King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Alien Metal Review

Having had so much fun on a rave tour of Europe that they decided to make a full electronic album – King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard ditch the rock anthems and embrace the 3am club scene of the far future in ‘Alien Metal’

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard make the word “prolific” look too slow. With TWENTY-EIGHT albums under their belt, the Australians have switched gears once again, this time throwing themselves into electronic music. After seemingly having a bit too much fun with the rave sets that accompanied Phantom Island’s operatic tour, they’ve emerged with a dance record that positions them perfectly for the late-night festival slots.

Built around a modular synthesizer setup named ‘Nathan’, which the band brought with them during last year’s rave shows, Alien Metal goes for a pulsating beat designed to be turned up loud and played in full. There’s little point sticking to the singles here. The breakcore and EDM experiment works best as one continuous descent into the club, with the transitions between songs exquisitely handled throughout.

It’s another sharp turn from a band who have spent the last few records jumping between the dad rock of Flight b741, the metal of PetroDragonic Apocalypse and the orchestral ambitions of Phantom Island. If you thought you were familiar with what King Gizzard were capable of, Alien Metal suggests otherwise.

Few bands can abandon rock for a rave record without alienating a chunk of their audience. With King Gizzard, that unpredictability is precisely what the fans have signed up for. The rave shows sold just as well as the orchestral ones, and maintaining that kind of loyalty across twenty-eight albums shows just how much creative freedom the band have earned.

There are often jokes about how you could spin a wheel, land on any random Friday of the year and chances are a new King Gizzard album is out, with another five recorded before you’ve finished listening to it. That isn’t far from the truth. Their workmanlike, no-nonsense approach feels refreshing in an age of social media and TikTok-ified music, where taking this kind of risk can feel like a rare breed.

‘Sapience’ is a transcendence into the otherworldly. This is a science-fiction album, a rave set that plunges you into the club at 3am when you’ve already been to a gig and are desperately looking for somewhere to go for afters. The keyboards churn away while the seamless transitions make it increasingly difficult to tell exactly where one track finishes and another begins.

Every song on the record first grew from an hour-long late-night improvisation, with everything in the key of F#. That shared origin helps explain why Alien Metal feels so cohesive despite the band drifting between different corners of electronic music.

If ‘Sapience’ is what the rave scene looks like in the forty-first millennium, ‘Level 5’ is a Prodigy and hardcore jungle-esque techno Frankenstein’s monster of a tune. “We’re on level five,” the track churns, carrying some of the fire and hunger that made The Prodigy so exciting in the first place.

‘Kill for the Steel’ drifts further again, pushing towards IDM as the rhythms become more fractured and unpredictable. Even within an album that already exists as a huge experiment, King Gizzard seemingly can’t resist finding new ways to mess with the formula.

Occasionally, that relentless desire to try something else can make Alien Metal feel like experimentation for its own sake. The improvisational origins of these tracks mean ideas are sometimes given more space than they necessarily need, and not every extended passage earns its length. But that looseness is also fundamental to the record’s appeal. It feels less like King Gizzard meticulously deciding to make an electronic album and more like six musicians stumbling onto something exciting and refusing to stop until they’ve worked out where it leads.

For rock fans unfamiliar with electronica and the dance and club side of electronic music, King Gizzard have once again created a fairly convincing gateway drug.

The title track sits on the grittier side of things, its composed and produced structure accompanied by Jayden Wall playing the alien in the music video. It segues almost seamlessly into ‘Level 5’ when played back-to-back, to the point where you wonder whether the two should have been positioned together on the album. Instead, they sit on opposite sides of the record and give Alien Metal a neat sense of symmetry.

There are obvious links back to the abstract electronic world of The Silver Cord, but this feels like another step away from Flight b741 and towards something stranger. There is minimal guitar and no live drums, but neither is particularly missed. In fact, stripping the guitar back allows the moments when it does appear to hit significantly harder.

‘UQT’ is the heaviest the album gets, with an enormous hook cutting through the electronics before another tonal shift takes us towards ‘Atomic Collapse’. The closer slowly builds and lures you in, catching you off guard just when you think King Gizzard are finally preparing to lie down.

By the time it finishes, it feels like you’ve stepped off the end of a five-season science-fiction show or stumbled blinking out of a theme park ride. Across six and a half minutes, ‘Atomic Collapse’ leaves the band contemplating what the future might sound like and, perhaps more importantly for a group that refuses to sit still, what it holds for them next.

Fans of Underworld and The Prodigy, look no further. King Gizzard have spent years proving they can make just about whatever music they want. On Alien Metal, they sound like they’ve wandered into a nightclub in the far future, discovered they’re the house band and decided they might as well keep going until sunrise.