King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, “Phantom Island.”

It’s not uncommon for various symphonies to lay down lavish string accompaniments for bands like Metallica and AC/DC. Often, these live concerts give fans an excuse to clean themselves up, wear something fancy and pretend rock and roll isn’t a hive of scum and villainy. What’s less common is an album produced in collaboration with orchestral players. But the musical approaches of Australian rockers King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard are anything but common.

For, Phantom Island, its 27th album — yes, you read that right — the Melbourne sextet collaborated with the L.A. Symphony Orchestra to fill out some songs that didn’t fit on last year’s Flight b741. The result is a sprawling and lush rock album that doesn’t sound like much else in the band’s nearly endless discography.

In some cases, like the album’s opening song and title track, the strings add a kind of TV-soundtrack-drama to the music. It doesn’t feel canned, and the strings aren’t cheesy or commercial-sounding, but it’s a long way from the stripped-down garage rock of the early years for King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. “Phantom Island” tells the story of an existential adventurer thrown into a strange new reality. At a “speakeasy,” the song’s narrator reflects on the ontological instability of his situation.

“I never thought I’d lose my mind/ I suppose sanity is easy to lose and hard to find/ Hey, and can you hear that tintinnabulation?/ Are all the bats in the belfry again?” Stu Mackenzie sings in the nasally Getty Lee register often used for cosmic or literary lyrical mansplaining.

Elsewhere on the album, the orchestrations create ambient textures rather than syrupy melodies. On “Lonely Cosmos,” a string section creates a kind of shimmering musical ocean surface at the beginning of the song, from which then acoustic guitar emerges. The vibe at the outset is mystical and dreamy as Mackenzie sings, “From the belly of the jungle where I launched/ I fly through time as dead as it is cold.” The song eventually evolves, with the help of a flute, to acquire a kind of “Girl From Ipanema” bounce. “I’m inhaling stardust/ Don’t leave me floating; this is not how I would want to die,” Mackenzie sings over a cheerier musical portion.

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard worked closely with Chad Kelly, a conductor and arranger who lives in Sydney, to add orchestrations to a batch of 10 songs that didn’t fit the vibe of the band’s previous album.

Many of the songs cover themes found in fantasy and science fiction novels. “Eternal Return” feels a little like Air’s “Virgin Suicide” soundtrack with majestic strings and minimal additional instrumentation, while “Panpsych” harkens back to the organ-heavy psychedelia of the early 1970s.

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have made evolution and change a constant to their musical approach, and Phantom Island suggests there are still more unexplored sonic territories to be discovered in the band’s musical journey. The key, it seems, is not to worry about things too much. Or as Mackenzie sings on “Panpsych,” “What will be, will be/ Find your zen; embrace the journey.”