwanaland was what turned that interest into an obsession. After that came a never-ending deep dive into their already vast collection of albums.

Following the band over all these years has been a pretty special experience. From the awesomeness of their five-album run in 2017 to seeing them at Ally Pally in 2019, then five shows at Primavera after Covid and, more recently, watching them play the Royal Albert Hall with a bloody orchestra, they’re a band that constantly morphs. Few groups could move from microtonal psychedelia and thrash metal to synth-pop, jazz, acoustic folk, weirdo techno and orchestral arrangements without it feeling like some kind of novelty, but with King Gizzard, that restlessness has become the entire point.

There’s also a really terrible photo of me fist-bumping Joey at the Royal Albert Hall on their Instagram. This prompted me to start working out and going boxing again, so I guess King Gizzard really can do anything. They also inspired me to start a tape label at one point, although we don’t talk about that anymore because we got threatened with legal action by a horrible label with a similar name. The funny thing is, we weren’t even ripping off their name. We were ripping off Julian Casablancas’ label. Different crime entirely.

King Gizzard’s constantly expanding discography makes picking 25 songs slightly ridiculous. I’ve tried to represent as many of their different sounds and vibes as possible, from the garage-rock chaos of their early years and the infinitely looping Nonagon Infinity to their heavier excursions, microtonal experiments and increasingly ambitious adventures elsewhere. There will probably be some shocking placements, particularly in the top 10, but I think that’s one of the best things about King Gizzard: they’ve made so much music, in so many different forms, that two people could love the band equally and have completely different ideas about what their greatest songs are.

It’d probably be useful to write a ‘Where to Start With King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’ guide at some point, but who the hell knows the answer to that question?

So, off the back of their most recent album, Alien Metal, here are our 25 best songs by King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard.

25) Cyboogie

I feel like I had to include ‘Cyboogie’. It’s such a fun song, but it’s also a pretty important one in the Gizz discography, marking one of their first proper attempts at pushing into more electronic territory and laying some of the groundwork for where they would eventually go with The Silver Cord and, more recently, Alien Metal. Released as their first single after the notorious five-album run of 2017 and after a year without a new King Gizzard album, it was a strange song to return with. ‘Cyboogie’ would eventually close Fishing for Fishies and, to be honest, it feels completely out of place alongside much of the record, except for the boogie element, which it has plenty of.

Stu’s vocals are fed through a vocoder as synths squelch and pulse underneath, giving the whole thing this brilliantly weird, psychedelic robot-funk feel. There’s a great breakdown about halfway through where everything opens up before the track gradually begins to malfunction and dissolve, as though the robot controlling it has simply run out of juice. It’s silly, incredibly catchy and unmistakably Gizz, but looking back, ‘Cyboogie’ also feels like an early glimpse at another avenue the band could explore.

24) Beginner’s Luck

‘Beginner’s Luck’ is such a lovely song. It’s a really mellow, easy King Gizzard song with great lyrics, and I remember listening to it over the Christmas period in 2017, which probably goes some way towards explaining why I find it so cosy. Released ahead of Gumboot Soup, the last of their five albums that year, it’s a particularly inviting opener to a record that goes off in all sorts of directions. After everything they’d already put out in 2017, it’s quite funny that they still had something this good sitting there waiting to go.

The lyrics follow a newcomer being drawn into a game at a casino, with the promise of beginner’s luck gradually giving way to something more sinister. It’s a slightly odd song to find comforting when you pay attention to what’s happening, but the warm keys and the way Stu and Ambrose’s vocals work together make it very easy to get settled in. Even when the guitar gets a bit wild towards the end, it doesn’t quite shake that feeling. There’s so much to enjoy in the arrangement without having to get your head around one of the band’s more elaborate concepts, and sometimes this is exactly the sort of Gizz song I want to hear.

23) Billabong Valley

It wasn’t until I saw the KEXP live performances of songs from Flying Microtonal Banana that these songs really started to shine for me. I think the production on those recordings really beefs them up, and ‘Billabong Valley’ is one that particularly benefits. There’s so much weight behind the guitars, and Ambrose’s voice sounds great against them. The studio version has plenty going on, but seeing them play it gave me a much better appreciation of how all those parts work together. It’s definitely one where I’d point someone towards the KEXP performance if the record hadn’t quite done it for them.

For this one, Ambrose takes centre stage for a rootin’ tootin’ cowboy track about the Australian bushranger ‘Mad Dog’ Morgan, an actual nineteenth-century outlaw. His high, slightly ragged vocal is perfect for telling this sort of story, and there’s something wonderfully strange about hearing it over those winding microtonal guitars. My favourite part is the breakdown, when everything slows down and you get to sit with that riff for a bit. When the guitars come back in with all that feedback, they sound so massive. It packs a lot into a relatively short song, and by that point I’m completely sold.

22) Change

‘Change’ is a great track from King Gizzard’s second five-album year, opening 2022’s Changes. Fun fact: the first letter of each song title spells out the album’s name. They’d actually been working on the record since their first five-album run in 2017, when it was supposed to be the fifth release, but it took another five years to get it finished. That’s a pretty long gestation period for a band who can seemingly put out three records while you’re deciding what to have for lunch. The opening track also provided the musical ideas they would develop across the rest of the album, so there’s quite a lot resting on this one. It’s a breezy, jazzy number, but there’s something a little proggy underneath, with the song working its way through several different sections over thirteen minutes. Those warm keyboard melodies make it very easy to settle into.

21) Trapdoor

‘Trapdoor’ is probably the weirdest song on Paper Mâché Dream Balloon. This song is so much fun, and the flute riff alone makes it one of the strongest tracks on the album. It’s such a busy little melody, darting around that repeated ‘trapdoor’ chant, and the whole thing has a slightly creepy nursery rhyme feel. Going acoustic clearly wasn’t going to stop Gizz from being strange, and there’s something particularly funny about how much menace they manage to get out of a flute. It’s also been used as a transition in fan-made Gizzverse compilations, which feels appropriate for a song that sounds like it might lead you somewhere you probably shouldn’t go. On the album itself, it’s a wonderfully odd interruption to some of the prettier songs around it, with the restless rhythm and increasingly insistent vocals.

20) Evil Death Roll

‘Evil Death Roll’ is the longest song on Nonagon Infinity and one of its best. It’s ferocious, fast and slightly demonic, with seven minutes giving the band plenty of room to stretch out and get weird. The guitars have a nasty bite to them, and even when the track eases off into its more psychedelic middle section, you know they’re going to come tearing back in. Lyrically, there are green scales, snapping jaws and severed limbs, suggesting a run-in with a particularly unpleasant croc. You can get into the Gizzverse theories if you fancy it, but the song does a pretty convincing job of conveying the danger by itself. The way it sort of mushes a bunch of songs into one makes it a standout on the album.

19) Sleep Drifter

‘Sleep Drifter’ is one of the sweeter songs on Flying Microtonal Banana, with lyrics about missing someone and finding them beside you in that strange state between sleeping and waking. They’re just as good at making sentimental songs as they are at the heavier stuff, and ‘Sleep Drifter’ is one of the loveliest examples. The winding microtonal guitar melody gives it a slightly unsettled quality, but the groove is so easy to get into. The band make those unfamiliar intervals feel completely natural within the song. You don’t need to understand the tuning to enjoy it; the melody is enough, and the longing in the lyrics gives you something to hold onto beyond the riff.

18) Interior People

‘Interior People’ is a Joey track, and I think he’s such an underrated songwriter, even within the band. Whenever he comes out of the woodwork with a song, it’s pure gold, and this is my personal highlight from Butterfly 3000. There’s something about the way the bass moves around that main guitar riff that gives the whole thing a real sense of motion. It keeps pulling you along, with little details in the arrangement catching your attention on the way to a chorus that’s one of the best he’s written.

Joey also mixed this one himself, and there’s something quite fitting about him having that much control over a song concerned with what’s happening inside his own head. He’s described it as being about questioning your sanity and the relief of letting go, which adds a nervous edge to all that brightness. The chorus feels particularly good with that in mind, giving some release to a song whose thoughts never quite seem to settle.

17) Nuclear Fusion

‘Nuclear Fusion’ is another one where I just had to link the live KEXP session from around the album’s release. Jesus, the whole thing sounds so much heavier in the KEXP session. There’s something so effortlessly cool about this era of Gizz, and this performance captures it perfectly. It feels a bit Led Zeppelin-y to me, but with microtones, particularly in the way the guitar tones and bass move together over the alternating hi-hats. It’s a solid song anyway, but hearing all those parts so clearly in the session makes it even more satisfying. I love that stupidly low ‘nuclear fusion’ at the start. They sometimes get fans up to do it live, which must be a pretty good evening for whoever gets picked. Stu and Joey wrote this one together, with lyrics about stars, atoms and everything being connected.

16) Digital Black

Murder of the Universe took me longer to get into than most Gizz albums. The first half felt like one irritatingly intense song, and I couldn’t really wrap my mind around it at the time. Over the years, though, it’s grown into one of my favourite Gizz albums. Once I started recognising the different sections and making sense of how they fit together, listening to it became considerably more enjoyable. ‘Digital Black’ is a particular highlight from the second half, packing a lot of what I love about the record into less than three minutes.

At the time of release, this felt like the heaviest Gizz got, but it retained a psychedelia that I sometimes miss in their more direct metal records that followed. There’s something warped and unpleasant about it that suits the album’s story perfectly. Arriving in the final chapter, it describes humanity abandoning its bodies for a digital existence, setting the scene for Han-Tyumi and his fairly disastrous attempts to feel human again. You don’t necessarily need to follow all of that to enjoy ‘Digital Black’, but the bizarre sci-fi setting is part of what makes this era of their heavier music so appealing to me.

15) Magenta Mountain

‘I am tectonic!’ ‘Magenta Mountain’ is definitely one of the strongest later-era Gizz tracks. There’s a sort of Eastern feel to the melody similar to the work on Butterfly 3000, with a great synth line and really lovely hushed vocals on the verses. The whole thing sounds so full, rich and warm. It feels like the ideal music to listen to whilst climbing a mountain, although the one in the song might be a little difficult to find. Apparently, it came from a vivid dream Stu had about a paradise called Magenta Mountain, which he then tried to describe to the rest of the band. The lyrics follow someone determined to reach it despite everyone insisting it isn’t real.

14) Her and I (Slow Jam II)

‘Her and I (Slow Jam II)’ is such a beautiful track, and a lovely way to close I’m in Your Mind Fuzz. It’s another of their great sentimental songs, with lyrics about putting the effort into loving someone properly. The chord progression and bassline really stand out, and I love how the opening sounds like a little lo-fi version of the song before the full arrangement comes in with the first proper verse. There’s something especially satisfying about hearing it open up like that. Those fuzzed-out, watery guitars remind me a little of ‘The River’, and there’s a similar willingness to give the instruments space to breathe. Over eight minutes, you get plenty of time to appreciate what each of them is doing without losing that affection at the centre of the song. I only wish they’d play it live more often.

13) Gila Monster

The metal eras of Gizz have never really done it for me in the same way as their other stuff, but there’s no denying that ‘Gila Monster’ is Gizz at their most epic. Picking up where they left off with Infest the Rats’ Nest, it has this huge sense of impending doom, with a chorus that practically demands you shout along. It’s ferocious live, and it’s nice to hear Ambrose going full metal here too. His voice brings a different character to the track, and he sounds like he’s having a great time with it.

It also really leans into the world-building Gizz are known for. The creature gets bigger and stronger by eating witches, eventually sprouting wings and becoming the dragon of the following track. It’s ridiculous, obviously, but that’s part of the appeal, and the band give the story all the musical excess it deserves. Even with my preference for their other eras, this is a great place to start if you want to check out their metal stuff.

12) Fishing For Fishies

‘Fishing for Fishies’ is such an adorable track, and another I wish they’d play live. Even once would be nice. After the gap that followed their five-album run in 2017, this felt like a proper return from the band, with ‘Cyboogie’ having taken a slightly unexpected electronic detour. There’s something very endearing about hearing them feel sorry for the fishies, especially when the music sounds this happy. It’s one of their most joyous songs, perhaps their most joyous, and I find it pretty much impossible to feel sad listening to it.

I love how it gradually builds, with those shuffling drums carrying the sweet little guitar melodies. There’s plenty happening in the arrangement, but it all feels so unhurried until they really start going for it towards the end. The outro is my favourite part, with the harmonica blurring into the guitars as everything gathers around that rhythm. Even then, there’s room for that lovely little keyboard part to poke through.

11) Cellophane

‘Cellophane’ feels like an important moment in their discography. For me, their music up until this point could be a little too rough around the edges, but on I’m in Your Mind Fuzz, that energy became something tighter and more purposeful. It’s a propulsive, full-throttle album with a great variety of tracks, and I’d love to hear them return to this particular strain of psychedelia. ‘Cellophane’ is the centrepiece of the opening four-song sequence, which plays like one extended movement and is well worth hearing in full. The relentless rhythm carries you straight into it, but that repeated chorus gives you something immediate to latch onto amid all the fuzz and frantic playing. To me, this is where King Gizzard as we know them really began to take shape: the band sound locked together, the songwriting is more ambitious, and there’s a confidence in how they move between songs that makes the whole thing feel like a massive step forward.

10) Robot Stop

If ‘Cellophane’ was Gizz coming into their sound, ‘Robot Stop’ is the track that pushes it to its highest form. Non-stop angular guitars, jagged rhythms and a band playing at full steam, seemingly with something to prove. There’s barely a second to get comfortable before you’re caught up in it, and the sheer pace makes it all the more impressive that everyone sounds so together. Nonagon Infinity remains one of their most ambitious records, with each track feeding into the next until the whole thing loops back to the beginning, but ‘Robot Stop’ makes an immediate case for it before you’ve even got your head around the concept. That opening chant feels like an invitation into everything strange and brilliant about this band, followed by five minutes that leave you with very little choice about sticking around. ‘Nonagon infinity opens the door’, and boy did this album open doors for them.

9) Work This Time

‘Work This Time’ feels like an unlikely hit for King Gizzard, but it’s such a beautiful, heartfelt song that its popularity makes complete sense. Released on Oddments, it came from Joey and Stu trying to record something soulful, with Joey taking the lead vocal. There’s a lovely glistening, muffled quality to the recording, with the guitars wavering around his voice and everything sounding slightly out of focus. That softness really suits a song about affection and promising to make more of an effort, and it’s another reminder of how good they are at writing something tender. The live version we included on our Chilled Gizzard compilation is incredible, too. They stretch it out towards the end, gradually building into something far more epic as Joey’s guitar solos take over. I love how much room they’ve found within this gentle little song to go completely all out.

8) Float Along – Fill Your Lungs

People will probably be pissed that I haven’t included ‘Head On/Pill’ on this list, but it’s never quite done it for me, and I think it gets too much love compared to the rest of Float Along – Fill Your Lungs. The closing title track is the one I keep coming back to. It feels almost biblical, as though Stu is reaching out to God through his songwriting. There’s something about that repeated invitation to breathe, with the sitar droning underneath, that gives it the feeling of a prayer. It’s also in 5/4, an early example of the band experimenting with odd time signatures, though you can happily get lost in it without counting a thing. The repetition is what makes it so lovely: they give the melody time to settle, and by the end that simple refrain feels enormous.

7) Rattlesnake

Rattle rattle rattle. ‘Rattlesnake’ was the first taste of the band’s full embrace of microtonal music, arriving in late 2016 ahead of Flying Microtonal Banana and the ridiculous five-album year to come. It’s hypnotic and chaotic, with that endlessly repeated chorus and a rhythm that makes eight minutes feel perfectly reasonable for a song about a snake. Stu’s custom yellow guitar, fitted with extra frets, gives the riffs their peculiar character, but it’s the zurna that really sends this one somewhere strange. Those piercing, snake-charming melodies sound as though they’re summoning some sort of demonic reptile. There’s much more going on than the chorus gets credit for, too, with the guitars constantly finding little variations while the beat keeps charging ahead. It’s a brilliantly daft way to introduce an experiment that would become such a huge part of their sound.

6) Mars For The Rich

‘Mars for the Rich’ is the best song on Infest the Rats’ Nest, and Gizz doing metal at their best. The star here is the bassline, which gives the track this great melodic groove and everything else so much to work with. When the bass gets its own moment towards the end, it’s easily one of the highlights of the album. There’s a bluesy heaviness to the guitars that brings it closer to Black Sabbath, and the chorus is made for being shouted back at them. I love the album’s themes of the rich leaving the rest of us behind on a ruined planet, and this track is the best at saying it outright.

5) The River

‘The River’ is a song where I think everything clicked into place for Gizz. That lilting 5/4 rhythm gives the guitars so much room to wander, and the band sound completely comfortable letting it carry them through ten minutes of jazzy psychedelia. Lucas has described it as a turning point, joking that they’d tricked themselves into thinking they could play jazz, but there’s nothing uncertain about the result. The material for Quarters! began with Stu working out repeating chord progressions on a borrowed loop pedal, and you can hear how much mileage they found in that approach here. I love how the song keeps returning to its main melody after drifting off into instrumental passages, making each return feel familiar without wearing it out. Then there’s that slick guitar riff towards the end, which feels completely earned after everything they’ve worked through to get there. There’s such an effortlessness to the playing at that point, as though they could happily keep going for another ten minutes. All four tracks on the album run for exactly 10 minutes and 10 seconds, but ‘The River’ makes that length feel completely natural. One of the best songs in their discography, and an early indication of just how far they could take a jam.

4) Gamma Knife

We’ve all seen the meme of Cavs playing the drums, and ‘Gamma Knife’ is a pretty good demonstration of what the fuss is about. It’s probably the strongest standalone song on King Gizzard’s breakthrough album Nonagon Infinity, with a chorus that holds its own even when you take it out of the record’s endless loop. But the breakdown halfway through is what really does it for me. The repeating guitar figure gives Cavs room to go wild in 11/8, and the way they pull everything back together afterwards is ridiculous. Apparently, he wasn’t initially keen on doing a big solo, which makes it even better that this became such a defining part of the track. Edgar Wright once joked that he’d make a Baby Driver sequel just to use ‘Gamma Knife’ in a car chase, and you can hear exactly why. It’s four minutes of Gizz sounding impossibly tight while playing as though they’re about to come off the rails.

3) The Dripping Tap

God damn, this song is insane. The musicianship on ‘The Dripping Tap’ is wild, and to me, this is Gizz’s ‘Free Bird’. Ambrose’s soulful opening is enough to make a great song on its own, but then the guitars come flying in and suddenly you’ve committed to eighteen minutes of absolute chaos. I remember seeing it live at Primavera, the only time I’ve caught it, and being completely blown away. There’s so much happening between the guitars, with melodies doubling up, peeling away and coming back together, while Cavs somehow keeps the whole thing moving at that pace. Every return to vocals feels like a chance to get your bearings before they’re off again.

The song had been around since the Fishing for Fishies sessions, but finally came together when all six members reunited after lockdown. Knowing that, the excitement in the playing makes perfect sense. You can hear a band delighted to be making this much noise together again. The lyrics are considerably less joyous, using an ignored dripping tap as an image of a crisis getting worse while those in charge do nothing. It’s a bleak thought to carry through such an exhilarating song, and an absurdly good way to open Omnium Gatherum.

2) Most of What I Like

I’m sure people will be shocked by how high ‘Most of What I Like’ is on this list, but it’s my most-played song on Apple Music. Not my most-played King Gizzard song, my most-played song of all time. It’s hard to put my finger on quite what gets me about it. To me, it feels like a love song despite the incredibly morbid lyrics about dressing corpses. ‘Most of what I like / Is given to me by / The one that I love’ is such a lovely way of expressing how much of your happiness comes from another person, even if the rest of the song makes that dependence sound considerably more troubled.

It’s another example of Joey Walker’s greatly underutilised songwriting, his second contribution to Paper Mâché Dream Balloon after ‘Dirt’. The chord progression feels mystical, reminding me of the way Brian Wilson could move between chords that seem unlikely neighbours and make the whole thing sound completely natural. The harmonies are so delicate, and the slightly out-of-tune piano at the end is a massive part of the appeal. There’s something a little wonky about the whole recording that makes the sweetness feel all the more human. Whatever it is that keeps bringing me back, the play count speaks for itself.

1) Crumbling Castle

The song that made me obsessive. Sketches of Brunswick East had already helped me appreciate Gizz, but after months of hearing their 2017 releases at Rough Trade, the sophistication of ‘Crumbling Castle’ was what really sucked me into the Gizzverse. Where do I even begin with this song? The musicianship might be King Gizzard at their best, and I still don’t know how they manage to keep it all in time. Stu once called it the hardest song they’d ever made, which is reassuring. There’s that jazzy passage in the middle, the guitars weaving around each other, the synth breakdown, then the explosive vocals and distortion at the end, where the whole thing seems to collapse under its own weight. It’s prog done absolutely perfectly, grandiose and ridiculously intricate, with production that lets you hear every part.

I have so many memories tied to this song. I remember sitting on the tube with my brother, telling him to listen to the separation between the instruments and explaining what I meant about hearing beyond a song’s topline melody. He really understood what I was getting at. When the band made Polygondwanaland freely available for anyone to press and release, I started that ill-fated cassette label just to put it out. That led to me releasing some other psychy shit, so this song had a fairly direct influence on how I spent both my time and my money.

The live memories are equally vivid, if not always for musical reasons. At Ally Pally on their mammoth 2019 tour, a girl threw up with what seemed like extraordinary precision, hitting the inside of my shoe and absolutely nothing else. At a festival in Bilbao, my friend was coming up hard and told me to ‘go on without me’. Sadly for him, I did, and had a whale of a time. ‘Crumbling Castle’ was my gateway drug to Gizz, and it still feels like their greatest achievement: an ambitious, beautifully arranged leap forward in their sound and, above all, an absolutely banging tune. There was no way anything else was taking number one, even if my Apple Music play count insists it should be ‘Most of What I Like’.

The 25 Best Songs By King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Ranked