At the risk of sounding like a base-model white guy in his early 20s, one of my favorite musical groups right now is King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. A couple of weeks ago I bought tickets to go see them in Philly and something that I seriously felt like I had to take into account was, “in light of their upcoming thrash metal album, am I going to be sucked into the ensuing mosh pit, and die?”. My favorite King Gizz albums have always been their more chilled-out stuff like Sketches and Paper Maché, so I was apprehensive about how much I’d enjoy Infest The Rats’ Nest and whether or not that would affect my enjoyment of the concert that Ticketmaster was going to charge me a bunch of BS fees to see. Well never fret folks ‘cause this one absolutely slaps.
As with a lot of King Gizzard’s albums, Infest The Rats’ Nest is greater than the sum of its parts. My reaction to the singles they put out was just sort of, “neat”. I liked “Planet B” but was iffy on a whole album of that. But I ended up, really, really liking IRTN.
First off, it has a plot. It’s some really cool dystopian sci-fi taking place post-environmental collapse. It starts off with some scene-setting vignettes - the environment is just gone, the people who can afford it have abandoned Earth for colonies on Mars, a presumed breakdown of law, order, and the economy have led to a black market for human organs, and people are being wiped out by antibiotic-resistant disease. In the album’s second half, those desperate to escape earth try to colonize Venus and die repeatedly in the attempt. And then they end up in hell (or maybe it’s figurative? or hallucination?) and the album just sort of ends. Unlike some other Gizz albums that are so concept-heavy it’s weird to listen to any of it in isolation (MOTU is the worst offender), each track on ITRN can really stand on its own while also being enhanced when listened to in the context of the full album. And, while there are probably fewer lyrics in the whole album than words in this paragraph, the music itself tells a lot of the story by setting this mood of bleak, angry panic. Listening to this gave me big epic sci-fi energy the weekend it came out.
I also have to mention the environmentalist message. You can find this at least once on most of Gizz’s albums but they’ve really been amping it up this year. Where their last album, Fishing For Fishies, was all “guys we have to stop polluting,” Infest The Rats’ Nest says “the Earth is completely, supremely boned.” This album gets angry about the future in a way that I think reflects a lot of the environmental angst that millennials-and-younger have and I hope the album gets more popular for that alone.
There’s also an essential “gizziness”(?) to ITRN; while it’s a lot harder than a lot of King Gizzard’s other stuff it still sounds like a King Gizzard album. Something I really like about these guys is that, although they dabble in a lot of different genres, their personnel and instrumentation don’t vary that wildly and there are common musical structures they employ across their work. I’m not entirely sure how to quantify it, but there’s this King Gizzard-y sound that you start to notice after listening to enough of their stuff. Part of it is you can hear how much fun they have. There’s a lot of legitimate artistry but you can also tell that the band doesn’t take themselves too seriously. Not that the subject matter here isn’t serious, but there’s like a degree of camp, almost. This core style is maintained on ITRN and that made it more accessible for me than if I’d just picked up listening to a new metal band - although maybe that’s just me saying “I was ready to enjoy this thing because I was already a fan of the creators” which, like, duh.
This is all to say that Infest The Rats’ Nest has become my go-to exercising soundtrack. It really makes you want to just sprint super hard. I think I listened to the album more times through on the day of its release than I’ve listened to Fishies, ever. Highlights for me are “Mars For The Rich” and “Perihelion”, while I’m going to go against the grain of (what I perceive to be) the fan-consensus and say I don’t like “Superbug” that much. It’s much longer than anything else on the album and to be blunt I think some of the lyrics are just bad. They use “fuck” a lot and really want to rhyme things with “fuck” like it’s going to make this sludge metal song about pestilence any harder. When it gets to
superbug is like a truck / penicillin is a duck
it just loses me completely.