The Sky Dematerialised

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard “Level 5”

I’ve noticed that when King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard make their most radical genre shifts, like their album-length forays into metal and electronic music, they stick closer to their recurring lyrical obsession with manmade disasters. This could just be a response to the extremity of the sound – it makes some sense to pair metal with lyrics about environmental catastrophe, and for that to extend that into techno-based meditations on extinction. In any case, this does some favors in providing a through line in their body of work. Even when they don’t obviously sound like themselves, they’re still very much being themselves.

Alien Metal is the band’s third electronic-oriented record, following excursions into analog synth psychedelia on Butterfly 3000 in 2021 and expanding into a more sinister techno palette on The Silver Cord in 2023. They’ve also performed live a lot in “everybody except the drummer plays synthesizers” mode over the past few years, which for me is their most exciting angle on this sort of music. When they bring out the synth table, they are basically playing electronic music with the mindset of a jam band. They have reworked several oldies in this format and let the songs sprawl out like they’re chasing tangents and exploring the possibilities of the music in real time. There’s some precedent for what they’re doing but not a lot. If this seems interesting to you, definitely jump at any opportunity to see them do a “rave” show.

This time around on Alien Metal, they have jumped wholeheartedly into early to mid 90s rave aesthetics. The sound is pure PLUR, even if the vibe is all tech dread. I think the songs work better when the bleak lyrical fixations overlap with a darker energy, like when they channel The Prodigy’s fire-starting breakbeats on “Level 5.” You can feel their glee in unleashing that big boom beat. It’s just as thrilling as whenever they lock into a motorik groove and Stuart Mackenzie shouts “wooooooooooo!”

Buy it from Bandcamp.