King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard Announce First EDM Album

Breakbeat Single and Modular Synth Obsession

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard have announced Alien Metal, their 28th album and first dedicated electronic record. The lead single, a breakbeat track called Level 5, arrived today with a video directed by Hayden Somerville that depicts a shadowy cult performing surgery on a zombie-like patient using a giant modular synthesizer.

That synth, played live by all six members simultaneously, became a creative catalyst for frontman Stu Mackenzie. He explained that no single module functions like a guitar string or pick—each one handles a tiny fragment of the process, so producing a single sound requires the whole system working in concert. Mackenzie called the experience "problematic" in how deeply it consumed him, describing a process of forgetting everything he thought he knew about music and starting over from the ground up.

Joey Walker's Electronic Roots

Bandmate Joey Walker, whose background in electronic production predates the band, said he'd hit a wall with his own technical knowledge and finally found the time and tools to push past it. "My background is electronic music," Walker said. "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."

Mackenzie credited the collaboration between Walker's reverence for the genre and his own obsession with the technology. "This way of breaking music down into parts was so up my alley," Mackenzie said in a press release. "I was like, 'I'm going to forget everything I know about music and relearn it all from scratch,' and it forced me to think about all these things I took for granted. It's problematic how obsessed I am with it. The record came together through Joe's deep, deep love and reverence for this genre, and my obsession with the tech."

Brooklyn Rave Shows Scheduled

The band will headline two "rave shows" in Brooklyn: the August 22 finale of their sold-out three-day run at Forest Hills Stadium and a concert the following night at Under the K Bridge Park.

Alien Metal is due out later this summer. The full tracklist includes Sapience, Alien Metal, Superheavy Supercritical, Kill for the Steel, Level 5, Rapid Alpha Decay, Uqt, and Atomic Collapse.