Inside King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s Hard Dance Experiment: ‘This Is Some Mad Scientist Sh–‘

Uber-prolific Australian band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard has released nearly 30 albums since its 2012 debut — in other words, the band isn’t known for the drawn-out studio perfectionism that often stymies musicians.

But with Alien Metal , its 28th studio album — and first in 14 months, an eternity in the Gizzverse – King Gizzard did something out of character: It took its time.

And with good reason.

Out today (Aug.

14), Alien Metal is arguably the biggest swing in a catalog full of them , as the sextet best known for wild, garage-meets-psych-rock ditched its guitars in favor of a hulking Eurorack, a type of modular synthesizer developed in the ’90s that all of its members could play simultaneously.

The band began trotting the rig out for “rave shows” in late 2024, and affectionately named it Nathan; after a quiet touring year, it returns to the road, presumably with Nathan in tow, for its second annual Field of Vision camping festival outside of Denver this weekend, and four New York City shows later this month.

Alien Metal isn’t completely without precedent in King Gizzard’s catalog — the band has been incorporating electronic sounds into its music for the last several years, including on the 2023 electropop album The Silver Cord — but with the album’s pummeling, high-BPM tracks, King Gizzard ventures further onto the dance floor than it ever has.

According to the band’s Stu Mackenzie, as King Gizzard’s members began to conceive the album, they thought, “We’ve already done a few [electronic] things which were interesting to us.

Let’s lean into the tropes a little bit more with this one — but also, let’s see if we can create something that feels like we made it, and that feels like it has its own DNA.” That forced King Gizzard to operate well beyond its comfort zone, and helps to explain the patience making the album required.

“We definitely scrapped more material for this record than we ever have, which was not something we expected to do,” Mackenzie, 35, says over Zoom from his native Melbourne.

“It needed to congeal — it needed to set.” Still, the band held onto its aggressively DIY ethos for Alien Metal , with its members modding out the Eurorack themselves and recording their experiments in their own Melbourne warehouse studio space, with “rats running along the floor and s–t.” As Mackenzie puts it, “We’ve just been doing this s–t ourselves, man.

This is some f–king truly mad scientist, making explosions in the bathtub-type stuff.” But while King Gizzard recorded the album over “a good couple years,” true to form, the restlessly creative band worked on several other projects concurrently.

“Whole records were formulated and thought of and expanded on and recorded — and, you know, completely abandoned,” he reveals.