Just when you think you’ve got King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard figured out, they go and do this. The Melbourne shapeshifters have announced their twenty-eighth album, ‘Alien Metal’, landing later this summer via p(doom) records — and it’s a hard swerve into the neon-lit heart of electronic dance music.
New Single “Level 5” Drops With a Video
Alongside the album news, the band shared the lead single Level 5, complete with a video directed by Hayden Somerville. The track was born out of the band’s modular synth rig — affectionately nicknamed “Nathan” — which they hauled out on tour last year and apparently could not stop tinkering with.
From Rave Shows to a Whole New Sound
Following 2023’s ‘The Silver Cord’, ‘Alien Metal’ grew directly out of the band’s now-legendary “rave shows,” where guitars got benched entirely in favor of a sprawling modular synthesizer setup, with all six members hovering around it, twisting knobs and building something new in real time.
“It completely rewired my brain,” said Stu Mackenzie, on discovering the Eurorack format at the suggestion of bandmate and self-proclaimed techno head Joey Walker. “I was like, ‘I’m going to forget everything I know about music and relearn it all from scratch.'”
It wasn’t a smooth ride, either — the band reportedly scrapped more material for this record than any before it.
“We’ve never scrapped so much material as we have for this album,” Mackenzie says. “Entire albums, entire universes that were formulated, created, recorded, deleted and started again.”
The breakthrough came during a late-night improv session that ran over an hour — that single jam ended up seeding the entire record.
“It sounds so crunchy, but also beautiful,” says Mackenzie.
“Alien Metal goes really hard, but it also goes to really interesting places,” adds Joey Walker. “And it feels unique — it feels like us, still.”
The result is a techno, hardcore, house and jungle-soaked ride, run through King Gizzard’s signature psychedelic filter — pulsing, distorted, and unmistakably theirs.
Live Dates: Field Of Vision, Forest Hills Stadium & a Brooklyn Rave Show
This August, King Gizz return to the stage in a big way — Field Of Vision II Festival is already sold out, and they’ll follow it with a three-night run at Forest Hills Stadium in New York before capping things off with a rave show at Under The K Bridge Park in Brooklyn, joined by .VRIL.
- 08/14–16/26 – Buena Vista, CO @ Field Of Vision II Festival (Sold Out)
- 08/20/26 – New York, NY @ Forest Hills Stadium (with Die Spitz, DJ Crenshaw)
- 08/21/26 – New York, NY @ Forest Hills Stadium (with Die Spitz, DJ Crenshaw)
- 08/22/26 – New York, NY @ Forest Hills Stadium (Rave Show)
- 08/23/26 – Brooklyn, NY @ Under The K Bridge Park (Rave Show with .VRIL)
‘Alien Metal’ Tracklist
- Sapience
- Alien Metal
- Superheavy, Supercritical
- Kill For The Steel
- Level 5
- Rapid Alpha Decay
- Uqt
- Atomic Collapse
About King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are Stu Mackenzie (vocals/guitar), Ambrose Kenny-Smith (harmonica/vocals/keyboards), Cook Craig (guitar/vocals), Joey Walker (guitar/vocals), Lucas Harwood (bass) and Michael Cavanagh (drums). Since forming in Melbourne, the band has built a reputation for genre-hopping without ever losing the plot, moving through prog-thrash, synth-rock, jam-band hoedowns, symphonic rock and now full-tilt electronic music across a discography that includes ‘Nonagon Infinity’, ‘Flying Microtonal Banana’, ‘Infest The Rats’ Nest’, ‘K.G.’, ‘L.W.’, ‘PetroDragonic Apocalypse’, ‘The Silver Cord’, ‘Flight b741’ and ‘Phantom Island’, among many others.
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