King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are masters of creating music that gets slathered with multi-hyphenate genre descriptors—the best attempts of writers, publicists and fans to capture what these Australian genius-freaks are up to now. But their 28th (pause for gasp) album since forming in 2010 is a bit easier: with Alien Metal, King Gizz has taken to techno.
And they’re going to make you dance. Alien Metal comprises eight tracks, but the album is best ingested as a full set—beats, beeps and blasts surfacing, pulsing, and subsiding over and over for a high energy 45 minutes. It should surprise no one that the album was born out of pure experimentation. Joe Walker had kept his techno obsession outside the King Gizz universe for years, but he finally introduced bandmate Stu Mackenzie to the Eurorack, a customizable set of synthesizer modules. The band eventually created Nathan, a Frankenstein-like synth behemoth, and began adding six-man techno jams to some shows beginning in 2024. Alien Metal is the result of one jam on Nathan—locked-in at 143 beats per minute.
Beyond the backstory, the album is just as playful. Even if you initially discovered the always experimenting ensemble because of their prog-rock release or a punkier track, a “King Gizzard’s rave album” shouldn’t scare you off—they haven’t transformed into The Chainsmokers. Alien Metal is dense and complex, layers upon layers of electronic melodies, distorted vocals, buzzsaw synthesizers, punishing industrial guitars, and beats that bop between straight-ahead techno, drum and bass, and breakbeat.
On “Uqt,” the band channels The Prodigy’s expert fusion of rave music and rock, with guitars and sirens flaring. With “Superheavy, Supercritical,” the dancefloor descends into elemental techno: a brief vocal sample, some elastic synths, a pounding beat. Sometimes, that’s all you need. Twenty eight albums in, King Gizzard have just reinvented themselves again.
