Chronologically, the first instalment in the Gizzard 2017 series came in March, with the fabulously-titled ‘Flying Microtonal Banana’; the album, a relatively sedate and breezy affair, was named after the guitar that formed its bedrock. “I went to Turkey a while back and I came back with this sort of folk instrument called a bağlama,” explains Mackenzie. “I was messing around and having fun with it for a while, which led to a few songs, and I thought we could maybe make our own Turkish folk album. We never actually recorded any of it, because once we started jamming, it became clear how difficult it is to translate the melodic parts from the bağlama to the other instruments. Instead, I had this guitar custom-made to resemble the bağlama in a simplified, more rigid form. That guitar was what we were calling the flying microtonal banana, and all the ideas for the record escaped from that instrument. We buried a couple of them pretty deep on ‘Nonagon Infinity’, but on ‘Banana’, all of that microtonal stuff really came to the fore.”

Instead, it was June’s ‘Murder of the Universe’ that had the closest ties to ‘Nonagaon Infinity’, both in terms of the way it sounds and with regards to the highly conceptual aspects of its vision. Where the lyrics on ‘Banana’ focused on a more tangible and real threat to the future of civilisation – environmental concerns and climate change – ‘Murder of the Universe’’s take on the End Of Days was more akin to the sort of things you’d see in horror fiction, from the ominous voiceovers to constant nods to monstrous transformation. “I think all the albums actually needed to be a little bit conceptual, in order that we could separate the songs into their appropriate categories,” Mackenzie relates. “That’s part of the reason why the four that are out are all so distinct from each other. With ‘Murder of the Universe’, though, the aim was basically to make a version of ‘Nonagon Infinity’ that was just more brutal, more disgusting – something like that. I wanted it to be scary and gross and, honestly, a little bit challenging.”

Anybody moved to suggest that ‘Murder of the Universe’ is the most indulgent of the 2017 releases to date might also have a point, by Mackenzie’s own admission. “Everyone always says that you should make music for yourself – that’s what you should be aiming for, so that you can kind of cast off the weight of expectation. But, to be honest, I think a lot of the time, you’re actually making music for your friends – or at least I am. I’ll write a song, and as I’m working on it, I’m thinking, ‘I’ll play this for such a person, because I think they’ll really dig it.’ ‘Murder of the Universe’ was an exception to that, because the whole time I was writing it, I was convinced that everybody was going to hate it except me! So I guess I made that one for myself, for a change.”

Given both the close ties of ‘Murder of the Universe’ to ‘Nonagon Infinity’ and the gruelling process that the band put themselves through to finish the latter, it’s possible that they were reacting against it and finding a little bit of catharsis in aiming to remake it in such an extreme new image. “There’s some truth in that,” Mackenzie agrees. “That’s something that would’ve happened subconsciously, for sure. ‘Nonagon Infinity’, at least for us, was a fairly calculated record, and although ‘Murder of the Universe’ was coming from the same place, and some of the most difficult songs and takes we’ve ever put down are on there, it still felt a lot more free, because when we were in the process of finishing it, we were letting the tracks go their own way, and if that meant they ended up in these far-out places, then great. That’s how the record took on so much of its concept and personality, and it was a much more enjoyable experience for us. We got to mess around a lot more, I guess.”

In turn, what followed ‘Murder of the Universe’ felt like a kick back against it. Had we not known in advance that every record that King Gizzard have put out this year has been by design rather than accident, it would’ve been easy to consider August’s ‘Sketches of Brunswick East’ a bit of a fluke. There was no bloody-mindedness about it, or roadmap of any kind; it simply fell together when Mackenzie cajoled his long-time tour mate Brettin into some collaborative sessions in Melbourne, once they finally got off the road for a little while.

“We toured with those guys quite a few times,” recounts Mackenzie. “I want to say that it was mostly through 2015. We played a lot with Mild High Club in Europe and in the States, and we just became good friends with them. Alex and I got on especially well, which is weird because I think we both have very different musical upbringings ­– it’s just that we arrive in this very similar place. I can’t read music or anything like that – I grew up just playing as loud as I could in pubs, you know? I just don’t know what I’m doing, most of the time. I’m always just kind of fucking around, but I’m curious, too, and I think Alex’s background is the sort of thing I’m fascinated by.”

Regardless of what the carefree tenor of his music might suggest, Brettin is a serious student of jazz, and it was that discipline and knowledge that drew Mackenzie towards the idea of a collaborative LP. “It’s like a horseshoe effect or something, the way we seem to meet in the middle. We just formed this friendship and I don’t really even know whose idea the record was. One day, we obviously decided between us that it was a good idea. At that point, as nice as it sounded, I’m not sure that we ever expected it to go anywhere, or end in something tangible. I think it was December last year that Mild High Club came down to Australia to play Gizzfest and I said to Alex, ‘why don’t you just stay here for another week, you can sleep at my place, and we’ll just go to the studio every day and try to make something.’ We had maybe ten or twelve weird ideas, that were usually just a chord progression with a melody over the top, and we just bounced them back and forth.”

As Mackenzie and Brettin began to hammer ‘Sketches of Brunswick East’ into shape, it became clear that they’d been able to tap into the same creative vein; the album’s title stems from the fact that, for much of the creative process, the individual ideas that became the songs on the record were just that – sketches of where the duo wanted to go. They’d turn on the tape machine as they played, and by the end of Brettin’s seven-day stay they had the basis of the record; work then continued in fits and starts, as the two traded recordings back and forth between Melbourne and Los Angeles.

That was something that continued for another six months before ‘Sketches of Brunswick East’ was actually ready, and as much as Mackenzie is now a staunch advocate for that kind of open-ended process, he does stress that an experimental environment doesn’t necessarily mean that the pressure is automatically off in creative terms.

“There’s always a little bit of pressure, and a little bit of pressure is always a good thing,” he says. “In some ways, if you’re going in blind, the stakes are a little bit higher. That was especially true of ‘Sketches of Brunswick East’, because Alex is this incredibly talented guy and I’m thinking, ‘I’ve got to make something that he’s going to like.’ At the very least, it had to be something that he’d be able to latch onto, and figure out where it could go next. I’d be trying to push him in a certain direction, but I’d also be holding back, because I didn’t think I was smart enough to know what chord inflection he was going for. I was happy to just hand it back and let him put his own sparkle on the songs. When he left Australia, I was stoked because I knew we had some good stuff, but at the same time I was kind of scared to listen back to what we had! I didn’t know what the fuck we’d just made! And there was a lot of chopping and changing, and editing – we almost sampled ourselves a few times.”