You Like King Gizzard’s “Alien Metal” - Now What?

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard making an electronic record isn’t exactly a surprise anymore. The surprise with Alien Metal is how completely they commit to it. This isn’t rock music wearing a cheap techno costume. The guitars have largely been asked to wait outside while the machines get to run around unsupervised.

The result is forty minutes of techno, breaks, ugly synth noises, sudden moments of beauty and the sort of rhythmic decisions that suggest somebody has recently spent a lot of time standing in front of very large speakers.

So what do you listen to after Alien Metal?

We aren’t aiming for the potentially obvious connections here. You can draw a straight line from parts of this record to The Prodigy, Aphex Twin, Nine Inch Nails and plenty of other names without much help from us. Instead, here are six records that take some element of what makes Alien Metal exciting and run off somewhere else with it.

Gesaffelstein "Gamma"

Gesaffelstein has always understood that electronic music works particularly well when it seems vaguely threatening. Mike Lévy’s records tend to arrive dressed in black and looking like they know something you don’t.

Gamma, his third studio album, came out in 2024 and moves his industrial techno toward new wave and synth-pop without making the whole thing substantially friendlier. Yan Wagner supplies vocals throughout much of the record, which gives songs like “Hard Dreams” a human center while the machinery continues grinding away underneath. That’s the connection to Alien Metal: not necessarily a specific beat or synth, but the way both records make electronic music feel physical. The bass hits like an object. The sequencers don’t decorate the songs; they push them forward.

If the colder, more mechanical parts of Alien Metal are what grabbed you, this is a very good next stop

Justice "Hyperdrama"

Justice figured out almost twenty years ago that dance music could benefit from behaving more like a ridiculous arena-rock band. Hyperdrama is the French duo’s fourth studio album, released in 2024 after an eight-year gap between studio records. Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé still like distortion, enormous synths and unnecessary amounts of drama, but this version of Justice is considerably more interested in contrast. Tame Impala appears on “One Night/All Night” and “Neverender,” while Miguel turns up on “Saturnine.”

At various points it sounds like disco being crushed inside industrial machinery, which isn’t a terrible neighborhood for Alien Metal fans to visit.

King Gizzard and Justice also share an instinct that electronic music doesn’t need to behave politely. A synthesizer can be subtle. It can also sound like someone just pushed a refrigerator down a stairwell. There is room for both.

 

Underworld " Dubnobasswithmyheadman"

Here we arrive at one connection that Gizzard listeners themselves kept making. Underworld’s Dubnobasswithmyheadman came out in 1994 and marked the beginning of the Karl Hyde/Rick Smith/Darren Emerson version of the group. The older Underworld had been a much different proposition; with Emerson involved, they mutated into something built around techno, dub, acid house and long stretches of hypnotic repetition.

Thirty-plus years later, the thing still moves.

“Dark & Long” announces itself patiently. “Mmm Skyscraper I Love You” stretches past thirteen minutes without giving much consideration to anyone who might be in a hurry. “Cowgirl” is one of those pieces of electronic music where repetition stops feeling repetitive and begins feeling architectural.

That quality matters with Alien Metal. King Gizzard have traditionally been a band interested in riffs, but here they increasingly understand something dance producers have known forever: sometimes the interesting thing isn’t changing the pattern. It’s letting the pattern change you.

Of everything on this list, this is probably where we’d start.

Porter Robinson "Worlds" 

Porter Robinson is the odd one out here, which is exactly why he’s worth including.

His 2014 debut album Worlds was essentially a decision to walk away from the harder EDM sound that had first made him successful. Instead of continually making everything bigger, Robinson built a record around atmosphere, melody, synthetic voices and enormous emotional payoffs.

“Sad Machine” sounds almost impossibly bright. “Sea of Voices” floats around for several minutes before deciding that, yes, it would actually like to become enormous. “Flicker” chops voices into another instrument entirely.

It doesn’t resemble Alien Metal in the obvious sense. That’s the point.

What connects them is the willingness to treat electronic production as a complete environment rather than a genre exercise. Gizzard aren’t merely adding beats to rock songs on Alien Metal, just as Robinson wasn’t simply writing EDM with quieter parts on Worlds. Both records ask what happens when the studio becomes the primary instrument.

Sometimes the answer is frightening. Sometimes it is embarrassingly beautiful.

Rustie "Glass Swords"

Then there is Glass Swords, which sounds like someone won every prize at an arcade simultaneously.  Glasgow producer Rustie’s 2011 debut for Warp is absurdly maximal electronic music: huge synth melodies, hip-hop-influenced rhythms, digital clutter, sudden explosions of color and bass that occasionally seems designed to test whether your speakers are still under warranty.

This record came up specifically when Gizzard fans started trading recommendations after Alien Metal, and it makes sense. Not because Rustie sounds like King Gizzard, exactly, but because Glass Swords shares their apparent inability to leave well enough alone.

“Ultra Thizz” is probably the easiest demonstration. There are enough hooks in it for several normal songs, all competing for the same three or four minutes.  A lot of electronic music depends on precision and restraint. Rustie apparently received that memo and used it to clean something off his keyboard.

If the overwhelming parts of Alien Metal are your favorite parts, go here.

Brian Eno "Another Green World"

And now for the record on this list that came out in 1975.

Brian Eno’s Another Green World sits at a strange point in his career. He had already made two solo art-rock records after leaving Roxy Music, but here the songs begin dissolving into something else. Only five of the album’s fourteen tracks contain vocals. Short instrumental pieces appear and disappear. Synthesizers stop acting like futuristic keyboards and start behaving more like weather.

It is a remarkably quiet ancestor to a lot of music that eventually became much louder.

There is no sensible argument that Another Green World “sounds like” Alien Metal. It doesn’t. But listening only for surface similarity misses the more interesting relationship.

Eno was exploring what happens when recording technology stops documenting a band and starts becoming part of the composition itself. Fifty years later, King Gizzard are approaching electronic music with much the same curiosity, albeit with considerably more BPM and a greater chance of somebody being kicked in the head at a festival.

Another Green World is the comedown record on this list. Put it on after the party has ended and the sun has begun doing that deeply inconsiderate thing - where it comes back up

Where to go after Alien Metal?

None of these records offers another Alien Metal. Good.

The interesting thing about King Gizzard’s latest detour is that it can function as a door into several decades of electronic music that otherwise don’t have much reason to occupy the same record shelf.

Enjoy these selections - and eventually get to Brian Eno, because nearly every road involving people becoming overly interested in synthesizers eventually leads back to Brian Eno anyway.

There are worse problems to have.