“I’m a pretty shit singer but I do think of my voice as an instrument,” laughs the frontman. ‘Superbug’ sings of the type of lurgy that will one day destroy us all, while the utterly nihilistic ‘Self-Immolate’ sees riff piled upon riff and Stu Mackenzie delivering a vocal display to stand alongside the likes of Tom Araya or Max Cavalera. This is an album dripping with disdain and disgust for a planet consuming itself in a mass act of cannibalism. ‘Venusian 1’ goes at it even harder, a shredding collection featuring an army of guitars. It’s the type of sub-three minute song you wish Hetfield and co. Ferocious and direct, “Organ Farmer” is built on drums that gallop away like a battalion of wild horses over the horizon and a triple guitar attack set to stun. Infest The Rats’ Nest is the sound of King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard scratching the thrash metal itch, fully and unequivocally. Later on, when I picked up a guitar I realized that shit was too hard to play, so I got into rock ‘n’ roll and garage. The German bands really kicked my ass and scared the hell out of me too. That was my introduction to heavy metal, and soon Rammstein led to Metallica, Metallica led to Slayer, Slayer led to Kreator and Sodom. I got whiplash, which I thought was pretty cool. “I made friends with him and we put together a performance at our school assembly where we headbanged to ‘Du Hast’. “In fourth grade there was an older kid who was into Rammstein,” explains Stu of his early discovery of metal’s extremities.

Released just six months after the uplifting blues-rock boogie and deep electro explorations of Fishing For Fishes, and drawing on the mid/late 1980s golden period of thrash metal – Metallica and Slayer, certainly, but also lesser-cited bands such as Exodus, Kreator and Overkill – Infest The Rats’ Nest sees a wholly unexpected creative detour into new sonic terrain. Their fifteenth studio album, Infest The Rats’ Nest is by far The Gizz’s hardest and heaviest album to date. But fear not: Melbourne, Australia seven-piece King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have returned to save us all, this time armed only with blast beats, an arsenal of well-oiled guitars that are locked and loaded, and a desire to melt faces clean off.

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