For years, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard have been dipping their toes in electronic waters. It began in 2022, on the spaced-out, DJ Shadow-featuring remix album Butterfly 30001. Then came the twinkling downtempo two-piece Made in Timeland, followed by The Silver Cord, two hours of Moroder-inspired electro-disco odysseys, in 2023. Last year, the Australian group went further, leaving behind their vast arsenal of gear and setting their newest band member, Nathan—a Eurorack modular synthesizer—to work across nine European raves. Now, we arrive at Alien Metal: King Gizzard’s first album of full-throated, big-tent EDM.
Even for a band who regularly veer between prog-metal space-operas, jazz-rock and microtonal mania, this feels like an audacious leap. But the transition makes more sense when you know a little King Gizzard history. You don’t make 28 albums in 15 years, after all, without adopting a certain democratic approach—and while head honcho Stu Mackenzie signs off on every record, these days, few are crafted by all six members in tandem. Instead, each album’s unique path is chosen, simply, by whoever’s around at the time. For Alien Metal, Joey Walker was the guy.
A New Direction for the Gizzverse
Despite being best known as the band’s lead guitarist, Walker gravitated to dance music first. In the late aughts, he toured as part of dubstep duo Trumpdisco, departing when Gizzard—a college side-project—unexpectedly got big. Walker returned to programming post-pandemic, releasing two gurn-friendly solo albums as Bullant, but still he dreamt of bringing his colleagues from King Gizzard into the fold. With Mackenzie finally wooed by modulation during the making of The Silver Cord, the time was ripe.
True to this, the record feels like a head finally getting his rocks off. “Sapience” is a full-blooded opening, a pulsing sprawl of psytrance that feels pretty wild for a band who started off sounding like Ty Segall. “Level 5” is a slice of sweaty, rhythmic jungle, while “For the Steel” has the privilege of being the very first King Gizzard Miami bass song. At times, Ambrose Kenny-Smith’s campy, comic-book vocals threaten to derail the light-footedness of these songs. But at their best, they’re integrated in brand-new ways for the band, like on “Superheavy, Supercritical” where the word “super” melts into an unctuous hook.
Technological Apocalypse and the Flesh
In its second half, Alien Metal dabbles in more blissed-out modes. “Rapid Alpha Decay” plunges the record into low, subterranean terrain, like Ben Frost at his most foreboding. The songs run into each other and loop around like liquid. They’re varied and unrelenting, changing shape and snapping into new phases. The record had potential to be merely a novelty move; instead, over time, its consistency and quality come into focus. They deliver on the promise of great dance music: slipping spindly fingers between the folds of your brain and messing around with the architecture.
Bodily incursion transpires to be the abiding theme of the album; in these songs, advanced Artificial intelligence corrupts the flesh. As Infest the Rats’ Nest did for ecological collapse, Alien Metal approaches its subject from the lens of the future, presenting AI as a toxic addiction of the living that promises autonomy and delivers only subjugation. “Pump my body full with lead/Feel it run through metallic,” goes “Rapid Alpha Decay,” “Jumpstart my heart, static/Transcend through the rapid.”
The record sets that tone from its very first word: “Palantir,” repeated by a distant, vacant voice. Earlier this year, Alex Karp—the CEO of the surveillance and defense company of the same name—released a 22-point vision for the future in which he argued that Western democracies must deploy technological and military hard power—specifically AI—to maintain global dominance and “defend” the “culture” of “the West.” It was, in short, teeth-gnashing techno-fascism from a company on whom multiple national governments are increasingly reliant. When, on the extractivist “Kill for the Steel,” Kenny-Smith’s vocoder coos, “We don’t wish death on anyone/But we will kill for the steel,” it may as well have been Karp’s 23rd decree.
King Gizzard isn’t reinventing the wheel here; they’re far from the first to explore apocalyptic futures through the metallic din of LFOs, oscillators, and amplifiers. Still, there’s no doubt that this is the most energized the band has sounded in years. And reinvention has never really been their business anyway. Instead, the group casts its great cosmic phaser as wide as possible, and subsumes as much as possible into the Gizzverse. Alien Metal only leaves one real question in its wake: Whatever next?