The album features four songs, each running for ten minutes and ten seconds[3] making each song a quarter of the album - hence the title. Drawing upon jazz-fusion and psychedelic rock, the album's more laid-back sound was described as "unlike anything they’ve released before" and as "an album more likely to get your head bobbing and hips shaking as opposed to losing footwear in a violent mosh".[1]
Stu Mackenzie described how the composition of the album came around in an interview in 2015:
"I wanted to make a record where I didn’t have to yell, as well as exploring some longer, repetitive song structures.” Four tracks, four quarters, each one precisely 10:10 minutes long, each one an extended jam teeming with melodies, the occasional trickle of water, space funk, laughter like Pink Floyd and deliciously unfussy grooves. I also didn’t want to use any brutal guitar pedals or sing through blown-out guitar amps as I usually would."[4]
Upon its release, Quarters! received generally positive reviews by music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from critics, the album received an average score of 68, based on 8 reviews, indicating "generally favorable".[5]
Writing for The Guardian, Everett True claimed during the album that "King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard unravel mysteries, perform magic, tease melodies out of intricately formed musical patterns and do it all with a face that would be straight except it’s taken too many mind-altering substances."[7]
Music
The album consists of four psychedelic pop songs, all running exactly ten minutes and ten seconds.[6] "The River" is a Traffic-style jazz-rock song with Santana-esque congas.[6] It is the second song by the band to feature an odd time signature, with the majority of the song in 5 4.
Tim Sendra of AllMusic described the album as a "jazz-prog epic."[8] Mike Katzif of NPR described the album's music as "jazz-inflected prog rock."[9]
Track listing
Vinyl releases have tracks 1–2 on Side A, and tracks 3–4 on Side B.[10]