King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have officially announced their 28th album, Alien Metal, and, because this is King Gizzard, it arrives with the feeling that the band have once again found a new wall to run directly through.
The Melbourne/Naarm six-piece will release Alien Metal later this year via p(doom) Records. Alongside the announcement, they’ve shared the album’s first single, ‘Level 5’, with a new video directed by Hayden Somerville.
Following the band’s recent run of so-called “rave shows” — including a free Melbourne pop-up at Fed Square that reportedly drew around 10,000 fans — Alien Metal sees King Gizzard swerving further into the dark machinery of electronic dance music. The record follows their 2023 synth-heavy album The Silver Cord, but appears to push the experiment into harder, heavier and stranger territory.
The album was written and recorded using the modular synthesiser setup the band took on the road last year, affectionately named “Nathan”. Instead of guitars, drums and the usual rock-band arsenal, the rave shows saw the band gather around the sprawling synth setup, each member manipulating the machine in real time to create something closer to a mutant electronic organism.
Frontman Stu Mackenzie said the process forced him to rethink the way he approached music entirely.
“It completely rewired my brain,” Mackenzie said. “I was like, ‘I’m going to forget everything I know about music and relearn it all from scratch’.”
According to the band, Alien Metal was not an easy record to make. Mackenzie said they scrapped huge amounts of material while trying to locate the album’s identity.
“We’ve never scrapped so much material as we have for this album,” he said. “Entire albums, entire universes that were formulated, created, recorded, deleted and started again.”
The breakthrough reportedly came during a late-night improvisation session that stretched for more than an hour. That single spontaneous jam became the foundation for the whole album, with every track on Alien Metal evolving from the same source performance.
The result is being described as a seamless trip through techno, hardcore, house and jungle, all filtered through King Gizzard’s permanently unstable psychedelic lens.
“It sounds so crunchy, but also beautiful,” Mackenzie said.
Joey Walker added: “Alien Metal goes really hard, but it also goes to really interesting places. And it feels unique – it feels like us, still.”
The video for ‘Level 5’ also comes with a very Australian curveball: a cameo from Vince Colosimo, known for roles in Chopper, Lantana, The Wog Boy and Underbelly, as well as appearances in The Great Gatsby, Daybreakers and Body of Lies.
Producer Ruby Thomas said Colosimo had long been discussed as a dream casting choice for the band’s projects.
“Hayden had brought up Vince on numerous occasions when fantasising about casting for previous projects, but I had mostly laughed it off because it seemed impossible,” Thomas said. “But on this occasion it didn’t feel like such a crazy idea. We really wanted to find a strong, recognisable face to lead this clip, and in Australian cinema, Vince is all that and more. He was a dream to work with and brought so much more to the role than we could have imagined.”
The tracklist for Alien Metal is:
- ‘Sapience’
- ‘Alien Metal’
- ‘Superheavy, Supercritical’
- ‘Kill For The Steel’
- ‘Level 5’
- ‘Rapid Alpha Decay’
- ‘Uqt’
- ‘Atomic Collapse’
King Gizzard are also set for a major run of live dates, including their sold-out Field of Vision Festival this August, three headline shows at New York’s Forest Hills Stadium, and another rave show in Brooklyn in July.
For a band that has already ripped through psych-rock, microtonal freakouts, thrash, prog, boogie, synth-pop, jam-rock and symphonic weirdness, Alien Metal looks like the next mutation: King Gizzard entering the rave bunker and coming back with something metallic, unstable and very much alive.
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