King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard to headline Wide Awake 2024

King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard have been confirmed as headliners for next year's Wide Awake festival, which will take place at Brockwell Park, London on May 25.

The Melbourne-based psych-rock sextet are the first, and so far only, artists announced for the leftfield indie, post-punk, electronica and techno one-dayer, which this year was headlined by Caroline Polachek and Osees.

The festival promoters say of the booking: "Our most requested headliner EVER, we've been trying to bring these guys over for the last 4 years and here we finally are!"

King Gizzard recently announced the follow-up to June's PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation album. The Silver Cord, their 25th studio album, will be released on October 27. Whereas PetroDragonic Apocalypse was billed as the band's second thrash metal album, following 2019’s Infest The Rats’ Nest, on The Silver Cord, King Gizzard are trying out electronic music.

“We come at electronic music from an amateur angle,” says frontman Stu Mackenzie. “I play the Juno synthesizer like a guitar, I don’t really know how to play it. But I wanted to be at peace with being the rock band pretending to know how to use modular synthesizers. We’re in uncharted waters, we’re further out to sea, but leaning into it, and we got to a spot where we were really happy with what came out.”

“It’s liberating to terrify yourself,” Mackenzie says. “I really believe in that as a philosophy. It’s always been part of our DNA. It’s something we’ve always done, putting ourselves in a position where the cortisol kicks in, pushing ourselves off the bridge and forcing ourselves to swim. Maybe we’ve got the thrill-seeker gene in us or something. It’s definitely my idea of fun.”

The band have released three songs from the record - Theia, The Silver Chord and Set - as one music video.

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Tickets for Wide Awake 2024 are now on sale.

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A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne's private jet, played Angus Young's Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.