King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard are still chasing the weird

There's something wonderfully uncomplicated about the way Stu Mackenzie, frontman of the eclectic Melbourne sextet, describes his band. For a collective who have spent more than a decade producing music at a frankly absurd rate – jumping between psychedelia, garage, thrash metal, jazz fusion, microtonal rock, and now electronic dance music – it is a surprisingly fitting introduction. 

Their 28th studio album, Alien Metal, is another sharp turn, arriving today through their own p(doom) Records. Yet speaking to Mackenzie, there is little sense of a band attempting to manufacture novelty. Instead, there’s the feeling of six musicians who have somehow retained the simple pleasure of messing around until something piques their interest.

That inquisitiveness is at the heart of Alien Metal. Following a tour of rave shows, where the band abandoned their traditional instruments in favour of a sprawling modular synthesiser setup (lovingly referred to as “Nathan”), it would be easy to assume the improvised jams were the record’s starting point. In reality, the band had already spent years figuring out how far they could take their electronic experiments. Beginning around the release of The Silver Cord in 2023, Mackenzie and his bandmates recorded material, scrapped it, started again and kept pushing until they found something that surprised them.

The rave shows were only one version of the idea. “A lot of the recordings that we did for this record did sound more like the rave show,” the 35-year-old Mackenzie explains, but as they worked towards a record they were genuinely excited about, simply recreating that experience wasn't enough. “We had an idea of what the record could be. So, we were going ‘this is cool, but we can already do this. Like, let's make something fucking bizarre’.” The result is an album which shares DNA with those performances without attempting to replicate them, and longtime Gizz fans might even find themselves wondering where Mackenzie’s staple flute has gone.

What appealed most to Mackenzie about making Alien Metal, then, was not proving that King Gizzard could make an electronic album, after years of bounding between genres but the process of putting himself and the band somewhere unfamiliar. This is how the band makes music: a routine of “seeing what we can get away with in a way, seeing what works and what doesn't, trying to just challenge ourselves, and seeing what we can do.” As he puts it, the band are constantly looking to place themselves in “awkward situations, situations where we just feel uncomfortable, and see if we can kind of figure it out.” The electronic music itself is almost secondary to the curiosity behind it. Rather than setting themselves a destination, they follow whatever feels interesting, embracing it wherever it leads and each record is just another opportunity to find out what happens next.

Perhaps the strangest part of this process is how little control Mackenzie seems to want over what the end result becomes. He talks about King Gizzard's records as though they're living things, developing personalities of their own until the band can simply follow where they lead. “All the albums are like characters in my mind to varying degrees,” he shares. “They’re, like, alive. They have a kind of DNA.” 

It's a unique way of describing a discography that could otherwise feel almost impossible to categorise. Rather than deciding in advance what a King Gizzard record should sound like, Mackenzie simply asks: “What would this record do?” It may sound overly instinctive, maybe silly to some, but it’s a kind of play that allows the band to remain so prolific while steering clear of predictability. “It's much easier for me personally to make decisions on finishing things if I'm not in control," add Mackenzie. "I'm just kind of following the muse.”

Alien Metal itself seems to embody that philosophy. While the record moves through different electronic territories, from the early hardcore jungle-like percussion of “Level 5” to the house-inflected four-to-the-floor pulse of “Superheavy, Supercritical”, its songs rarely feel like isolated pieces. Much like Nonagon Infinity, the band’s eighth studio album, tracks bleed into one another until the boundaries between them begin to feel almost arbitrary. Rhythms, textures and warped electronic melodies mutate rather than stop. 

By the time closer “Atomic Collapse” loops back into the album’s opener, “Sapience”, the final moments fold seamlessly into a musical Möbius strip, with no obvious point of departure or arrival. It gives the whole thing a sense that this is an album designed less to arrive somewhere than to keep moving, and keep listeners moving in doing so.

For all the changes between albums, Mackenzie does identify one constant: the band themselves. Asked whether he could point to any kind of thread running through every King Gizzard record, he struggles to name anything beyond “the obvious statement – which is ourselves and our, sort of, collective instincts… I recognize the gift that we have of having played music together for so long now, and having spent so many hours playing together.” 

Their shared history has created a kind of “cellular level synergy”, accoriding to Mackenzie, and one that allows them to see what they can do with that chemistry. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that the journey becomes easier,” he explains. “Actually, like everything in life, you accumulate baggage.” Still, it may be the closest thing King Gizzard have to a constant: not a particular sound or style, but the restless interplay between a group of musicians who have spent years learning how to surprise one another. 

What makes that growth particularly charming is how little Mackenzie seems to take their position for granted. Asked whether he imagined doing anything like Field of Vision, the festival King Gizzard curates and headlines in Colorado, when the band began, his answer is immediate: “Oh God, no!” He remembers sleeping in his car with his guitar in the back: “Honestly, even thinking about the next meal was hard at that point.” 

Now, the band are able to organise their own festival, play around the world and build elaborate new musical projects simply because they want to. Yet the distance between those two versions of King Gizzard does not seem to have produced much cynicism; instead, Mackenzie keeps returning to gratitude. “We are very lucky to still be at it,” he muses, before adding the crucial qualification: “I love the challenge.”

That combination of gratitude and restlessness might be the closest thing King Gizzard has to a consistent aesthetic. They're not making different records because they’ve run out of ideas, nor does Alien Metal appear to be an attempt to escape what came before it. They’re making them because there’s always something they haven’t tried yet. “We genuinely still love it,” Mackenzie says when I ask why they keep going. The band have multiple albums already partially completed, he tells me, before reducing the grand trajectory of one of the world's most relentlessly creative bands to something almost disarmingly modest: “like I was saying earlier, just try and stay out of trouble.” For King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, that really is enough. Keep playing, keep experimenting, keep surprising themselves, and keep making the weird stuff.