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Really, really tough to make.”ĭespite living with a chronic illness, Mackenzie is not accustomed to pressing pause. So I just had to make that call, which absolutely sucks. And this was over the course of a fairly long amount of time. It was just brutal, and I was kinda going downhill. “It does often feel like a risk, every time you go away for a long time and you leave your healthy space and your support network and everything like that. It’s actually not a great lifestyle for, like, any person in terms of health,” he says with a laugh. Touring isn’t a great lifestyle for this disease.

“Everything kind of happened all at once, and I was already doing a few different treatment kind of things, and that wasn’t working. “It’s been bad on tour before, but I think this time was a perfect storm,” he says. This was the first time the symptoms got so intense that he needed to pull the plug on band activities and, by extension, to go public about his battle with Crohn’s. Normally he keeps the sickness under control by carefully managing his sleep, diet, and stress - not the easiest variables to control when living in transit for months at a time. His whole life, he’s been suffering from Crohn’s disease, a debilitating and incurable inflammatory bowel condition. A month before our call, Mackenzie cut short King Gizzard’s jaunt through Europe and the UK due to health concerns. In all seriousness, this reprieve from the road has been much-needed. After so many years playing rock ‘n’ roll until sunrise, waking up early with the kid still feels like a fresh challenge. “Sleeping in a tour bus and going on tours probably prepared me well for extreme sleep deprivation,” Mackenzie says, only half-joking. He’s home in Melbourne with his wife and daughter, recuperating between tours of separate continents, having briefly traded out the chaos of touring life for a different kind of chaos: that of life with a nearly two-year-old child. For him, our conversation is taking place on the morning of Sept. But Mackenzie is the group’s founder and chief driving force: the primary songwriter, the guitar virtuoso, the falsetto voice poking and prodding most tracks along, as well as the guy who records, often mixes, and sometimes even masters the records. King Gizzard are a band in the classic sense, too collaborative to be perceived as some dude’s solo project. It’s a rare group that can convincingly blur the lines between Phish, Neu!, King Crimson, and the Osees while never sounding like anything less than themselves.

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They’ve also documented that concert experience via umpteen live albums and official bootlegs freely uploaded for their fans to download and distribute how they see fit. In the decade since that record’s fried echo-chamber psych-surf shenanigans, King Gizz have tried their hand at (among other things) a Spaghetti Western epic narrative, heady jazz fusion, dreamy psychedelic folk, prog-metal short stories, woozy soft rock, brain-melted boogie, charred primitivist thrash, panoramic synth-pop, and extensive experiments with microtonal composition - most of it merged seamlessly into the zany garage-punk jam-band vibe that has made them one of the most infectiously fun live acts in the world. It also happens to be 10 years to the day since they released their first, 12 Bar Bruise. 7 - the same day the Melbourne psychedelic party rockers extraordinaire confirmed the titles and release dates of their three new full-lengths, all of which are dropping within a 21-day span this fall. On my end of our video call, in the Eastern Time Zone, it’s still Sept. His boyish face mostly flashes contemplative expressions while answering questions but sometimes defaults back to the half-grin seen on stage just before some kind of lunatic outburst somehow he looks friendly, bemused, and mischievous all at once.

At 31, his former blonde metalhead mane is shorn to just above shoulder length. Mackenzie’s slender frame is immersed in a white quarter-zip. Not that nodding to their own history while launching forward into an elaborate new chapter would be at all out of character for this band. “That was completely coincidental,” Stu Mackenzie assures me, marveling at the accidental synchronicity. What’s the best way to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of your debut LP? If you’re King Gizzard & The Wizard Lizard and you’ve released 20 studio albums in that timeframe, you celebrate by announcing three more.