Ten years ago, the prospect of Ty Segall making a wild, noisy, guitar-charged rock’n’roll album would’ve raised zero eyebrows, but in 2026, it comes as a pleasant shock. For most of the past decade, Segall has spent as much time outside the proverbial garage as within it, exploring the vast musical terrain—prog, folk, synth-core, drum circles—that lies beyond its soot-covered confines. And not only has Segall become a more adventurous artist, he’s also become a more sophisticated—and, at times, unabashedly romantic—songwriter in the process. Even as last year’s streamlined Possession saw him slipping into classic-rock coziness after an extended period of musical exploration, its shape-shifting song structures were still beholden to the labyrinthine logic that has governed Segall’s 2020s releases.
So for old-school Segall fans, Chrome is a long overdue trip back to the fuzz-war trenches, a resounding reaffirmation of Segall’s core strength—i.e., striking a highwire balance of ugly riffs and catchy melodies with a tightrope walker’s outsized sense of confidence. Sure, Segall has written sludgy sing-alongs like “Black Paint” several times before, and yet the spirit of anarchic joy that coursed through his earlier work remains as intoxicating as ever. But for Segall, a full-fledged return to his punk/proto-metal roots would require not just turning up the volume but unlearning the craft he’s acquired over the years, and that’s not really the case here. If the past decade has seen this garage rocker become ever more eager to experiment, with Chrome, garage rock is the experiment.
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The album isn’t so much a return to form as a reconsideration of it—a vision of Segall’s primal past filtered through his current, finely focused craftsman’s lens. Even in this elemental state, there’s careful attention paid to scene-setting and world-building, as heard in the evil-”Baba O’Reilly” organ oscillations that summon the roiling “Hospital” like a weather-station radar warning of an incoming tornado, or that moment in “Glass” when the bottom drops out of the song’s metallic new-wave groove and we’re plunged into a dreamy extended jam that suggests an indie-rock version of Pink Floyd’s Animals. And while Segall revisits the crime-scene splatter of 2012’s Slaughterhouse, he’s also opening up the windows to let in some fresh air: “Running to Nowhere” blasts out of the gate like a more paranoid “Paranoid” before the distortion and screaming dissipate to reveal a wistfully jangly psych-pop tune at its core. (None of this should suggest Segall has lost his flair for lawless noise freakouts—those moments were just relegated to the concurrently released Love Fuzzz EP, comprising two lava-lamp-smashing dirges that each ooze past the 10-minute mark.)
If there’s a direct antecedent for Chrome in the Segall canon, it’s the untamed 2019 live set Deforming Lobes, which makes perfect sense, given that the new album effectively doubles as a reunion for his long-serving Freedom Band: guitarist Emmett Kelly, bassist Mikal Cronin, and keyboardist Ben Boye, with Evan Burrows taking over the drum stool once occupied by Charlie Moothart. (To emphasize the significance of the occasion, Chrome is also the rare Ty Segall album to feature faces other than his own on the cover.) That built-in camaraderie is as much of a special effect here as anything on Segall’s pedal board: Chrome clocks in at a lean nine songs and 32 minutes, but it’s not hard to imagine the album’s most ragged rave-ups—like the Redd Kross-covers-“Ace of Spades” surge of “Separation” or the title track’s ZZ Top-via-King Gizzard boogie blitz—getting stretched out for twice as long in concert. So even as it reverts to Segall’s old ways, Chrome points to future possibilities: It’s like a live-album document of gigs that have yet to happen.
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