Only a fool bets against King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard staying still. Symphonic bombast one year, deep-fried Southern rock hoedowns the next—the Melbourne septet’s discography reads like a dare to their own fanbase. So, of course, album number 28, Alien Metal, finds them chasing a different high entirely. This time, it’s a dark, sweaty EDM record built almost entirely around a Eurorack modular synth setup the band has nicknamed “Nathan.”
Their origin story is almost too on-brand. Joe Walker, the group’s resident techno head, spent years nudging Stu Mackenzie toward modular synthesis. It finally clicked during lockdown. And what followed, by the band’s own account, was a genuinely chaotic gestation. There were entire scrapped albums, false starts, and a running band joke that the record was cursed. The eventual breakthrough came when Walker and Mackenzie, alone after a dead-end studio day, fell into an hour-long jam in F# at 143bpm. That session became the DNA for the whole record. Every track on Alien Metal traces back to it, filtered by overdubs, Ambrose Kenny-Smith’s vocoder, and Jase Galea’s suitably unnerving sleeve art.
Knowing all that context makes the record more interesting. It doesn’t necessarily make it more convincing. Alien Metal has a madcap, old-school rave energy that’s hard to resist, even when it’s not quite hitting the mark. This is dance music made by rock musicians relearning the genre from scratch. You can feel the enthusiasm and the naivety in equal measure, which per Walker, was the whole point.
“Level 5” is the record’s clearest highlight. It’s a blast of early hardcore jungle and Prodigy-style breakbeat that feels less like 2026 and more like the long-lost soundtrack to a late-’90s FPS. I want a plasma rifle and a corridor full of aliens to go with it. “Sapience” pulses through a neo-rave groove, while “Superheavy” edges toward house. “For The Steel” throws in enough Miami Bass low-end to keep things interesting. Still, it lands closer to well-executed pastiche than genuine innovation.
Then there’s “Rapid Alpha Decay.” A robot voice intones, “I am the keeper of the energy” with zero irony. No shit, King Gizz. Nobody’s stopping your whims at this point. And honestly, thank god for that. It’s the kind of unselfconscious silliness that’s become the band’s calling card.
At eight tracks, Alien Metal is slighter than you’d expect from a band this prolific. It’s a taut EP stretched to album length rather than a fully realized world. But brevity suits the format. There’s not much fat to trim, and the record never overstays its welcome like a bloated 14-track rave odyssey might.
Is it groundbreaking? No. Is it 100% convincing as a full pivot into electronic music? Not quite. But it doesn’t need to be either of those things to work. Alien Metal is a fun, propulsive summer record that’s going to sound enormous blasting over a festival field at 2am. That’s really all King Gizzard needs it to be.