How King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard Is Preparing for Its Biggest Summer Yet

From its voluminous releases to its bold genre-hopping, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard has become known for blowing up the conventions that limit most rock bands. But even by the Australian sextet’s standards, its upcoming tour — where it’ll team with orchestras to bring its latest album, Phantom Island, and selections from its catalog to the stage — is unfamiliar territory.

“It was ultra intimidating, to be honest, at the start,” King Gizz vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Joey Walker tells Billboard in early July, as he commutes to the band’s third day of rehearsals for the tour in Melbourne. “We just had really no point of reference.”

“We’re not very good at rehearsing,” Walker’s King Gizz compatriot Stu Mackenzie explains with a laugh. “This one will have to be the most rehearsal [we’ve done] for a tour for a very long time, maybe ever, because there are so many people on stage… it’s gonna be a lot harder to go out on tangents like we usually do.”

But, lest fans of King Gizz’s famously off-the-wall live shows worry, the orchestral gigs are just another laboratory for the band to test the new and unexpected. “It’s just a different type of discipline,” Mackenzie says. “Improvising and doing stuff off-script feels like it should be undisciplined — but it’s actually, in a lot of ways, the most disciplined of all, because you need to be in such a specific headspace to even have the confidence to do it, that it takes a lot of mind over matter to actually just do that every night.”

It’ll also be a new experience for Sarah Hicks, the conductor who will lead ensembles such as the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and the Chicago Philharmonic as they perform King Gizz’s music. Under the guidance of arranger Sean O’Loughlin, who has helped translate music by Boyz II Men, Jason Mraz, Little Big Town and more to orchestras, the King Gizz scores still allow for the band to take musical detours.

“He’s been able to build in moments in our charts where it indicates for an orchestra, ‘OK, this is an open vamp. Stuff is going to happen. We need to wait for a signal from the band, through me, to know when we’re moving forward,’” Hicks says. “Sean is working with the band to figure out how to navigate those portions. It requires us to have a little more flexibility — but I think it also requires the band to understand the strictures within which we work as classical musicians.”

The shows will be the fruition of a nearly two-year planning process — one that inspired the band to also make an album backed by an orchestra, rather than the other way around, says Panache founder Michelle Cable, who books and manages King Gizz. When the band wrapped a tour at the Hollywood Bowl in November 2023, Johanna Rees, Los Angeles Philharmonic vp, presentations, suggested the concept of an orchestral tour to Cable.

Cable brought it to the band, which was so enamored with the idea that it decided to record the album that became Phantom Island, released in June, with an orchestra. Concurrently, Cable dipped her toes into the orchestral sphere — “It’s definitely not my world,” she says, though she calls the experience “fun and educational” — to select the best markets and ensembles for King Gizz.

“Suddenly, it’s not just about this band that is so independent and [for which] the DIY ethos is so significant,” she says of the undertaking. “Suddenly, we’re having to work around everyone else’s means and schedules.”

King Gizz will do eight orchestral shows in eight U.S. markets beginning on July 28, before staging a handful in Europe and Australia later this year. Promoters and ensembles in other markets have expressed interest in doing orchestral shows with King Gizz moving forward but, Cable says, the tour is “this moment in time to celebrate this album. It’s not going to be something we do again.”

Through the project, King Gizz has found enthusiastic partners in its orchestral affiliates. Jim Roe, president and executive director of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s — which will perform with the band in Queens, N.Y., and New Haven, Conn. — says the ensemble’s players “like all kinds of music that is not traditionally considered classical, and [playing with non-classical artists] really changes the pace for them… It keeps everyone on their toes. They love it.”

Adds Hicks: “There’s this stereotype we have of classical musicians being strait-laced, and [classical music] is all they do. But I would say a majority of us don’t listen to classical music in our off-time, that we have our own genres that we’re passionate about, that we’re drawn to an artist that, when they happen to be doing an orchestra show, we are just beyond the moon excited to work with.”

King Gizz’s orchestral shows are just one component, albeit a significant one, of their major summer plans. Inclement weather scuttled Bonnaroo this year, but before it did, the band was booked to play three days at the fest as its first resident artist. Live Nation/C3 promoter Stephen Greene, who has been involved in the festival’s planning for nearly two decades, has booked King Gizz for years regionally — and while the band first played Bonnaroo in 2015, he says the band’s appeal truly clicked for him in 2019, when he booked them for an outdoor show at New Belgium Brewing Company in Asheville, N.C.

“The 4,000 people that were there, every subgenre of music was represented,” he says. “It was just the most absolutely fun and out-of-control [experience], in the most positive and wild way. I hadn’t seen anything like that in a really long time — a crowd that reacted to a band in that way.”

Greene calls King Gizz “a core band for Bonnaroo,” because “they sort of transcend genre” — and for that reason, cooked up the idea with Cable of helping the group bring its residency model, through which it has played multi-show runs in markets around the world, to the Tennessee festival.

While Bonnaroo didn’t happen as planned, King Gizz will stage the ultimate residency in mid-August, when it’ll put on its first U.S. festival, Field of Vision, at Meadow Creek in Buena Vista, Colo., a couple of hours southwest of Denver. The event will feature three three-hour sets by King Gizzard, as well as performances by like-minded artists including Babe Rainbow, White Fence, Ryley Walker and King Stingray.

“We wanted to create something where we were more in control of creating this environment where the fans could really bond and have this long, extended experience together,” says Cable, who explains that by curating the event itself, the King Gizz team could ensure aspects from booking to camping to vending met its standards.

“This is a little bit of a beta test year, with the format,” Walker says. The band is “hoping to create something we can do yearly,” Mackenzie adds, “in a place where people can come back every year and have a good time and hopefully be surprised.”

Also on King Gizz’s horizon: a European “rave tour” this fall, where it’ll continue the electronic experimentation it’s recently tinkered with on albums like 2023’s The Silver Cord onstage at its concerts. But first, King Gizz will perform some nine hours of music at high altitude in the Rockies at Field of Vision.

“We’ll have to get in some breath training before we get out into the Rockies,” Walker says. “We’ll see how we go. If we all pass out on stage, I guess that’s cool.”