Murder of the Universe is the tenth studio album by Australian psychedelic rock band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard.

[6] Murder of the Universe is a concept album split into three separate stories, called suites, each containing elements of spoken word to carry a narrative.

However, the Altered Beast suffers greatly from absorbing another consciousness – it loses track of its identity and eventually dies of insanity, decaying into the earth.

"[12] Writing about the album alongside King Gizzard as a broader cultural phenomenon, theorist Benjamin Kirbach argues that: In Tolkien, the Balrog is a demon awakened inadvertently by the Dwarves of Moria.

This ancient agent of retribution is no doubt Tolkien's metaphor for the hubris of modernity—and Gandalf must sacrifice himself so that Frodo et al. can escape its fiery contempt.

In King Gizzard, the Balrog is similarly provoked by technological obtrusion ("You made the atom split / It caused a massive rift / And he came screaming through").

A prisoner of this solipsistic pedigree, with no point of reference but the archive of now-extinct human knowledge at his disposal, Han-Tyumi pines for his biological counterpart and becomes obsessed with two things that as a machine he cannot do: vomit and die.

This unholy merger triggers a chain-reaction in which the machine-human hybrid simultaneously ingests and regurgitates itself in infinite regress.

As if throwing dialectical history into reverse, the bilious anti-singularity spills out and eventually coats the entire universe in vomit.

's voice slows and tapers off in a digital swansong not unlike that of HAL 9000's.In sum, Murder of the Universe 's psych-rock opera presents a mythopoetic allegory of human technogenesis: from the primal prosthesis of the altered beast to the illusory enframing of nature via electricity, and finally the zombified imprint of ourselves we leave behind as Han-Tyumi.