Chrome

Ty Segall — 2026

“Ty Segall turns Chrome into a full band workout, letting the riffs breathe while pushing some of his heaviest solo material yet.”

There is a trend I keep noticing lately where artists pull the whole band into a room and try to catch that together energy on tape, and Chrome is another great example of it done right. There’s just one guitar overdub. That’s it. Everything else was live. Ty Segall wrote half of these songs with Ben Boye, Evan Burrows, Mikal Cronin, and Emmett Kelly, and you can feel five people leaning into the same riff at the same time. This is one of his heaviest solo records yet, the kind that bumps right up against the muscle he flexes in FUZZ. The difference is control. Where a lot of his older heavy material blends everything together with distortion, here that hum sits further back in the mix and lets the playing breathe. The guitars come at you in twin runs, one dropping out just as the other picks up before they eventually lock back together. The rhythm section stays in full support underneath it all, giving each track real depth.

What always gets me about Ty is that he refuses to make the same album twice. Same band, brand new vibe. Chrome swings between clean vocals and bursting guitar jams that tip into legit hard rock, the kind of stretch where you almost forget this is the same guy who used to record whole albums alone in a bedroom. “Running To Nowhere” ranks up there as one of the heaviest things he has ever put to tape solo, yet right in the middle a harmonizing vocal and a cool, controlled guitar run break the storm into sections and let the track sink in differently. The lyrics wander through dark, allusive passages, more mood than message, which works because this album is really about the musicianship. This is a record made for volume, and it rewards it.