The Third Eye

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s 27th (!) album, Phantom Island, washes ashore June 13th via their own (p)doom records. If you’ve been tracking the band’s latest adventures, you’ve already heard the lushly orchestrated “Deadstick” and the glimmering title track. 

Now comes “Grow Wings and Fly,” a shimmering, orchestral jam about getting blissfully airborne — figuratively and maybe a little literally — with lyrics about shedding doubt and dancing in the summer rain, tongue out.

The track began as a tag-on to live versions of “Shanghai” before evolving into its own radiant beast. It’s got flutes instead of fuzz pedals and pedal steel instead of psych squall, like King Crimson took a beach day with Canned Heat, tripping politely under string arrangements. 

Sam Joseph, their front-of-house wizard, lends that wistful steel, while UK baroque specialist Chad Kelly co-pilots the orchestration, bringing old-world harpsichords and Bach tuning to Gizzard’s microtonal messiness.

The accompanying video, directed by longtime Gizz-collaborator Hayden Somerville, stars Ambrose Kenny-Smith as a soggy, soulful sea creature gently nudged back to the surf by his bandmates at Flinders Beach. It’s dreamy, weird, and slightly stomach-turning, which, per Somerville, is the whole point: “There are so many strange and beautiful ways to grow wings and fly.”

Phantom Island marks the band’s first full plunge into orchestral waters and is a companion of sorts to 2024’s Flight b741. Stu Mackenzie says the band felt the songs “needed a different kind of paint,” hence the strings, the swells, the cinematic shimmer.

In true Gizzard form, this lush rebirth isn’t slowing them down. The band kicks off a European residency tour May 18th in Lisbon, playing in places like a prison in Lithuania and a Roman amphitheater in Bulgaria.

They’ll follow with symphony-backed U.S. gigs and, most Gizzardian of all, their own new festival: Field of Vision, landing in Colorado this August with sets from friends Babe Rainbow, King Stingray, and DJ Crenshaw.

Pre-order Phantom Island by KGLW here.