GUM / Ambrose Kenny-Smith Share Funky Title Track Off Newly Announced Album ‘Ill Times’

GUM, the project of Jay Watson (Pond, Tame Impala) and Ambrose Kenny-Smith (King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, The Murlocs) teamed for a new album, Ill Times, due out July 19 on King Gizzard’s new label p(doom) records. The duo previewed the LP with a video for the title track.

Ill Times is the first album released on p(doom) records. King Gizzard said the label functions “to put out our own records and our friends’ too. If you all keep listening to ’em, we’ll keep making ’em.”

First meeting after a Tame Impala show in Kenny-Smith’s home town of Geelong, Victoria, Australia in 2009, Watson and Ambrose began their working relationship a few years later as their bands began to take off — sending tracks back and forth.

The music the Australian musicians began creating was a departure from the wheelhouses of their respective groups. “I was excited to explore stuff our other bands hadn’t really touched on before,” Watson said. “Funk, soul… groove-based music.”

Thematically, loss was a common theme across Ill Times as Kenny-Smith wrote lyrics for the project following the passing of his father, renowned Australian musician Broderick Smith (the opening track “Dud” is credited to Ambrose-Kenny Smith and Broderick Smith), as well as the death of a close friend.

“I learned life is too short to live it in regret or a hole of depression,” Kenny-Smith added.

A press release further detailed Ill Times:

Ill Times is an album that takes swings at losers with god complexes, that builds the Impressions’ slow-burning ballad “Fool For You” into something so massive and brawny it’d give Jack White the willies, and closes with Watson and Kenny-Smith delivering righteous rough justice to an unabashed villain, and then riding off into the sunset like the heroes they are. The album is easily as much fun as the duo had making it, and that was a truly ridiculous amount of fun.

For six albums now, you’ve heard Jay Watson’s brain, unfiltered, as GUM. Now you can hear what that brain sounds like when it’s refracted through Ambrose Kenny-Smith’s bluesy, soulful lens. And it’s a very wonderful sound indeed.

Preview Ill Times with the music video for the title track below:

Ill Times Tracklist:

1. Dud
2. Ill Times
3. Minor Setback
4. Fool For You
5. Resilience
6. Powertrippn’
7. Old Transistor Radio
8. Emu Rock
9. Marionette
10. The Gloater