King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard
Royal Albert Hall, London
4th November 2025

Tom Parry sees the creative force of King Gizzard in full flow for an epic and incredibly varied performance at the Royal Albert Hall to mark the release of yet another new album.

When you see that a band is playing with a full orchestra it can hint that they might be running out of fresh ideas. If the band is one as inventive and restless as King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizzard, however, you can be pretty sure that doing a gig at the Albert Hall with an orchestra is not simply going to be a case of churning out a standard set with some embellishment from a full string section behind.

 

So it proved as soon as frontman Stu Mackenzie came out with the five other members of Kind Gizzard. This was not going to be a performance when they sat back and allowed the orchestra – the Covent Garden Sinfonia – to flesh out the songs so they could be less energetic than usual.

On the back of the release of Phantom Island, their 27th album (in less than 13 years), the Melbourne outfit clearly relished being in the hallowed space of the Royal Albert Hall.

The first part of the two-and-a-half hour set was the new record played out in its entirety, a bold move for such a prestigious night. 

It didn’t seem to make any difference to the devoted fans, though, who seemed as enthused by the new material as they would be by songs that have been around for longer. The gig started with furious, expansive energy, prompting an unrelenting flow of stage divers from start to end, and never really took a breather.

What was impressive about this particular King Gizzard set was that it was as though they had been playing with an orchestra forever, there was no hesitancy.

In the third song, Lonely Cosmos, the orchestra really came to the fore. The brass players bolstered the next number, adding real emphasis to its already epic quality. 

At times it seemed like the presence of the seated orchestra added an extra dimension to King Gizzard’s outerplanetary psych rock, without losing any of the chugging groove which makes these six exceptional musicians such an incendiary live act. At other points, once the gig really got going, and King Gizzard let loose with soulful, trippy signature freak-outs, the orchestra faded more into the background. At times it was hard to really hear what it was adding when the band was properly rocking.

Some of the latter songs off the new album were infused with a wistful and dreamy quality, bringing summery, hypnotic waves into this most stolidly British of venues. 

There was so much going on in this gig. For me, one of the main highlights was the soulful voice of keyboard player and multi-instrumentalist Ambrose Kenny-Smith. The interweaving guitars of Mackenzie, Joey Walker and Cook Craig, combined with their vocal dexterity, was special too. So tight, amazing to watch.

The orchestra disappeared for about 20 minutes mid-show, during which the house lights were on, and King Gizzard entered into an extended jam which transformed into Gaia, one of their most raucous, riff-heavy tracks, culminating in a crazy crescendo. It was like being privy to the inner workings of this unique band, more like a rehearsal in a garage which removed all of the stagecraft. At the end came an incredible drum solo, giving the other five members of the band a break, before the orchestra returned.

Picking out the high points of the last part of this gig would be a tough task. It was stratospheric and spacey, then segueing into flat-out head-bangers, and then weaving into desert rock, like some distillation of the best bits of Can, Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead and a few thrash metal bands thrown in for good measure. There were wild scenes in the mosh pit during favourites like Crumbling Castle and Mars for the Rich – about everyone’s current hate figure Elon Musk. The fiery, pulsating riffs of Dragon cascaded and screeched around the Royal Albert Hall. Theatrical, epic, but somehow not self-indulgent. I could have happily listened to another two hours.

~

Words by Tom Parry, you can find his author’s archive here plus on Twitter and his website

All photos © Paul Grace. For more of Paul’s photos go to his archive. Paul is on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and his websites are www.paulgrace-eventphotos.co.uk & www.pgrace.co.uk.