The Chats - Get Fucked (2022)

The history of punk rock is rife with underground aggressors who enjoy a surprise brush with mainstream notoriety thanks to an atypically sunny song that teeters precariously close to novelty-tune status. So the crossover success of the Chats is all the more remarkable given that it came through their surliest song. With the 2017 single “Smoko,” the Australian trio not only scored an anti-social anthem that’s since been covered by the likes of YUNGBLUD and Wet Leg, they also transformed regional vernacular—in this case, Aussie slang for “smoke break”—into an international catchphrase. Vividly channeling the boiled-blood irritation of a service-industry worker who’d sooner gut you than waste a precious second of their five-minute puff session making idle conversation, “Smoko” nonetheless possessed the sort of Seinfeldian relatability that landed the then-teenaged band on morning shows and the 6 o’clock news back home. But since then, the Chats have hardly gone out of their way to make themselves more respectable for the masses. The best songs on their 2020 debut High Risk Behaviour concerned venereal disease, getting caught wanking on webcam, and gorging yourself on rump steak. Now their second album comes bearing a title that’s practically begging to get them disinvited from the late-night talk show circuit.

Get Fucked is everything you want a Chats album to be: fast, crass, and loaded with more instantly quotable Aussie idioms than Crocodiles Dundee and Hunter put together. But it’d be wrong to say Get Fucked simply serves up sloppy seconds from their proverbial pub feed. This is a portrait of a changed band: Once the pride of the small Sunshine Coast surfing town of Coolum Beach, the Chats are now based 90 minutes south in the big city of Brisbane, a relocation that pays immediate dividends in the form of “I’ve Been Drunk in Every Pub in Brisbane,” which is kind of what Wire’s Pink Flag would sound like if all the lyrics were Yelp reviews. But the album is also their first without founding guitarist Josh “Pricey” Price, who played the grubby goofball foil to perpetually pent-up bassist and vocalist Eamon Sandwith. With Sandwith’s snarl now the uncontested focal point, the Chats sound both more agitated and absurd than ever. Like Sandwith’s already iconic bowl-cut/mullet combo, Get Fucked is militaristic severity up front, party in the back.

Even as the Chats skate on the edge where street punk blurs into hardcore, they still retain the shout-it-loud bonhomie of classic ’70s rock. This is a band that’s always put Cosmic Psychos and Kiss on the same piss-stained pedestal, a veritable Oi-C/DC that’s in awe of rock’n’roll’s high-voltage power and pint-sloshing communalism yet fully aware of its inherently ridiculous macho posturing. And so the opening “6L GTR” is a muscle-car manifesto for 90-pound weaklings who know nothing about automobiles, a buzzsaw-riffed ode to a hot-rod model that doesn’t actually exist; in live versions of the song, Sandwith has taken to slipping in the car-seat seduction monologue from Van Halen’s “Panama,” a move that underscores the fact Sandwith will never be a ladies’ man on par with David Lee Roth in his ’80s golden-god prime while acknowledging the Chats’ spiritual debt to hard rock’s original pranksters.

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But as much as the Chats seem like the kind of band that would happily bait a stadium full of Guns N’ Roses fans (an opportunity they’ll get to indulge this fall), they take equal glee in subverting the stern-faced pose of punk. Their songs are so preoccupied with life’s everyday annoyances—from public-transit ticket inspectors (“Ticket Inspector”) to panic attacks (“Panic Attack”) to getting paid late (“Paid Late”)—and so proudly unpoetic that their frustration and aggression can’t help but come out sounding joyful and celebratory. The addition of rockabilly-schooled guitarist Josh Hardy—of fellow Sunshine Coast garage combo the Unknowns—also allows a little more sunshine into the Chats’ self-described “shed rock,” whether he’s answering the blitzkrieged charge of “Struck by Lightning” with “doo-woo-doo-wop” hooks, rerouting the chugging surfer-dude beatdown “Emperor of the Beach” into a bluesy swing, or contributing the congenial, 1963-bound closer “Getting Better,” which stakes out the middle ground between the toga party and the circle pit.

And yet, as with “Smoko,” Get Fucked’s value goes beyond comically deranged depictions of mundane scenarios. Despite specializing in the kind of songs that’ll send non-Aussies scurrying to decipher the significance of Boggo, Beefy’s, and “hoonin’ down the Bruce,” the Chats are ultimately tapping into universal anxieties. “Smoko” isn’t merely about some asshole sitting on a milk crate and puffing away; it’s about an economy where workers are run so ragged that they can’t even enjoy their brief moments of respite. On Get Fucked, the Chats present a sequel of sorts in “The Price of Smokes,” a song that’s reportedly been on the backburner for a few years, but whose release is perfectly timed for this moment of inflationary angst. Cruising on a steady, post-punky bass groove, with Hardy’s leads stretched into a psychedelic smear, Sandwith repeats the line, “The price of smokes is going up again/I could already barely afford my rent”—and he sounds seriously torn by the choice between cigarettes and shelter. At nearly four minutes, it’s practically a prog song by this band’s standards, a gradually intensifying surge in lieu of their usual instant stage-dive strikes. But it’s a reflection of both the Chats’ evolution and that of the world at large—the ticking time bomb soundtrack to an increasingly unfair society where you’re now in danger of being priced out of a smoko.

TRACKLIST

1. The Chats - 6L GTR
2. The Chats - Boggo Breakout
3. The Chats - Struck By Lightning
4. The Chats - Southport Superman
5. The Chats - Panic Attack
6. The Chats - Ticket Inspector
7. The Chats - The Price Of Smokes
8. The Chats - Dead On Site
9. The Chats - Paid Late
10. The Chats - I've Been Drunk In Every Pub In Brisbane
11. The Chats - Emperor Of The Beach
12. The Chats - Out On The Street
13. The Chats - Getting Better