Flying Microtonal Banana by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard

Flying Microtonal Banana, the ninth studio album from Melbourne's King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, dropped on 24 February 2017 via Flightless at home, ATO in the US and Heavenly in the UK, and it's the one where they retuned the whole band. Subtitled Explorations into Microtonal Tuning, Volume 1, it's their first dive into the notes that fall between a piano's keys, played on custom-built instruments, and it opened both a trilogy of microtonal records and their year of five albums.

It sounds like psych-rock beamed in from somewhere east of everywhere: bent, woozy guitar lines from Stu Mackenzie, Joey Walker and Cook Craig, Ambrose Kenny-Smith's harmonica wailing over the top, and two drummers, Michael Cavanagh and Eric Moore, locking the groove tight. "Nuclear Fusion" is the pick. It became their first top 10 album in Australia, peaking at number two, and their first to reach the Billboard 200.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.