King Gizzard Forgot Everything They Knew About Music — Then Made Album Number Twenty-Eight

The story of Alien Metal starts with a Eurorack synthesizer setup the band named Nathan. Joey Walker, the self-described techno head of King Gizzard, suggested the format to Stu Mackenzie, who promptly fell down a rabbit hole. “I was like, I’m going to forget everything I know about music and relearn it all from scratch,” Mackenzie says. The Melbourne six-piece took Nathan out on the road for a run of rave shows where traditional instruments were set aside and every member made their own manipulations to the modular setup. What started as an experiment became an obsession.

The album itself took years and involved scrapping entire creative directions, including complete albums, before the breakthrough arrived: a late-night improvisation session that ran over an hour. Every track on Alien Metal evolved from that single source performance. The result moves through techno, hardcore, house, and jungle, filtered through King Gizzard’s psychedelic lens, and lands somewhere that sounds like nothing else but also unmistakably like them. “It goes really hard, but it also goes to really interesting places,” Walker says. “It feels unique. It feels like us, still.”

Alien Metal is their twenty-eighth album and follows the electronic explorations of 2023’s The Silver Cord. The band plays Forest Hills Stadium in New York across three nights this August, plus a sold-out return of their Field of Vision Festival in Colorado and a rave show at Under the K Bridge Park in Brooklyn. It is not available yet but I am sure the Pre-order is incoming so check back.

Coming Soon: Pre-order Alien Metal ↗

1“Sapience”

2“Alien Metal”

3“Superheavy, Supercritical”

4“Kill for the Steel”

5“Level 5”

6“Rapid Alpha Decay”

7“Uqt”

8“Atomic Collapse”