Rattlesnake

Few rock songs from the 2010s achieve the genuinely hallucinatory effect of "Rattlesnake" — a thirteen-minute motorik spiral from King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard's 2017 album *Flying Microtonal Banana*. The song is built on a single, almost meditative repetition: the word "rattlesnake" chanted over and over against a locked, hypnotic groove that owes more to Can or Neu! than to any conventional rock structure. The guitars are tuned in quarter-tones, sliding through microtonal intervals that unseat the ear in subtle and disorienting ways, giving the whole track a slightly detuned, desert-sun quality — music that sounds baked and parched and alive with hidden movement. The rhythm is immaculate and relentless, the whole band functioning as one precision organism, locked into a pulse that never wavers across its full duration. There is no conventional emotional arc here, no verse-chorus tension and release — instead the song works through accumulation, the repetition gradually stripping away context until the word itself becomes pure sound, a coiling shape. The effect is genuinely trance-inducing: time dilates, attention narrows, and the mind enters a state adjacent to meditation. It belongs to a specific tradition of Australian psychedelic experimentation that King Gizzard helped bring to international attention, music with roots in Aboriginal drone aesthetics and late Krautrock minimalism. You reach for this track when you want to be carried somewhere specific — a long highway stretch, a late afternoon run that tips into dissociation, or any moment that calls for the dissolving of ordinary consciousness.