At this point, it’s safe to say that longtime listeners know what to expect from a new Ty Segall album: seismic blues-scale riffs, yowled melodies, glinting solos, an artful cocktail of brute force and nimble eclecticism. Yet as familiar as the relentlessly prolific Segall’s sound has become, and indeed as familiar as many of its core ingredients have been since day one, he always seems to find new combinations, novel developments, subtle shifts in emphasis. In recent years, the palette has expanded somewhat, reaching beyond his early garage-punk parameters for elements of post-punk, folk, and the more pastoral shades of the ’60s psychedelia that has always been a central influence on his work. 2025’s Possession was among his most expansive records yet, despite being relatively easygoing: a spirit of space and lightness blew through its power-pop arrangements, resulting in one of the more playful and relaxed records of Segall’s career. In this context, Chrome is something of a refortification: harder, darker, more tightly-wound. It’s also way more of a band album, the product of people jamming in a room together for hours on end, gradually mining the songs out of their interactions like sculptures from uncut marble. Most of the time, particularly in its heaviest moments, it’s a refreshing development from this exceptionally restless artist. When Segall wants to really let it rip, he can duke it out with the best of them. “Everything You’ve Been” thunders along atop a riff of Electric Wizard-level grunt, while “Running To Nowhere” is pure Black Sabbath and all the more compelling for it (for a band so influential that they invented an entire genre, few of Sabbath’s admirers are particularly good at really nailing the terrible power that made them so special; Segall gets closer than most). One gets the sense, not for the first time in his career, that if Segall fancied leaving the indie-garage scene behind to go full doom metal, he’d pull it off with consummate ease. Perhaps best of all is “Black Paint,” which pairs monstrous, mid-collapse guitars with the album’s sweetest melodies and most focused songwriting to create something far sharper, sleeker and more emotive than it has any right to be. Occasionally, Chrome’s jammed-out nature does get the better of itself. The songwriting craft that Segall has refined so carefully over his last few albums is, at times, slightly crowded out by what sounds like a desire to simply lock into a groove with his bandmates and fit the lyrics in afterwards. “Glass,” for instance, gallops along pleasingly enough, its Queens of the Stone Age-like push-and-pull between guitar and vocal initially satisfying. Yet it never quite develops beyond this, aside from a somewhat undercooked slowed-down interlude which only ever feels like a palate-cleanser before the opening riff bundles back into view. The closing title track, meanwhile, may well be the kind of acid-rock freakout that a significant portion of the Ty Segall fanbase loves more than anything else on the record, but to these ears it sounds a little too wacky for its own good; better in a live setting, perhaps. Elsewhere, though, tracks like “Play Cowboys” and “Separation” do strike the balance between jam and focused songcraft, the former a mid-tempo bar-room romp with a killer chorus, the latter a doom-punk barrage whose gang vocals and frenetic pace lend it a real sense of defiant purpose. As one might expect, the playing here is uniformly excellent: these guys (Ben Boye, Evan Burrows, Mikal Cronin and Emmett Kelly) are seasoned pros, who manage to combine technical virtuosity with spontaneity and fluidity. In lesser hands, some of these tracks could so easily wither into sloppy cliche; here, they mostly sound far more urgent and explorative than anyone could reasonably expect of something so traditionally garage rock-influenced in 2026. A couple of the aforementioned reservations aside, then, this is yet another remarkably coherent, masterfully-constructed record from one of modern rock’s great artisans. Ty Segall learned the tricks of his trade long ago, and although he never strays too far from his first principles, when he and his bandmates follow their noses into uncharted territory, they tend to come back with something worthwhile. At its best, Chrome is one such gem. [Drag City] Luke Cartledge is a journalist, researcher and musician. He lives in south-east London and writes about underground music, radical politics and cultural change. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Jacobin, Tribune, The Quietus and many other publications, and he is a former editor at Loud And Quiet.