King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard Are Releasing an EDM Album

After an uncharacteristically long break of 13 months since their last studio LP, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard have announced a new album. Set to arrive “later in the summer” (sure, who needs release dates), Alien Metal marks the band’s foray into EDM, a press release notes. A new song, “Level 5,” presents compelling evidence for the claim. Watch the Hayden Somerville-directed video, in which some sort of cabal performs freaky electronic surgery on an unsuspecting patient, below.

Today’s news is pegged to the Melbourne sextet’s forthcoming three-night stint at New York’s Forest Hills Stadium next month. The last of those dates is billed as a “rave show,” and is followed by another rave show at Brooklyn’s Under the K Bridge Park. The band’s P(Doom) label will release the Phantom Island follow-up, and you can find the artwork and tracklist below.

Gizz made the record using the giant modular synth operated by all six members during their live shows. In a press release, Stu Mackenzie said the synth, which they call “Nathan,” “completely rewired my brain. None of the modules are instruments. 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. So, you need this whole machine to even make a sound. 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’, 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.”

The Joe in question, Joey Walker, added, “My background is electronic music. 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.”