The Chills

The Chills were one of New Zealand’s most iconic guitar pop bands of any era. They started out in the ’80s, making a consistent series of chiming, hook-laden guitar pop records for the Flying Nun label, then bumping the production values up for a couple albums (notably 1990′s Submarine Bells) on Slash. The band’s songs and arrangements were constructed with interweaving guitar hooks and vocal harmonies, creating a lush sound that never falls into cloying sentimentality. The Chills’ personnel changed frequently with the only constant member being singer-songwriter Martin Phillipps, the band’s founder. When he hit some health roadblocks in the ’90s, the band took an extended break and Phillipps made music only sporadically before returning in the 2010s for a series of strong comeback albums — including 2021′s Scatterbrain — which stand with the band’s best work to date. Phillipps began playing music with the New Zealand punk band the Same in 1978. Following in the footsteps of the Clean and the Enemy, the Same played mostly covers, creating a raw fusion of British Invasion and garage rock. However, the group never recorded. Phillipps applied the same approach for the Chills, the band he formed in 1980 with his sister Rachel and Jane Dodd (bass) after the Same fell apart. In 1982, the Chills signed with Flying Nun, the influential New Zealand independent record label, and released several singles that were never widely distributed in America and Europe. During this time, the group went through an enormous number of members: future Great Unwashed bassist Peter Gutteridge, the Clean’s David Kilgour, keyboardist Frazer Batts, bassist Terry Moore, guitarist Martin Kean, keyboardist Peter Allison, drummer Martyn Bull, and drummer Alan Haig. While these incarnations of the Chills recorded plenty of singles, they never made an album. Released on the U.K. record label Creation, the group’s first album, Kaleidoscope World (1986), was a collection of early singles; it was later released in the U.S. on Homestead. With the lineup of Phillipps, bassist Justin Harwood, keyboardist Andrew Todd, and drummer Caroline Easther — the group’s tenth lineup — the Chills recorded their first proper album, Brave Worlds, in 1987. Produced by Mayo Thompson, the leading figure of the cult band the Red Crayola and a former member of Pere Ubu, the bandmembers weren’t satisfied with the final result, claiming it was too loose and under-produced. The Chills, particularly Phillipps, were more satisfied with their second full-length album, 1990′s Submarine Bells, their first record released on an American major label. Submarine Bells was recorded with yet another version of the band, with Jimmy Stephenson replacing Easther, who was suffering from tinnitus. The album was well-received by critics and college radio, yet it failed to break the band into the mainstream in either America or Britain. Two years later, they released Soft Bomb, which suffered the same fate as Submarine Bells. The following year, Martin Phillipps broke up the Chills again and spiraled into drug addiction, which led to some serious health issues. He never stopped making music, though, and in 1996 released Sunburnt under the name Martin Phillipps & the Chills. The album featured Dave Mattacks of Fairport Convention and XTC’s Dave Gregory on drums and bass. Phillipps joined David Kilgour’s Heavy Eights band and continued to round up people to play the occasional Chills show, going so far as to record an EP, Stand By, in 2004. It would be 2013 before the Chills returned with any new music, which came in the form of a single song released online titled “Molten Gold.” Shortly after it was released, a massive live recording, Somewhere Beautiful, surfaced, capturing a 20-song set recorded at a New Year’s Eve party in 2011. The next year a collection of BBC Sessions from the ’80s was released, further stoking the desire of fans for new material. Finally, in 2015, Phillipps and a fairly long-running incarnation of the Chills (multi-instrumentalist Erica Scally, bassist James Dickson, keyboardist Oli Wilson, and drummer Todd Knudson) released Silver Bullets on Fire Records. The band played their first U.S. show in many years, appearing at 2016′s N.Y.C. Popfest, then touring the U.K. and Europe. The same lineup went back into the studio with longtime Manic Street Preachers producer Greg Haver and got a big, bright modern rock sound for the band’s 2018 album Snow Bound. After replacing bassist Dickson with Callum Hampton, the band retuned to the studio to track their seventh album. A set of songs about mythology, aliens, and the travails of modern life, 2021′s Scatterbrain kept the big rock sound of their previous album while adding some prog flourishes to the mix. Martin Phillipps died on July 28, 2024 at the age of 61. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine