In folk tales, silver bullets are the only weapons capable of combating werewolves and other such sinister creatures.
For New Zealand band The Chills, it took a silver bullet to end a near 20-year dearth of recorded material.The band’s fifth album, Silver Bullets, arrived in late October – the long-awaited follow-up to 1996’s Sunburnt (which was credited to Martin Phillipps and The Chills).
The Chills have never been the biggest band in the world, but they were key contributors to the iconic Dunedin Sound of the 1980s. The influence of the Dunedin Sound has rubbed off on such contemporary indie rock linchpins as Real Estate, Twerps and Blank Realm. As a result, plenty of listeners are only just discovering The Chills. The band’s leader and sole remaining original member, Phillipps was aware of this when working on Silver Bullets.
“It fits with the old Chills stuff, but at the same time it sounds like it was recorded now, not back in the ’80s,” he says. “And that seems to have worked. This is a really good album to play to show younger people what we do that doesn’t sound like it was recorded on four-track back in the ’80s.”
While the improved recording scenario gives the album a more accessible sonic quality, Phillipps didn’t greatly alter his songwriting practice. “I actually just did what I normally do, which is write the songs and not try and calculate how people will respond to it,” he says. “But it’s kind of opened the way for the next album. I do intend to push the boundaries a bit more about what my music and Chills music can be. There’s so much that’s gone on in music, and I would like to just do a bit more experimenting with what we can actually do as well.”
The Chills’ catalogue dates back over 30 years, and there’s a lot of reverence surrounding their output between 1984 and 1992. When working on material for the new album, Phillipps wasn’t distracted by his earlier songwriting achievements.
“Once you’ve done a song or a certain style, you’ve covered that ground, so it makes it harder to come up with something that you really do want to say or a musical direction that you want to follow that you haven’t already done. But that wasn’t really a problem with Silver Bullets, because there are a handful of riffs that have been kicking around for a long time. The bulk of the record was completed in about a year once we had the go-ahead to do the recording.
“Pretty much all the lyrics that had been tried over the years got chucked out and it was mostly all new lyrics,” he adds. “So it really did reflect what I’m thinking about now as opposed to worrying too much about the old stuff.”
Silver Bullets is one of the loveliest sounding releases of 2015, replete with deceptively simply chord progressions, weaving guitar melodies, crisp-sounding guitars and keyboards, and a reassuring vocal delivery. Lyrically, however, it’s not blasé or carefree. A number of songs address fairly solemn themes – the title track is a statement of strength against adversity, while ‘Pyramid/ When The Poor Can Reach The Moon’ is an account of inequality and associated ignorance. A similar compositional juxtaposition has typified much of the band’s career output.
“It’s something I’ve always done, right back to [1986 single] ‘I Love My Leather Jacket’,” Phillipps says. “That’s about the death of our drummer from leukaemia, but I didn’t want to make a sombre song about it, so I stuck that lyric with a very rock kind of riff. And I’m still doing things like that – trying to find, if not opposites, then things that shouldn’t go together but do go together and create a third sensation or atmosphere.”
The Chills play the Magic Mirrors Spiegeltent on Wednesday January 13. More information is available at the Sydney Festival website, here.
