The Sky Dematerialised

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard “Level 5” I’ve noticed that when King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard make their most radical genre shifts, like their album-length forays into metal and electronic music, they stick closer to their recurring lyrical obsession with manmade disasters. This could just be a response to the extremity of the sound – it makes some sense to pair metal with lyrics about environmental catastrophe, and for that to extend that into techno-based meditations on extinction. In any case, this does some favors in providing a through line in their body of work. Even when they don’t obviously sound like themselves, they’re still very much being themselves. Alien Metal is the band’s third electronic-oriented record, following excursions into analog synth psychedelia on Butterfly 3000 in 2021 and expanding into a more sinister techno palette on The Silver Cord in 2023. They’ve also performed live a lot in “everybody except the drummer plays synthesizers” mode over the…