King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard announce EDM album and NYC “rave shows”
The psychedelic rockers have been tinkering with a modular synth big enough for all six members to play at once
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have announced a new EDM-leaning album, ‘Alien Metal’, and accompanying “rave shows” in New York City.
Ahead of the release “later in the summer”, the Australian psych-rock outfit have debuted the first single, ‘Level 5’, which dives deeper into the electronic experimentation introduced on previous records. The full LP will land on the the group’s own p(doom) label, just over a year after its predecessor, ‘Phantom Island’. You can listen to the first single below.
According to press material, the record was recorded during extensive live sessions that featured all six members simultaneously operating a giant Eurorack modular synthesizer nicknamed ‘Nathan’. A similar setup was used for a 2025 King Gizzard concert held at Factory International in Manchester, UK. The band’s frontman Stu Mackenzie added in the album’s press release that working with the kit “completely rewired my brain”. You can see footage of the modular set-up below.
“They’re not the equivalent of a guitar string, they’re not even a guitar pick. Each of the modules does the smallest thing, maybe one module is the equivalent of causing the plectrum to hit the string, and another module is controlling how hard the plectrum hits the string,” he continued. “But this way of breaking music down into parts was so up my alley. I was like, ‘I’m going to forget everything I know about music and relearn it all from scratch’.”
Fellow group member Joe Walker reportedly initiated the idea, introducing Mackenzie to the modular gear required to build their bespoke synthesizer setup. In a statement, Walker explained the project fulfils a long-standing goal of his.
“My background is electronic music,” he shared. “It’s my side-hustle, and was my main focus. I stopped to be in Gizzard, but I still made electronic music. But I was frustrated, I felt like I’d hit the threshold of my technical understanding, and I never had enough time to go deeper.
“When the pandemic hit, I took the plunge,” Walker continued. “Stu [then] went from not knowing what a filter did, to quickly being able to run his own Eurorack channel on YouTube, if he wanted to. He's that deep into it. But he doesn’t listen to electronic music, to dance music, so he had to learn the template, the ‘beats’, like in the filmmaking sense of a measure of structural progression... how the ‘drop’ functions, that sense of tension and release... a lot of people think it’s about everything getting as loud as it can possibly get, but it’s actually about pulling elements away, to emphasise the impact.”
Next month, King Gizzard will play four dates in New York City, three at Forest Hills Stadium on 20th, 21st and 22nd August. The latter is billed as a “rave show” and will feature contributions from broken techno-electro DJ Moktar .
A final performance is scheduled for Brooklyn’s Under the K Bridge Park on Sunday, 23rd August, which will be accompanied by a DJ set from Vril. The venue has previously been used by electronic artists such as Four Tet , Tiësto , The Chainsmokers, and Chris Lake . Tickets to King Gizzard’s upcoming shows are available here .
‘Alien Metal’ is out this summer via p(doom). You can listen to first single, ‘Level 5’, below.
