King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have made more albums than most bands manage songs, and Alien Metal finds them rebuilding their usual garage-rock sprawl around modular synthesizers. The Melbourne group credits the record to aliens from the future, which tracks: these eight pieces sound like someone fed their entire back catalogue into a sequencer and let it mutate. Tracks like Superheavy, Supercritical and Rapid Alpha Decay swap out guitars for dense patches of oscillating voltage, though the rhythmic drive still comes from live drums pushing against the grid.
The modular work here is more textural than academic. Kill For The Steel uses shifting arpeggios that could sit on a krautrock record if the low end weren't quite so blown out. Uqt leans into drone territory, all slow-moving harmonics and no resolution. It is not pretty, and it does not try to be. Jason Galea's artwork suggests rust and radiation, which is about right.
This will appeal to people who already follow the band's more experimental turns, and to anyone interested in hearing modular synthesis used for something other than ambient drift. It is uneven, but that seems intentional. Joseph Carra's mastering keeps the harsher frequencies from tipping into unlistenable, though some might prefer they had.
