Tracked with a live band straight to tape, these nine songs are less of a return to form and more of a continuation of several different conversations he’s been having over the course of his career. “I wouldn’t say it’s a callback or a throwback to the records I made a decade ago or something, but it felt right to just kind of make loud rock and roll. That’s it,” Ty tells me on the phone. It’s mid-July and he is enjoying a nice vacation at home before the album cycle kicks in. “I think it’s just a great representation of the loud side of what my band can do… I feel like we haven’t presented that on a record in a long time.”

And it works. Chrome is melodically heavy and jagged in all the places that matter. Take the album’s opener, “Hospital” for example, where swirling arpeggiated synths underpin skittering drums underneath a thick, soaring fuzzy guitar melody with Ty’s signature scowl. “Black Paint,” the lead single from the record, is a monster of towering percussion and streaks of incendiary harmonies that feel cut from the same cloth as 2018’s Freedom’s Goblin or 2014’s Slaughterhouse. “Let Go,” another standout track from Chrome, blends a playfully grimy, mid-70’s Sabbath-esque riff with a propulsive backbeat and what feels like one of the most mosh-ready songs on this record. It’s an album with the right kind of tension and raw power delivered by a band exceptionally well-tuned to each other. The musicianship is tight and Ty’s lyrics are as colorful as ever. But if Chrome feels like a snapshot of a band in complete lock-step with one another, that’s because it is. Ty’s career is dotted with the same musicians and collaborators that he’s been working alongside for years; trusted collaborators and friends like Mikal Cronin (bass, vox) and Emmett Kelly (guitar, vox). In a way, they’ve morphed into less of a band and more of a garage rock hive mind. “We’re all very into the same idea of what we think a live rock and roll band should be, and the kind of thing that connects us is this living, moving, changing representation of the songs. That’s exciting.”

The threads of Chrome and that distinct sound can be traced to his early days in San Francisco. It’s 2006, and an 18-year-old Ty Segall has just moved to the Bay Area from Laguna Beach for college. Part of the city’s draw was what felt like a thriving garage rock scene, with bands like The Mummies and Coachwhips. Ty was already steeped in that world, having spent his high school years playing in similarly raucous bands. But instead of finding that high-energy, anything-goes kind of garage punk, he found a scene in transition. “Oh man, I really like Coachwhips,’ and they’re not playing anymore. I really like Numbers, and they’re not playing anymore. Bubbling up in their place was the nascent freak-folk scene led by artists like Devendra Banhart. For Ty, this was a different world.

As time went on, friends and former bandmates like Mikal Cronin (guitar) and Charles Moothart (guitar, drums) moved up to the Bay. He kept writing, recording and playing bars, house shows and all-ages spaces with friends both old and new. As they played, a new ecosystem began forming around this uniquely scuzzy, psych-infused strain of melodic punk. John Dwyer, formerly of Coachwhips, continued pushing his own brand of weirdo, freak-out garage rock with Thee Oh Sees, while newer groups like Sic Alps were honing their own blend of noisy, minimalist psych. A scene started to build on top of the foundations of the old one, and Ty was at the very core of it. “Everyone was just big fans of what everybody else was doing, and it was kind of this shared experiential thing. We all kind of kept playing music, and it seemed like we developed our own thing on top of the San Francisco thing.”

Those instincts, to absorb and incorporate the swirling miasma of influences around him would serve as the cornerstone for Ty’s music. Now 20 years in with 18 solo records (and countless side projects), he has shifted between styles constantly. From the lofi punk on his debut to the breezy psych-folk on Hair and the synth-infused, meaty rock tunes on Harmonizer, he has built a striking sonic tapestry. There’s more, but I would need more adjectives and more than one paragraph to capture it. Through it all, though, the collaborative world of Ty Segall kept growing and fusing with itself and Chrome is just the latest snapshot of that universe. The garage rock hive mind kept growing, and so has his own approach to collaboration. With this latest record utilizing longstanding collaborators like Mikal Cronin, Emmet Kelly, Ben Boye (keys, piano) and Evan Burrows (drums), finding new ways to surprise one another is central to the joy of his band.

“Emmet [Kelly] I have a pretty serious hive mind two-guitar player thing, so we can really lock in in this pretty weird way. It’s very, very fun. So that’s always surprising when you start a solo and you land on the same note together” he says, adding “…we never really arrange those moments and when we accidentally find a magical thing, that’s the surprising part. ”But outside of his core band, how does Ty find new ways to flex his creative muscles and challenge himself? One of those answers is scoring for film.

“It’s like every movie is like a new band you’re starting or something, you know?” In 2020, Ty was asked to score Whirlybird, a documentary highlighting a pair of influential 1990s Los Angeles news helicopter reporters Marika Gerrard and Zoey Tur. With its rhythmic synth melodies, wildly cacophonic sax lines and highly syncopated drums, Whirlybird has a distinctively fraught sonic landscape. So when Director Dylan Meyer tapped Ty to score her latest stoner-buddy-comedy The Wrong Girls, she flooded him with ideas and he jumped feet-first into that universe. “Dylan gave me a lot of references: songs, ideas and things. I just started making riffs and demos, and it would be kind of like: Oh, that’s a cool vibe, go in that direction.”

Working across mediums and with Meyer’s references meant that Ty was entering a creative world that was not his own; one whose narrative contours and emotional beats had to be excavated in response to someone else’s direction. Though that process is, really, not too dissimilar from the same instincts that animate Chrome. The joy of simply tracking the record with longtime friends in a room feels representative of how he has constructed his creative process, by inviting others into his creative stream.

This is what makes Chrome less simply a return to the loud, fuzzed-out rock that first established Segall. The live-to-tape immediacy comes from a band with enough shared history to move as a single entity but with enough curiosity to keep catching themselves off guard.

Order Chrome by Ty Segall HERE