Polygondwanaland so far... (partially lost leaked demos by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard; 2017)

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard in April 2017 (Photo: Amber Knecht)

Status: Partially Lost

Background

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard is a psychedelic rock band from Melbourne, Australia. They've received international attention and acclaim for their energetic live performances, prolific release schedule, and diverse range of genres explored throughout their music. Following the success of their 2016 album Nonagon Infinity, frontman Stu Mackenzie announced that King Gizzard were to release 5 full length studio albums the following year. The absurdity of this announcement would receive mass media attention from publications such as Relix, Pitchfork, and The Guardian, many articles focusing on whether or not the band would complete this goal. Ultimately, the band were successful, releasing their fifth album of the year on December 31. On top of the 5 albums, King Gizzard were consistently touring and promoting their material through interviews and music videos throughout the whole year, even receiving mainstream recognition through an appearance on Conan that April. Then drummer and manager of the band Eric Moore also had to run the band's record label, Flightless Records, putting out six more albums that year in addition to Gizzard's five. All of this busy work would earn King Gizzard the Band of the Year award from Consequence in addition to the endless praise received from various music blogs and publications.

The five albums of 2017 were February's Flying Microtonal Banana, June's Murder Of The Universe, August's Sketches Of Brunswick East, November's Polygondwanaland, and December's Gumboot Soup. The first four of these albums were near totally different to each other. Flying Microtonal Banana was an exploration of microtonal music using custom-built or modified instruments, Murder Of The Universe was a heavy psychedelic three-part concept album with spoken word narration throughout, Sketches Of Brunswick East was a collaboration album with Mild High Club exploring jazz, Polygondwanaland was a progressive rock album built up by four suites, and Gumboot Soup being a collection of songs cut from these prior albums.

Polygondwanaland would stand out amongst these five, partially for its full exploration of a genre Gizzard had merely hinted towards in their past material, but also for its unique release. King Gizzard's previous albums were all released by their own label, Flightless, with deals created later on for international distribution. At the time these international releases were handled by ATO Records and Heavenly Recordings, but Polygondwanaland was different. Instead of either international label or even Flightless releasing the album, the band announced the album 3 days before release stating, "This album is FREE. Free as in, free. Free to download and if you wish, free to make copies.Make tapes, make CD’s, make records." The band released the album entirely for free allowing anyone who wanted to release their own editions of the album. Though ATO and Heavenly would release their own editions, followed by Flightless as a limited edition in 2018, it was completely out of the band's hands. Many record labels would be started through this free album, and nearly 400 different variants reportedly exist as of May 2024.

Leaked Demos

King Gizzard hadn't let out a lot of details about these albums until shortly before release, with official album release announcements sometimes going out days before the actual release. A likely reason for this was how much changed about these albums and how rocky the production of them really was. One example of this was the album Changes, originally meant to be the fifth record of 2017 before being shelved as they couldn't finish it in time, instead putting out Gumboot Soup and finishing Changes as their fifth album of 2022. Polygondwanaland had gone through a lot, in particular, leading up to its completion, with songs for it being worked on as early as 2014. The 10-minute opener Crumbling Castle was originally previewed live as a short, heavy 3-minute-long track in August 2016. Photos and videos from inside the band's studio at the time showed that Crumbling Castle was intended to be on Murder Of The Universe before at some point becoming its own thing.

On April 3, 2017, an anonymous account under the name "Blinky Bill" had posted a link to the King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard Fanpage group on Facebook. The link was to a private Soundcloud playlist put up only two minutes before the post on the Flightless Records account titled "Polygondwanaland so far...". Within the playlist was 5 tracks, demos to the then-unreleased Polygondwanaland. The tracklist was as follows;

1. Crumbling Castle I,II+III (1)
2. Polygondwanaland I+II+III (1)
3. Tetrachromacy I (1)
4. Spanish I (1)
5. Spanish III (1)

"Crumbling Castle I,II+III" would be released as Crumbling Castle, one long track not split into parts. "Polygondwanaland I+II+III" would be released as tracks 2-4 on the album; Polygondwanaland, The Castle In The Air, and Deserted Dunes Welcome Weary Feet. "Tetrachromacy I" would likely be released as Tetrachromacy, being part 1 of the Tetrachromacy suite. Allegedly "Spanish I" and "Spanish III" became Inner Cell and Horology, parts 1 and 3 of the Inner Cell trilogy, though this remains unconfirmed. From what still circulates, these demos seemed quite complete even if the album would use completely new recordings. The most obvious difference is that these demos were instrumental, though these songs likely did have written lyrics at this time given the 2016 performances of Crumbling Castle.

Availability

The original post by Blinky Bill was taken down quickly, with the Soundcloud playlist being deleted not long after. It was too late though, as many fans had already seen the post and already began theorizing on what the tracks were. Several people managed to grab screenshots while others ripped the tracks, however, these wouldn't be distributed very far. Blinky Bill had begun messaging people who posted info and screenshots to the group asking them to take it down and seemingly asking anyone who claimed to rip the tracks to not distribute them. Fans would eventually confirm this account to actually be King Gizzard frontman, Stu Mackenzie, with the account's only friends being every other Gizzard member and old posts with pictures of Stu tagged as Blinky Bill. The account would try to hide this though, seemingly posing as a fan and claiming to be Han-Tyumi, a character from the then-unreleased Murder Of The Universe.

Stu or Blinky Bill would ultimately be successful, with most people agreeing to respect the bands wishes to not spread these tracks. Rips of these demos were incredibly hard to come by until the album's release, however even after the albums release, only two of the five demos would circulate publicly. These were the demos for Crumbling Castle and the Polygondwanaland Suite. Tetrachromacy and the two Spanish tracks never resurfaced. Its unknown if any fan saved these additional 3 tracks or if they may be traded privately.

King Gizzard - in addition to their prolific studio album output - have a series known as Official Bootleggers, a series of official live albums and rare or demo tracks that were either unreleased or not widely available for anyone to release their own copies of similar to the release of Polygondwanaland. A series within the Official Bootleggers is the demo compilations, a currently 6-volume compilation of demos of unreleased and released Gizzard tracks in various states of completion. Through these demo albums so far, only one Polygondwanaland demo has been released being one of Horology. This demo sounds very different to both circulating Soundcloud leaks, seemingly being a solo recording by one member rather than a full band take like the Soundcloud leaks were. It's for this reason that many fans believe it to not be one of these leaked tracks, and rather an earlier take. The band still puts these compilations out every so often, so for now the best bet for fans to hear these lost demos is waiting to see if Tetrachromacy or any other Poly demo pops up on one in the future.

Track title	Status
Crumbling Castle I,II+III (1)	Found
Polygondwanaland I+II+III (1)	Found
Tetrachromacy I (1)	Lost
Spanish I (1)	Lost
Spanish III (1)	Lost

Gallery

• 

  Screenshot of the original Soundcloud playlist.

• 

  Screenshot of Blinky Bill's original Facebook post.

• 

  Screenshot of Blinky Bill's messages to a fan asking to not share the tracks.