King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard announced as first headliners for Wide Awake Festival 2024

Keith Miller, co-founder and booker for Wide Awake says: "We're so delighted to finally nail down King Gizz! It'll be ten years since I first saw them in the Shacklewell when they hit the main stage. We've tried to bring them over every year, and they were our most requested acts from our fans survey. I caught them up at Manchester Psych Fest in September and it was unreal. You will not be disappointed!”

The festival prides itself with line-ups that have an equal gender split and 2023 saw it work further on a sustainable positive policy, which was set up to change the way live music events affect the planet. With social, cultural and environmental awareness being key to the very make up of Wide Awake, the festival itself is a party for those that want not only the best live acts but also want to encourage change.

Alongside the news of their recently announced 25th studio album, Silver Cord, the band unveil a trio of new singles, “Theia / The Silver Cord / Set", which open an album that sees perhaps the most thrilling rock group on the planet turn their hand to electronic music.

“Theia / The Silver Cord / Set” introduces this captivating turn and offers a glimpse at what is still to come. The Silver Cord does something no King Gizzard album has ever attempted before — becoming an album with a split personality and of divergent possibilities.

The Silver Cord will be available in two incarnations, the first paring its seven tracks back to their hooks, their choruses, their innate pop essence, and respecting the furniture of traditional song form. The second version of the album, however, bulldozes the rules of the three-minute pop hit and lets these robotic tunes run free.

The Silver Cord - Extended Mix stretches the connecting tissue between each track as far as it can, with KGLW operating as their own disco remixers and exploring the infinite possibilities contained within these extended futurist anthems, building them into epics unlike anything else in the group’s voluminous catalog.

“The first version’s really condensed, trimming all the fat,” explains Stu Mackenzie. “And on the second version, that first song, "Theia", is 20 minutes long. It’s the ‘everything’ version – those seven songs you’ve already heard on the first version, but with a whole lot of other shit we record while making it. It’s for the Gizz-heads. I love Donna Summer’s records with Giorgio Moroder, and I’d never listen to the short versions now – I’m one of those people who wants to hear the whole thing. We’re testing the boundaries of people’s attention spans when it comes to listening to music, perhaps – but I’m heavily interested in destroying such concepts.”