Polygondwanaland

 ( 2017 Albums ) 

Cultural theorist Benjamin Kirbach argues that, like Murder of the Universe (which also came out in 2017), the narrative of Polygondwanaland "adheres to a similarly Mythopoeia three-act structure in which civilization is threatened by ecological calamity." According to Kirbach:

The ensuing political strife results in a failed coup, the mutilated survivors of which ("Having had his eyes gouged / He left without the gift of sight") Cybernetics enhance themselves and ultimately regain power by colonizing the world of/as information. The album's name is a pun first of all on Gondwana, a neoproterozoic supercontinent that would have included modern-day Australia, as well as "poly," which no doubt refers to the Polyrhythm composition of the music as well as indeed—in Polysemy fashion—polygon, a multisided object which in this case could refer to the polygonal nature of computer graphics. The new supercontinent, polygondwanaland itself, is the terra incognita of digital information systems ("My body’s not a temple / It is a vessel / And a blank slate / An empty hard-drive"), and once human beings enter into it, they're able to see beyond the normal three-dimensions via a new "Tetrachromacy" hodography of user-generated data ("Many fingers, many minds and / Many eyeballs puppet my feet"). After a final flare-up of fuzzed-out guitars, Polygondwanaland ends with the Han-Tyumi's familiar voice, intoning nothing more than the word "Hello." This is not Murder of the Universe, but Han-Tyumi's arrival is enough to link the two albums conceptually (if not Diegesis). On the vinyl record, the needle then enters a locked groove, "Hello" repeating in an endless mechanical loop lest a human hand reach in to stop it.

Pitchfork gave the album a score of 7.2/10 and ranked it 17th in their list of the 20 best rock albums of 2017.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard

• Michael Cavanagh – drums , percussion , glass marimba
• Cook Craig – electric guitar , synthesizers
• Ambrose Kenny-Smith – harmonica , vocals
• Stu Mackenzie – vocals , electric guitar , bass guitar , acoustic guitar , synthesizers , flute , glass marimba , mellotron , percussion
• Eric Moore– management
• Lucas Skinner – bass guitar , synthesizer
• Joey Walker – electric guitar , acoustic guitar , bass guitar , synthesizers , vocals , percussion

Additional musicians

• Leah Senior – spoken word

Production

• Casey Hartnett – recording
• Stu Mackenzie – recording , additional recording, production
• Ryan K. Brennan – recording
• Joey Walker – additional recording
• Sam Joseph – mixing
• Joe Carra – mastering
• Jason Galea – artwork and layout