King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard Conjure a Futuristic Rave

Australian psychedelic rock phenoms King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard have dropped their 28th album, and it’s something of a curveball. Fans who were hoping for an epic guitar-driven psychedelic rock banger will have to wait, as Alien Metal is an EDM rave type of album more in the style of 2023’s The Silver Cord. The new album is still a high-energy affair. However, one’s mileage may vary depending on the listener’s appreciation for the sci-fi rave vibe built around the group’s evolving use of the modular synthesizer setup that they debuted on tour in 2024.

“Alien Metal goes really hard, but it also goes to really interesting places,” says guitarist Joey Walker, the self-confessed “techno head of the group” in a press release. “And it feels unique – it feels like us, still.” Guitarist Stu Mackenzie says, “It completely rewired my brain… I was like, ‘I’m going to forget everything I know about music and relearn it all from scratch’.”

The group are said to have discarded countless recordings and abandoned entire creative directions while searching for the sound they were after, before a breakthrough during a late-night jam session that became the basis for the whole album. “We’ve never scrapped so much material as we have for this album,” Mackenzie adds. “Entire albums, entire universes that were formulated, created, recorded, deleted and started again.”

The idea of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard recording and discarding entire universes may be a mind-boggling concept for fans of “the Gizzverse”, with the group having generated one of the deepest sonic mythologies in modern music across their ambitious discography. Yet the album described on its Bandcamp page as having been “recorded in the future by aliens” still features the psychedelic vibes fans have come to know and love, even if there isn’t much guitar.

The eight tracks feature pulsing grooves, wicked beats, wild synths, and trippy, distorted lyrics with esoteric hints about the past, present, and future. Yet it seems like these aliens are from a darker future than the one King Gizz tapped into on 2021’s effervescent Butterfly 3000 album.

There’s no easing into it as “Sapiens” jumps right into a techno-rave blast off at 143 beats per minute for the album’s duration. The lyrics are often hard to decipher due to the distorted vocal effects. Still, a voice seems to signal listeners to take note of “Palantir” (the panopticon-style tech company owned by right-wing oligarch Peter Thiel and/or “the seeing stones” in Lord of the Rings, after which the company was named). Palantir has been in bed with the CIA and the Trump administration, and one has to wonder if this may anger Earth’s extraterrestrial observers.

The title track generates more vibe as the groove deepens and a voice speaks of “Transforming through the slipstream, Rebirth, reborn, interstellar reality”. There’s more of a melody going on in the layered synths and percussion, making it feel like this track could get the dance floor going at that nightclub in the Dune: Prophecy series. “Superheavy, Supercritical” sounds like another section of the same jam or perhaps a bridge, as a voice says, “When you’re feeling super / When you’re feeling heavy / When you’re feeling supercritical.”

The sound and the mood change on “Kill for Steel” as the beat drops out, an arpeggiator comes in, and a voice says, “We don’t wish death upon you / We don’t wish any bad luck or any ill will / But we will kill for the steel.” It’s a moodier track as the percussion comes in and out, with some eerie synths in the background. Do these aliens covet certain minerals on Earth or do they just mean they’ve got to have that heavy metal music?

“Level 5” is one of the top bangers on the album as trippy synths come in behind dynamic beats. Yet ominous undertones creep in as we hear, “Mortician, don’t make me look ugly tonight / Got a date with the end of the world, We’re out of time.” The energy level ramps back down a bit on “Rapid Alpha Decay”, as a voice sings “I love the keeper of the energy, Energy and heat,” then later, “I am the keeper of the energy”.

The storyline seems to go in a scarier yet still bumping direction on “UQT”, when a voice says “Electroshock therapy, They wanna cut me open and take a peek / Then out come the clipboards as they study me / Temple to temple, volts 120 / No anaesthesia and no pain relief / Gimme some of that Uqt.” This sounds sort of like the disturbing scene in Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, when archival film footage from the Roswell era documents a grey alien being tortured by heartless minions of Uncle Sam’s military. Yet is “uqt” some sort of painkiller? The music seems to have a hypnotically medicinal effect.

Closing track “Atomic Collapse” is all instrumental with no voices, but hot beats and psychedelic synths. Yet the title suggests an ongoing theme in the Gizzverse to warn humanity to clean up their act—from “Nuclear Fusion” and “Murder of the Universe” in 2017 to “Planet B” and “Mars for the Rich” in 2019, to “The Dripping Tap” in 2022 to the entire PetroDragonic Apocalypse album in 2023 and onward. 

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard debuted a number of the tracks during their three-day “Field of Vision II” festival in Colorado the weekend of the album’s release, with a video of the “Level 5” performance from night one quickly popping up on YouTube via the Bootleg Gila channel. It’s clear to see the band members having a blast getting into the groove with “Nathan” (their Eurorack synthesizer machine), while drummer Michael “Cavs” Cavanagh is straight crushing it. The same is true for the debut of “Alien Metal” on night two, with a jam that expands the five-minute studio track to 13 minutes and also includes Joey Walker riffing out on a Flying V guitar.

Alien Metal isn’t likely to become as revered as some of the Gizz albums of the past decade, yet it expands the group’s sonic palette for the rave jams they’ve been mixing into their shows over the past two years. The album feels like a sci-fi rave that veers between an ominous soundtrack warning of impending doom and a cathartic path toward potential salvation. In this sense, it fits right in with King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s long-time creative direction.