King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard are still chasing the weird

“King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard are a bunch of freaks from Australia, just trying to stay out of trouble. How’s that?” There's something wonderfully uncomplicated about the way Stu Mackenzie, frontman of the eclectic Melbourne sextet, describes his band. For a collective who have spent more than a decade producing music at a frankly absurd rate – jumping between psychedelia, garage, thrash metal, jazz fusion, microtonal rock, and now electronic dance music – it is a surprisingly fitting introduction. Their 28th studio album, Alien Metal, is another sharp turn, arriving today through their own p(doom) Records. Yet speaking to Mackenzie, there is little sense of a band attempting to manufacture novelty. Instead, there’s the feeling of six musicians who have somehow retained the simple pleasure of messing around until something piques their interest.That inquisitiveness is at the heart of Alien Metal. Following a tour of rave shows, where the band abandoned their traditional instruments in favour of a sprawling modular synthesiser setup (lovingly referred to as “Nathan”), it would be easy to assume the improvised jams were the record’s starting point. In reality, the band had alre...