King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard Are Dropping an EDM Album

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard built their reputation on genre-hopping unpredictability.Their next move, an EDM album called Alien Metal, might be their boldest leap yet.

Ad 0:00 Click for sound 0:00 / 0:00 It’s the 28th album from the barnstorming rock band, and the first taste, a breakbeat banger called ‘Level 5,’ is out now.The single dropped today alongside with a music video directed by Hayden Somerville showing a shadowy cult performing surgery on a helpless zombie-like patient using a giant modular synthesizer.

That synth, played live by all six members simultaneously, apparently broke frontman Stu Mackenzie’s brain in the best way.He explained that no single module functions like a guitar string or pick, each one instead handling 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.“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.” Bandmate Joey Walker, whose roots in electronic production predate the band entirely, 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,” Walked added.

“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 t...