I listened to it twice in a row on Friday morning. I’m loving it. I think UQT is my fave.
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I watched the Apple Music interview and found it illuminating to hear Stu and Joey talk about the process of making the album. I was a little put off when I read that it’s pretty much just Stu and Joey playing. Turns out that all six of them had been in the studio working on it, and then everyone left but Stu and Joey. It was then that they banged out the 90-minute jam that served as the outline of the album. I guess what remains unclear to me is whether the rest of the guys can actually be heard on the album. I know Ambrose does some vocoder vocals, but is anyone else on there? Maybe it doesn’t matter.
The Level 5 we heard at FoV appeals to me more than the album version, or at least it did in that setting. I like all six of them playing, including Cavs on actual drums. But I’m opening my heart and mind to the album, trying to let in music that prior to Gizz would not have appealed to me. And it’s working. I danced my ass off during those Nathan sets and I think I will end up listening to Alien Metal a good amount.
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Was kinda thinking the same thing- def the Stu/ Joey show on the new tracks and even other Nathan songs in general this go round. It fucking RIPS!, but I wonder if Cookie and Amby would feel more involved at their own stations layering more synth, keys, guitar, sax, etc. The thing about Nathan is it’s really hard to pick out the individual inputs and who’s doing what. Either way, It sounded awesome live (stream, lol) and the new tracks pulled me in more than on the album.
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I am not too put off by it, it is not the first time they have operated that way. ITRN is essentially just Stu, Joey, and Cavs for the whole album. I think there are plenty of other examples throughout the catalog. Lucas hasn’t played bass in studio on a ton of stuff.
I think they made it obvious during rave shows and FOVII in particular for the AM tracks that they can all contribute to what is happening live with Nathan.
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I know you’re right about that, especially about how ITRN is only three of them and that Lucas is on so few of the albums. I just like seeing them all contributing, but maybe that’s not how they do their best work and they’re all okay with that. That seems to be the case.
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Yea, I think B741 and PI might be their most collaborative studio albums and those are 2 of my least favorites. My suspicion is that on a lot of albums Joe, Stu, and Cavs, plus maybe Cookie are laying down the basic tracks and then others come in with vocals and overdubs. Which is all fine, it seems like how they work. And they all have something to do live. Lucas’ bass is so integral to their live sound it is wild to me that he is on so little studio material.
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I also enjoyed that interview. My take on what they said was that the whole band were working on it for months, and then one night over a 90 minute jam the 2 kinda put it all together. They also said that was “like a year ago”, so I’d imagine there was lots of time for more input from the others?
It was wild to hear them say that the single 90 minute jam basically turned into the whole album, and they intend to release it in some form some day.
Edit - Only writing credits for Stu, Joey, and Ambrose, so 
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I’m surprised that they recorded it this early, with all the Frankenstein reference and JOJAM and LUSEQ I was expecting that they were working on something that didn’t come to fruition during the november rave tour
I feel like Stu is probably rewriting lyrics right up until the second they take his mic away to press the record haha
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This album really finds a new life live, so energetic tonight, was jumping up and down forever
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Yeah – I wasn’t as consistently into the album tracks as I usually am with their stuff. But if tonight versions show where they’re going with it, I’m totally in.
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I have some Superheavy, Supercritical stuck in my head: “When you’re feeling super…supa supa supa”
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Hi gizz family, I so badly want to go to the under the K bridge show tonight but money is tight 
Any angels out there with a spare ticket for a fan in need 
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Yeah, that was such an interesting thing about the Apple Music interview. I almost got the impression that the jam that was the base for this was maybe between FOV1 and the rave tour? Stu mentions he thought they’d chop it up, refine it a little bit, and release it within a month. Maybe there was even some motivation to release it (at least digitally with vinyl to follow) right on the cusp of rave tour? Maybe I’m reading too much into that, though. If the band already has two albums that are 3/4 of the way finished queued up behind Alien Metal, perhaps that supports the notion Alien Metal was originally conceived to be a 2025 album.
Really hope they do drop the 90-min jam eventually. 134bpm in F# 4eva.
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Clearly an album you should listen to from start to finish, it’s all one piece of music. A single song might work, but can never be as good as the whole thing. I’m pretty sure I hear a lot of influence from Cavs’ drumming on Sojourn in those beat patterns throughout a lot of the album. Great work.
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Ok let’s go it’s time that I write some gizzverse rambling about the album. I haven’t watched the timeland theory yet it will not be influenced by it (I plan to watch it pretty soon).
First let’s take Uqt. The lyrics are pretty obviously from the point of view of the alien that is experimented on in the level 5 video. A cult is experimenting on them, and given the similarity between the alien+modular synth experiment and Cyboogie, it’s reasonable to think it’s the Han-tyumi cult tha wants to cyborgify humanity (see Tezeta and Automation). In the song, the alien is asking for Uqt, and it seems that this substance is be something that would relieve their pain. Uqt is the atomic symbole of Unquadtrium, the hypothetical superheavy (!) element 143 of the periodic table. I think that this Uqt is the “alien metal” in question.
Then we go to the title song. We have a character asking to an “astral blacksmith” a fix, and given that a blacksmith is someone who manipulate metals, we can suppose that the character is asking for the titular “alien metal”, the Uqt, that is a drug to aliens. We have another drug reference in the song referencing PCP reinforcing this idea. Another thing happening is the idea of a soul being reborn, reinforced by the water and ice reference as timeland noted in his song history can be a reference to a soul being reborn or a great change within someone. This sounds a lot like the anamnesis process many gizzverse characters go through when they visit the dreamworld/bardo and that is notably shown in B3K and Magenta mountain (see WBTG Slinger blog post on the topic). Here, something similar is mentioned along with the character living this rebirth seeking drugs after it, just like the B3K characters do in Catching smoke after experiencing the Bardo and the Anamnesis in Dreams and Blue morpho.
Then, the album mentions several time the cyborgifiation (terrible looking word, not sure it exists) of humanity. Level 5 is very clear about it, the song talks about how humans are outdated and replaced by the cyborgs as the end of times is near (at least according to the narrator). The fact that this is indeed a cyborg cult that is doing this is also evocated (we shut our eyes our faith is blind). Sapience, even if its lyrics are only “Palantir”, also evocates this, with the idea that AI (represented by Palantir, a sort of modern Skynet) is now sentient. Finally, Rapid Alpha Decay might give us the link between cyborgs and Uqt. The narrator of this song seems to be a human that is being turned into a cyborg. What is interesting is the focus they put on the energy (I am with the keeper of the energy, I am the keeper of the energy). This energy they’re talking about is seems to be really powerful, really the thing that powers them and makes them feel well, even full. And in fact, alpha decay of atoms is a form of radioactive decay that can be used to obtain energy (some space probes and rovers use that). And what could be subject to a rapid alpha decay? A superheavy element for example, like Uqt.
So it could be both aliens or cyborg that we hear in Kill for the steel, the steel in question being Uqt, as it is for both of them an element of extreme importance. The character in the title track could as well be an alien or Han-tyumi, as it is very possible that Han-tyumi experienced the Bardo and Anamnesis (“looking through rose colored glass won’t work” sounds a lot like someone trying to recreate this experience after The silver cord), and is now trying to experience this again, through tetrachromacy and being turned into a cyborg, which would make him long for that Uqt to power himself and emulate his experience.
The 2 other songs are also evocative of superheavy elements. For superheavy, supercritical this is pretty clear, even if I don’t see the link between supercritical matter and superheavy elements, as it is simply a state of matter found at high pressure (for example in sub-Neptunes planets). Atomic collapse is a phenomenon that is theorized to concern elements 170 and heavier, it happens because those elements could catch a close electron which leads to a collapse of the electrons on the core and a release of antimatter (positrons). As we are talking about a Gizz album, the thematic meaning of ending the album by a song titled like this could be (big speculation here for an instrumental track) that the aliens and/or cyborg, being always hungry for something more powerful than Uqt, turned to heavier elements until they reached the threshold for atomic collapse, causing their demise.
Now if we like to go into even more farfetched gizzverse speculation we could ask ourselves where does the Uqt come from. We can imagine that a superheavy element like this is produced in a cataclismic astronomical event, just like heavy elements are produced in real life supernovae. So the “summer breeze laced with PCP” would actually be the ejected matter from a supernova or some similar event, with the PCP being the Uqt produced by the event. In this interpretation, the astral blacksmith would not be a literal character, but the event itself or the star/whatever before it becomes a supernova/something similar. Now maybe you see where I am going with this, as a supernova is literally an exploding sun, something already present in the gizzverse! In the last verse of Set, he brings 9 stars from other systems ("Sucking starlight from distant planets/In spheres of dying fireballs of heavens they dance
/That god brought about a hellish era of ten brilliant bodies burning stellar) and in Chang’e her husband Houyi (not mentioned directly in the songs but the ten suns are clearly taken from this chinese myth and he’s most probably the archer mentioned in Extinction) destroys the 9 others. And now (tinfoil hat on as always), where else do we see a star from a neighbour system being brought in close to Earth? In Gliese 710! I’ve always struggled to find a satisfying way to tie the IDPLMaL narrative to the rest of the gizzverse but my best bet is by linking it with the Set/Chang’e story. Anyways, a planet that orbits this star has aliens (“Alien figures stumble sickly as their planet bakes”) who seem to have a pretty bad time, so by combining all of that we could have an explanation to how Uqt and the alien arrived on Earth for the experiments.
However, I don’t think this explanation works in term of timeline, as the exploding suns are mentioned in MOTU, so this event must happen after Han-tyumi starts barfing, but the cyborg cult episode most likely happens before that. I put this idea anyway cause I think it’s a good fuel for future gizzverse theories.
So that was my rambling written around 1-2 am with all the things I thought about since the album was released. I plan to write my full gizzverse theory eventually, I would like to do that during the next 6 months but I’ll probably be very busy so maybe it will be delayed again, and on top of that just as I was organizing my ideas the timeland theory dropped and it may change my ideas and I would have to think again for some time. Anyway, if anyone read that in full let me know what you think gizzverse is fun and reel.
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THIS IS AWESOME. You’re not alone in looking at it this way, either.
Not going to lie, I had a similar cathartic writing session a few nights ago. 1k words just kinda went ‘plop’ out of the brain and onto the paper. It felt so good to get all the thoughts and connecting threads that had been nagging at me since the album release on paper assembled in some sort of semi-coherent form.
I also arrived at a similar conclusion: Uqt = “The Steel”.
Can’t wait for the .net song histories for these to drop as well.
What’s the ‘timeland theory’ you mentioned?
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Fascinating read! Thank you for sharing. I had no idea it went that deep! I’d never heard of Uqt as a theoretical element…and then I went on to really get an education by reading the rest of your post. Seriously interesting.
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Gliese 710
I see your point about exploding stars, but this song also has the lyric “Watch the new star dance upon the night sky”…. I’m tired and I don’t….really have a point. But it was interesting.