Chrome by Ty Segall: Album Review
Chrome by Ty Segall: Album Review
Ty Segall, the prosaic So-Cal riff-rock colossus, returns this week with Chrome, his latest studio album, following 2025’s Possession. On Chrome, Segall teams up again with past collaborators Ben Boye, Evan Burrows, Mikal Cronin and Emmett Kelly.
It seems like every decade has its callbacks to earlier decades, songs or entire albums that velcro together a hybrid of eras–the 60’s/80’s marriage of “Shake it Up Baby” in Ferris Bueller, or the way swing swung back in the late 30’s/late 90’s mashup. But in this first quarter of the 21st-century, it feels like something different is going on, a bleed-through that’s always existed in rock as a performative affect, has now become a true convergence of epochs—maybe there is no mid 2020’s sound because times is collapsing in on itself, who can say? But when an artist like Ty Segall plays music that’s a mix of the 70’s through the Now’s, he’s got the chops to time travel in a way only an avid surfer could, riding waves back and forth through a tide of fuzzy octaves and fuzzier arpeggios.
Chrome is an emotionally rooted album, saturated with classic rock mood, in the best sense. Even though it’s got lots of feel, it’s also visual at the same time–like take-a-ride through space “visual,” follow two eagles down a death spiral, “visual.” There are some squalling guitar duets on Chrome that are truly worth a listen.
Segall’s guitar-progression vernacular uses familiar phrases from bands like Motörhead, Frank Black, and Queens of the Stone Age, but that’s Segall’s gift: taking the recognizable and asking, can this rock again, can it rock harder? He’s got an uncanny ability to make just about anything serve a song, fusing collages of smoking riffery, music that invariably satisfies on a first hear. The instrumental elements work well because he’s laying down something real. And the recording and arrangement on Chrome is sparse enough to let the grooves breathe.
Some of the titles, like “Running to Nowhere,” “Let Go,” and “Chrome” make a run at the intimidating infinitude of creation and reincarnation cycles, and that’s a very particular type of existential dread—the kind that never ends. My favorite lines/mantras from the album include “Slide below the unknown/So let go you have no control,” and “When I died/I was alive/I was alive/When I died.” You know, Buddhist stuff. It seems like Segall is pointing toward the inexorable limitlessness of life, the vastness of space, and time, calling us to look these things in the face, and then let go.
Even so, the words on Chrome are often as opaque as the metal itself. But as another “instrument” on the album, the lyrical oddities are equal to the trippy psych rock guitar that makes a Ty Segall album so fun. If rock ‘n’ roll is about allowing oneself to be maniacal for a moment, then Segall has the knack for that sort of intensity, an obsession for rock that sounds classic right out of the bag. A Ty Segall album is a little like Steven Seagal movie: It’s never not a Ty Segall album. Chrome is no exception.
Chrome released on Drag City Records on August 28th, 2026.
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