“Lately I’ve been having these vivid nightmares,” says Stu Mackenzie, video calling from the suburbs of Melbourne. “I’m on stage, but I can’t find my plectrum anywhere. It’s like it’s disappeared.” Mackenzie blames these “classic anxiety dreams” on the fact that, after two years of pandemic-mandated absence from concert stages, his psych-rock sextet King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard are on the precipice of an “absolutely giant” world tour. “Jumping back into it all again feels like crossing a force field into another dimension,” he says.
The group were recuperating at home in Melbourne after another epic global jaunt as the pandemic began. “We’d been going at it so hard,” says vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Joey Walker. “If you’d told me then, ‘You’re not gonna tour for two years’, I’d have said, ‘Well, we need the break.’”
