Uber-prolific Australian band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard has released nearly 30 albums since its 2012 debut — in other words, the band isn’t known for the drawn-out studio perfectionism that often stymies musicians.
But with Alien Metal, its 28th studio album — and first in 14 months, an eternity in the Gizzverse – King Gizzard did something out of character: It took its time.
And with good reason. Out today (Aug. 14), Alien Metal is arguably the biggest swing in a catalog full of them, as the sextet best known for wild, garage-meets-psych-rock ditched its guitars in favor of a hulking Eurorack, a type of modular synthesizer developed in the ’90s that all of its members could play simultaneously. The band began trotting the rig out for “rave shows” in late 2024, and affectionately named it Nathan; after a quiet touring year, it returns to the road, presumably with Nathan in tow, for its second annual Field of Vision camping festival outside of Denver this weekend, and four New York City shows later this month.
Alien Metal isn’t completely without precedent in King Gizzard’s catalog — the band has been incorporating electronic sounds into its music for the last several years, including on the 2023 electropop album The Silver Cord — but with the album’s pummeling, high-BPM tracks, King Gizzard ventures further onto the dance floor than it ever has.
According to the band’s Stu Mackenzie, as King Gizzard’s members began to conceive the album, they thought, “We’ve already done a few [electronic] things which were interesting to us. Let’s lean into the tropes a little bit more with this one — but also, let’s see if we can create something that feels like we made it, and that feels like it has its own DNA.”
That forced King Gizzard to operate well beyond its comfort zone, and helps to explain the patience making the album required. “We definitely scrapped more material for this record than we ever have, which was not something we expected to do,” Mackenzie, 35, says over Zoom from his native Melbourne. “It needed to congeal — it needed to set.”
Still, the band held onto its aggressively DIY ethos for Alien Metal, with its members modding out the Eurorack themselves and recording their experiments in their own Melbourne warehouse studio space, with “rats running along the floor and s–t.” As Mackenzie puts it, “We’ve just been doing this s–t ourselves, man. This is some f–king truly mad scientist, making explosions in the bathtub-type stuff.”
But while King Gizzard recorded the album over “a good couple years,” true to form, the restlessly creative band worked on several other projects concurrently. “Whole records were formulated and thought of and expanded on and recorded — and, you know, completely abandoned,” he reveals. “Maybe they’ll turn into something eventually.”
Plus, Alien Metal might not be as dissimilar from King Gizzard’s other output, anyway. “There are certain parallels with a lot of the heavy metal stuff we’ve done to techno, and to some of the more krautrock-ish, hypnotic, longer stuff that we’ve done,” Mackenzie says. “Maybe there is a thread with King Gizz and dance music that isn’t so far away.”
You and King Gizzard have been dabbling with dance music in recent years, from The Silver Cord to your “rave tours” with Nathan the Eurorack, to Mango Sticky Rice, the batch of modular ambient recordings you made on your own and released late last year. How did all these strands coalesce and inform Alien Metal?
King Gizz has been experimenting with electronic music in certain capacities for quite a long time, whether that was what we were doing with Silver Cord or whether it was what we were doing in a different way with 2021’s Butterfly 3000 [and its companion set of remixes Butterfly 3001], or with the rave tours, or [2022’s] Made in Timeland. Certain things that we’ve done have felt, to varying degrees, [like] “rock band making electronic music,” which is not like something that I think is even bad — it’s actually something that I think is quite interesting. But it is not what we were trying to do with this record. And it meant that this record needed more development than we thought it would.
It’s quite challenging to write songs, in the traditional sense, with this equipment, and I don’t think it’s what it’s good at or built for, but that therefore became interesting [to us]. Trying to figure out how to do six-person improvisational electronic music with [this] hardware — all the Eurorack stuff with f–king patch cables on the outside, just nightmare tech stuff — is all wrapped into the story as much as any of the [band’s prior] recording projects are.
That context is what we arrived at Alien Metal with. It’s like, “What are we doing here with this record?” That’s something that we are always trying to find when making a record: What’s its sort of personality, you know? That’s why naming a record can be so powerful early on, because you stop calling it “it” and you start calling it Alien Metal. It takes on its personality, and you start to follow its footsteps. You start to follow its rhythm.
So you named it before you were finished with it?
We don’t always [do that], but we usually do. It actually helps, at least me, with finishing things, because you have a North Star. You have a purpose, and it makes the decision-making a little easier.
When it comes to writing, what limitations did this equipment present, compared to your typical instrumentation — and how did those limitations open up new creative possibilities?
With the hardware stuff and the Eurorack stuff, it’s not so much about limitations as it’s endless. It’s actually insane how many sounds you can get out of these boxes. It’s f–king amazing, and if you’re creative about the patch you’re making, you can do truly wild s–t. That is a big challenge in the sense of what kind of sounds you want to work with. We had to spend time figuring out what we were wanting to do that was exciting to us, and that involved a lot of learning. Like, this s–t is some mad scientist s–t. But it’s cool. I feel like I understand music in a different way — and I certainly understand voltage in a different way. And math, there’s a lot of math in this stuff too, and some science.
The other thing that’s quite interesting about it is this format, the Eurorack, it’s like the patch cables on the outside, you build modules and you piece together a synth or voices or whatever — but everyone makes something different, and I can understand my patch, but I can’t necessarily rationalize why any of the other guys made the patch that they did. It’s this window into someone’s creative process. It’s actually a super visual window, with all the cables hanging out on the outside. I’ve fallen in love with that as just an expression in itself.
King Gizzard is still doing rock shows. What has the cross-pollination been like? How, if at all, has this impacted how you view your guitar-based music?
It’s made me have a different kind of appreciation for the guitar, and also acoustic or unsynthesized, organic instruments. With this patch-from-scratch mentality of Eurorack stuff, you have to build everything from the ground up. To make something resemble even a bassline is a lot of patching, and then it might actually sound quite boring, and then you hear somebody play a bass guitar through an amp, and you’re like, “Man, that sounds awesome!” You just pluck an acoustic guitar string and listen to the decay and the way it fills the room…
I think about sound now in a way that I didn’t think about sound [before]. I thought about music, and notes and melody and harmony and stuff. But it forces you to think about things at a much more rudimentary level, because ultimately all this thing is doing is sending voltages to things. You just have to think about it on a more atomic level, a more cellular level, a more granular level.
What are the biggest dance touchstones for you and the rest of the band?
If you asked [bandmate] Joey [Walker] this question, he would like be so excited, and he would want to tell you about everything that had a big impact on his life. I would love to give you such a deep answer, but the honest truth is, for me, my entry point is as much the equipment as anything. I’ve just become obsessed with this format of synthesizer and thinking about sound in this new way — and that’s what I listen to. I get home, and when my kids go to bed, I turn on my synth, and I’m just trying to understand why when I plug the jack into this socket, it does this, and why when I plug the jack into the socket next to it, it does that.
One aspect that hasn’t changed here compared to some of your previous albums is the world-building: There’s references to an “astral blacksmith” and a “mortician,” and one song’s lyrics declare, “We don’t wish death — but we will kill for the steel.” What can you tell me about the lore of Alien Metal?
I would love to get into this s–t. But do you know what? I’ve found that recently, over the last couple of years, I say things I don’t even agree with. I would hope that people can experience this album at face value — or dig in. That’s my hope here. The lyrics don’t have to be the centerpoint, either.
This is the third straight year with only one new King Gizzard album, compared to some years in the past where you’ve released anywhere from two to five projects. Last year’s Phantom Island was an ambitious orchestral project, with a corresponding orchestral tour. Are you settling into a less frequent release schedule — and what’s the next frontier you want to conquer?
We’ve got two sort of ideas. Not even ideas, but we have two records that are like three-quarters finished at the moment, which is a bit silly and does happen sometimes. We definitely have slowed down in finishing records. If you had have asked me this when I was younger, like in my mid-twenties, I probably would have had a bit more fire; I was more desperately ambitious, maybe. I’m happy to let things take their needed amount of time, at the moment. That might be one record a year right now; maybe there’ll be a couple in quick succession coming up. I don’t know. There was a stretch, toward the start of King Gizz records, where we were doing two a year. We weren’t thinking about it super hard, but if one wasn’t done, we’d just f–king make one. As you get older, doing stuff like that is harder.
Your touring schedule is more limited this year compared to previous years, but you’re celebrating the release of Alien Metal with your second annual Field of Vision festival outside of Denver, and you’re heading to New York City later this month for a run of four shows. What can you share about those gigs, and what’s next for the band’s touring?
There was something about the last Field of Vision that was just so special on so many levels. It felt magical, it felt unreal, in a lot of ways. So yeah, excited to get back there. Next year, we are also returning to more of a normal, busy touring schedule. But this year we have been quiet on the touring level — besides a bit of COVID period there, it’s got to be the quietest that we’ve ever been. We’ve been busy with life, and also just making music. We’ve been on home soil a lot lately, which is cool. Family, life — the ship of life doesn’t stop sailing.
