Audio By Carbonatix
Well, it looks like another one of my small joys was sacrificed at the altar of technological progress.
This time, it was the entire King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard catalog on Spotify.
If you’re a King Gizzard and the Lizard fan who fired up Spotify this Friday morning, ready to mainline some “Rattlesnake” into your veins to kick off the weekend, there’s a chance you found… nothing.
The vast, sprawling, gloriously weird catalog of Australia’s finest, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, has vanished. As of this writing, you can still listen to certain songs, but their album page on Spotify is a ghost town.
While the band has yet to release a formal press statement, they broke their silence Friday morning with an Instagram post announcing a new collection of demos. The caption was short, sweet, and brutally to the point, set to Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War”:
“New demos collection out everywhere except Spotify (fuck Spotify). You can bootleg it if you wanna.” So, yeah. The move is intentional.
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Also, to not fully bury the lede here: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s demos Vol. 7 + Vol. 8 are out and available to listen and buy on Bandcamp.
You can still listen to songs, but all their albums are gone, just three days before their summer tour kicks off in the United States at the Mann Music Center in Philadelphia.
Update: King Gizzard confirmed on Instagram Stories that the reason they’re pulling their catalog on Spotify is due to Spotify’s CEO investing millions in AI drone warfare technology.
This is all because of Spotify’s billionaire CEO, Daniel Ek. According to a June 2025 report in the Financial Times, Ek’s investment firm, Prima Materia, is “doubling down” on a German defense tech company called Helsing.
And what does Helsing do? Oh, you know, just the usual Skynet kind of stuff, sans actually making Terminators. It started with artificial intelligence software for military use, but is now expanding to build its own hardware. Think: AI-powered drones, aircraft, and even unmanned submarines. The FT reports that Helsing has already sold “thousands of strike drones to Ukraine.”
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This venture is happening now. Ek’s firm just led a massive $704 million round that values Helsing at a staggering $14 billion. In the article, Ek himself lays out the vision, saying, “There’s an enormous realisation that it’s really now AI, mass and autonomy that is driving the new battlefield.”
If Ek’s investment in AI warfare is the motive behind yanking their catalog from Spotify, the Gizz boys aren’t alone. They join a growing list of artists who are fed up.
Indie-rock stalwarts Deerhoof were one of the first, stating bluntly, “We don’t want our music killing people. We don’t want our success being tied to AI battle tech.”
They didn’t stop there, calling Spotify a “widely hated data-mining scam masquerading as a ‘music company’” that is “flushing itself down the toilet.” Experimental outfit Xiu Xiu echoed the sentiment, labeling the platform a “garbage hole violent Armageddon portal.”
I’m with the artists on this one. It feels like AI is seeping into every crack of our culture, but not in the way we were promised in science fiction. It’s not making the everyday joe richer, curing cancer, or solving climate change.
We’re struggling to see the ways it’s actually making life any better, besides with some bells, whistles, and lots of money for the techn-futurist overlords.
Instead, its most high-profile applications seem to be generating uncanny valley art that gets old quickly and reeks of laziness, and, now, making warfare more efficient. We’re also conveniently ignoring the immense environmental cost: the colossal data centers required to power this revolution consume terrifying amounts of water for cooling, straining resources in communities just so we can get a slightly better algorithm.
Look, I’m not a Luddite. Technology only moves one direction for most of human history: Forward. I believe AI can be a powerful tool. It can help us organize data, communicate more clearly, and solve complex problems. But that’s what it is: a tool. It’s not a deity we must worship or a tide we can’t turn. The problem is who wields the tool and for what purpose. Right now, it’s being wielded to build a future I’m not sure I want to live in.
When asked about a potential backlash, Spotify’s Ek’s response was the perfect villain monologue, like someone you could picture pushing the buttons in a Skynet boardroom. “I’m sure people will criticise it and that’s OK,” he told the Financial Times. “Personally, I’m not concerned about it. I focus more on doing what I think is right.”
Which brings me to my own little crossroads. I listen to an obscene amount of King Gizzard on Spotify. They’ve grown into one of my favorite bands at the moment. They’ve become an IYKYK darling to a certain kind of tuned-in musichead, blurring the world between metal, blues, and psych-rock. They’re masters of musical worldbuilding in the best possible way.
However, my monthly fee for Spotify feels like it’s no longer for music, and it’s becoming increasingly expensive anyway. In a way, that fee feels like it’s a micro-investment in Daniel Ek’s vision of the dystopian future. It’s a subscription to a music platform masquerading as a subscription to Skynet, one monthly payment at a time. It’s not like the money is going into King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s pockets to help them continue on their incredible trajectory as artists, which is what I would greatly prefer.
The tech-lord guys are betting we’re all so addicted to convenience that we’ll just shrug as they build a future straight out of a movie we were supposed to see as a warning.
They’re wrong.
Getting pissed off online does nothing, but, in theory and when done by enough people, a cancellation confirmation email.
Hit ’em in the wallet. It’s the only place they feel anything.
Time to go buy all my favorite King Gizzard albums on vinyl.
The way God and Stu Mackenzie intended.
BroBible has reached out to King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s PR reps for comment on the removal and to ask whether the band will be releasing an official statement. Stay tuned.