Hello, hi everyone! Tractorthony Beamtano here, the internet's busiest music nerd, and it's time for a review of this new King Gizzard album, Alien Metal.

Here we have the newest full-length LP from Australian legends King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, who I'm pretty sure are on their 1000th album right now and 50th genre change.

But seriously, King Gizzard has a long and storied catalog at this point, much larger than most groups and artists who have been at it for as long as they have. And if I wanted to, I could front end this review with 30 full minutes going into every single detail and step of the band's entire Gizzolution. But for the purposes of brevity, I will say these guys, if you are unaware of their work, have been a fantastic and highly influential act on the current psych and garage rock scene at the moment.

However, they clearly never wanted to be defined purely by that sound. Which is why, after a handful of very solid and impressive albums, they began to branch out into folk music, into microtonal music, and really that's just the start. Because since the mid-2010s, the band has based numerous album cycles around entire genre shifts into metal, into jazz, and much, much more.

However, for a while now, at least in my view, I feel like there has been one stylistic change that has been kind of dogging the group for a minute, and that is electronic music. It's something fans have been interested in hearing the group dabble in a little bit more since career highlights such as "Cyboogie," as well as the very synth heavy Butterfly 3000 (2021), which had its moments for sure, but in terms of, like, legitimately making an electronic release felt more like a half measure than anything.

Then later, in 2023, we actually would see the band make a more whole-hearted attempt at doing something in this direction with The Silver Chord. There were tracks on this thing that saw the band trying their hand at techno, at trance, at progressive electronic music too.

But there was something about its build that kind of made it feel ill-conceived from the jump, as the record was presented in these two discs of the same songs, one disc having kind of these shorter, more neutered versions of these tracks' progressions, the other disc featuring versions that went up to like 18 minutes or so, which at that point, in my eyes, you're kind of leaving it up to the audience to decide which one is actually better or worth their time. And, in my opinion, it was sort of neither in both cases. The progressions on one disc felt kind of lacking, while the lengthier versions of these songs didn't feature enough variation to justify the runtimes.

Alien Metal, though, love it or hate it, feels a lot more like the real deal, with regards to some of these same electronic music styles – in fact, I think the realest deal any King Gizzard fan could've asked for, given they actually wanted them to dabble in this sound in the first place. Because, again, we have the band taking the plunge into acid techno, into psy trance, tech house, and some breakbeat stuff, too.

This record is a full-on rave at Thunderdome, with one track seamlessly flowing into the next, like you were experiencing a DJ set. It's a nearly unbroken sequence of eight songs that, despite this being such a bold change of pace, still carries with it a lot of the usual King Gizzard calling cards: the conceptuality, the kind of meta-commentary, some psychedelic aesthetics, too.

In a way, I feel like, for a lot of Gizzard fans, this record is going to be a bit of a double-edged sword. Because often, this band is just lauded for how versatile they are, how they're willing to just dare to go where other bands won't. And while I think the band is living up to that part of their reputation here, most definitely, you also have to kind of ask yourself, are King Gizzard fans even that into techno? Do they legitimately want a true blue techno album?

Because this thing is not like a psychedelic rock or prog rock album with some electronic bits mixed in to just kind of give you the facade of change. In fact, there's very little in the way of any guitar on this record, at least from what I can tell, and certainly little to no live instrumentation. The band really broke out the sequencers and the drum machines and the groove boxes for this one. And because of how hard of a turn Alien Metal makes here, for sure there are going to be some Gizzard fans who this record just goes too far for.

But with all of that being said, personally, I found this record to be very competent, authentic, and most importantly fun. It feels more vintage than cutting-edge in terms of a lot of the sounds and aesthetics that it's going after, really kind of hitting that mid-to-late '90s techno sweet spot, which, honestly, I think is a welcome change of pace given how popular a lot of Y2K aesthetics are in a lot of new pop music and dance music.

But also, the band isn't giving in to a lot of these prevailing, IDM headphone listen type of vibes that I feel like are coming back in the electronic music scene recently, too. Also, I think that going in the direction of a very clubby and direct old-school techno sound allows the band to play with formulas that have been a part of their tool belt for a long time, or formulae I mean, in terms of forming a lot of these tracks around kinda linear, continuous grooves that the group slowly cooks up all these different variations on as they're kind of jamming their way through them.

Take, for example, the opening track, which features these booming, rumbling beats topped with these staccato, ascending and descending melodies that, honest to god, sound like something from an older King Gizzard track, maybe from the Nonagon Infinity era. It could even be something literally lifted from a track in this time period. I'm sorry if I'm not recollecting the exact reference point off the top of my head. But ultimately, the point I am trying to make here is that, in spirit, at its core, this does compositionally feel like many a King Gizzard song we've heard before. It's just that it's being transcoded into a totally different style, almost in the spirit of remixing.

I should also note that the progression of this track undergoes a lot of very engaging peaks and valleys, as well as the single, repetitive lyric on this track: a mention of Palantir, which that alone makes this record's intentions clear in terms of what it's probably gonna be commenting on with regards to the surveillance state, authoritarianism, capitalism run amok. These are ideas and conceptual angles that you're no stranger to if you've actually paid attention to a lot of the commentary on many past King Gizz records.

But then from here we move on to the track "Alien Metal," which was a single to the record, and it's here where I think some of my issues with this album present themselves. I mean, yes, I do enjoy the fact that this song carries over a lot of the rhythm and momentum from the opener, but on top of that momentum the band starts introducing these very heavy-handed vocoder vocal passages. And these vocoders just play such a central role in the sound of this track, and a handful of others too, that it just comes across very clunky and I would say even disruptive to the grooves and the overall vibe of the production that they're pulling together here.

Again, I sort of get what King Gizzard is trying to do from a conceptual standpoint, from a messaging standpoint, but the fit of these lyrics and their flow over these techno grooves, it just feels like oil and water. They don't reinforce each other at all and to me, again, just feels at odds.

Now, these vocals are a recurring element throughout the album, but there are some tracks where I feel like we're getting just enough. It's a bit of a less-is-more situation, to be honest, like with "Superheavy, Supercritical" or "Kill for the Steel." The former, which is German techno perfection from front to back, and the latter does a great job of pulling off a lot with a little, lyrically, in terms of making its angles clear around authoritarianism and resource extraction. It isn't overstating its point with a thesaurus worth of lyrics.

But with "Level 5," I do think the band, to an extent, kind of loses control of the amount of lyrics on the track, againn. I mean, I do think the more aggressive production and hearing King Gizzard lean into breakbeats, almost in a The Prodigy sort of way, does lead to a bit more of a balance. But if I'm being real, I just don't think vocal passages that take kind of a religious chant sort of mode was the best choice here, melodically, in terms of developing something that would have actually lined up in a very cohesive way with this production.

I mean, instrumentally, the evolution of the track is great, really edge of your seat, honestly. If anything it could have been a little bit louder, but there's still the matter of these vocals once more being a little disruptive for me. I did, however, notice a bit of a shift in the melody lines of these vocals on "Rapid Alpha Decay," where the singing does come across a bit more punctuated and a bit more rhythmic, and does sync up really well with the techno beats down below. I also like a lot of the spacey and ambient aesthetics of this track, too. It's really the slow burner of the album.

I think "Uqt" does a great job on the vocal front as well, while simultaneously leaning into these themes of surgery and probing, which often come along with any alien discourse. I'm also kinda liking the chugging guitar passages that are laid throughout this track as well, almost bringing a little bit of an industrial flavor to this record. I think fans of acts like Shpongle will get something out of this track, too.

And then there's the matter of the closer ["Atomic Collapse"], which I think is King Gizzard trying to bring this album to a really noisy, messy, chaotic peak, almost the closest to a jam you are going to get on this record. And while, for sure, I do think they get kinda close to the idea of that, close to that vibe, the track to my ears really kinda hangs in the yellow, for the most part, before petering out into what feels like a very blissful and hopeful, almost new-age flavored finish. And then the record just kinda disappears uneventfully, without a trace.

I mean, I can appreciate what the final track here is pushing for. Did it pass with flying colors? In my opinion, no. But the intention is there, and the production is as well-mixed and as sturdy as it is on nearly every other song on this project. Which I would like to say, for the most part, I liked and enjoyed. I mean, as somebody who personally has been pushing for the band to go into this direction, unabashedly, and to do it with no punches pulled, I think they honestly kinda pulled it off.

They could've done a slightly better job of sticking the landing and not allowing those vocoder vocals to be so dominant over the beats, and over the compositions and progressions they were pulling together, sure. But still, I liked a majority of what King Gizzard offered on this record, and think the band managed a commendable and enjoyable effort on this one, even if I didn't come out totally head over heels for it, which is why I'm feeling a light to decent 7 on this album.

Anthony Fantano. King Gizzard. Forever.