Freshly returned from a US tour, Stu Mackenzie is glad to be back in his Melbourne home.
“We’re travelling a little less this year, although still seem to be crazy busy,” he says. For the guitarist and singer of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, that’s likely busier than most.
Having released five albums in a single year, twice in their career, the band took their time with Alien Metal. While no strangers to heavy and dark music, their 28th record leans further into electronic music than ever before. “For us, it’s probably like a longer form journey that we’ve been on,” explains Mackenzie. “We’ve spent a lot of time developing and, I suppose, immersing ourselves in the world, but also the equipment. Learning how to make music together in this format has been a really exciting adventure that we’ve been on for quite a long time.”
King Giz’ Croxton Block Party
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- When: 17, 18 September
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Guitarist Joey Walker’s love of techno led the band towards modular synths. They soon became a fixture of the band’s live shows, forming the backbone of their “rave” sets. “The shows have had a portion of the set where we’ve brought out a mountain of synths, and that’s evolved and changed over the last few years,” says Mackenzie. “That’s, in some ways, culminated in this record.”
Though the band’s genre-hopping might seem planned from the outside, Mackenzie says they usually have multiple projects on the go. Whichever is most likely to be completed becomes the next album. “Starting things is a lot easier than finishing things, I’ll definitely say that, and we’ve done a lot of starting things and never finished them too,” he says. “With six people in a band, a lot of it is getting everyone on the same page. Sometimes there’ll be something that three or four people will really want to do, but that’s not enough.”
While Alien Metal is unlike anything in the band’s discography, it doesn’t feel out of place. “You spend so long doing something that the thing that feels good is actually the opposite thing,” explains Mackenzie. “I think you tend to get pretty deep into one thing that the pendulum swings the other way, and I think that’s been a big part of why the records have swung wildly in different directions.”
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The band has recorded jams for albums before, but nowhere close to what they did for Alien Metal. “We actually spent a couple of weeks, all six of us together, just recording everything. We ended up with 50-odd hours of recordings, which is just a bad idea.”
“The first one we picked out was this long-form jam that was just Joey and I in the studio quite late, and it ended up being the blueprint for Alien Metal,” he recalls. “It was this hour-long improv between the two of us, where we were experimenting with our equipment, but it just had quite a special energy and spark.”
Even for a band known for their vast output, turning the improvisation into an album proved difficult. “We began a long, long, long, long, long exercise of just developing, refining, rewriting and rerecording,” says Mackenzie. “It was a punishing album to make, to be honest. The issue was that we were probably further away from being done than any of us realised the whole time.”
Much of the challenge came from having to relearn how to play together. Using Eurorack modular synths, the band not only had to build and patch the systems themselves, but also learn how to use them. “We’ve spent so long, 15 years or so, learning how to make music with each other with drums, guitars and bass and that sort of thing,” he says. “To throw that on its head and start from scratch was really hard, and felt like being born again.”
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With roughly 100 modules in each member’s rack, Mackenzie says they’re their own self-contained orchestra, though not easy to play in concert. “We had to reverse engineer a lot of the equipment,” he says. “Figure out ways to super reliably keep ourselves in sync, to pass the signals around without degrading, and to buffer the audio around the table.”
“One thing that I like about the format is, because you have to build your own system and because you have to make a patch yourself, everybody makes wildly different and unique instruments,” says Mackenzie. “It’s a really interesting and cool reflection of that person’s personality in a lot of ways.”
To make the instrument less intimidating, the band gave it a name. “There’s a reason why people don’t do this live, improvised electronic music with Eurorack — it’s just sadistic,” says Mackenzie. “Calling it Nathan felt like a humanising of the machine, in a way, and there was an instinctual reason to just take the edge off it. So maybe, deep down, it’s something like that. But I think we also just thought it was funny.”
Nathan will make an appearance at the Croxton Block Party, which the band also curated, in October. “It’s so good when it feels easy and aligned. We know all the folks at the Croxton, and I’ve done stuff with them for years and years. So it’s a cool, cool fit… and just nice to do a show in our backyard.”
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