Edition №16
My sister and brother-in-law have seen King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard quite a few times, and they're the reason I know the band at all. Two things amaze me about it: a level of access for fans that I'd put next to the Grateful Dead's, and a habit of changing styles from album to album, sometimes from one night to the next. I was supposed to see them in the summer of 2025. Travel got in the way.
Polygondwanaland is that access taken about as far as a band can take it. On November 17, 2017, the band put the album on its website for free as 3 separate masters: one for digital, one for CD, and one prepared for vinyl, with a warning that the vinyl files "will not sound normal on generic Hi Fi speakers." The page asked people to make their own tapes, CDs, and records, and it waived the mechanical license. The Creative Commons license on the band's Bandcamp page let anyone copy the album and sell it, as long as nobody altered it. Stu Mackenzie told NME the day before release that the whole thing was a gift and an experiment. "I don't think we really thought this through," he said.
People took them up on it, and they still are. Discogs dates 6 new versions of Polygondwanaland to 2026, 9 years after the files went up, and one of them, its label says, is made from recycled plastic.
You can own this record without anyone ever selling it to you. The band's page says so in 8 words: "We do not own this record. You do." Labels and fans have since made hundreds of versions of it. The list worth owning is much shorter.
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Reference Checks is a Twelve Bar Studio production. If you've ever bought a record everyone praised and wondered why yours didn't sound like the one they meant, that's the problem I started it to solve. My listening chain is calibration context, named in the About page and kept out of every verdict. Research uses AI tooling; the verification and the editorial are mine. See Editorial process.