The Chills' new album, Silver Bullets, was released on Saturday, almost 20 years since the Dunedin group's last full studio effort, 1996's Sunburnt. Here, band founder Martin Phillipps shares an insight into his songs.
FATHER TIME
For the 1990 album Submarine Bells, I asked my father, who is a fine singer, to record a scale of notes in New Zealand to be sent on a DAT tape to where we were recording in England.
The results can be only just heard on the song Submarine Bells and, when I recently rediscovered the tape, it seemed a good idea to use the better technology available now to do something more sophisticated.
Producer-engineer Brendan Davies and I worked out a short and simple piece of music to start the album where we layered my father's vocals and added the minimum of backing instruments to create a strong and unique opening track to set the scene for what was to follow.
WARM WAVE FORM
The basic riff, then entitled Warm, was first released on a collection of my rough four-track cassette home demos called Sketch Book Volume One in the late '90s, and that makes it possibly the oldest piece of music on the new album and, certainly, one I have been running through my mind in endless variations for a long time.
It is a memory of a younger me experiencing the wonders of intimate embrace and, perhaps surprisingly, the woman being addressed is a composite rather than a single person.
It is a song dedicated to the shared sanctuary of physical love.
SILVER BULLETS
This is the album's actual opening statement and it is quite a blunt one.
If you don't know your history and what happens when you force the majority of people into lives of mere servitude then watch out!
History follows inevitable patterns and with more people becoming aware through the internet of just where they stand, then it is likely that world-changing events may well occur at a previously undreamt-of pace.
This song is perhaps the closest on the album to the way the band performs live.
UNDERWATER WASTELAND
The first of the album's epic tracks.
This has three separate parts, each gaining strength and emotional power as it addresses the tragedy of the decimation of our oceans.
It became an instant live favourite when we began performing it mid-2014.
AMERICA SAYS HELLO
The second of the album's epics, this was one of the more difficult songs to realise as I deliberately left it 'til very late to bring to the band and the recording studio as I wanted to capture the immediacy of the group piecing it together under pressure.
I knew that it needed the basic recurring riff happening in different keys and on different instruments and that the whole song should be a series of connected moments with a shared theme but beyond that it was a studio creation.
Thematically, it is about the international policies of the United States Government but, rather than just another rant against it, I decided to envisage a future where America realises that its current warlike, imperialist approach is no longer working and the country asks to be accepted back into the wider world community.
I know that's naive, but it makes for a good story.
LIQUID SITUATION
This is a musical interlude designed to be placed somewhere on the album to give a break from the potentially overwhelming nature of the big, long songs and it seems to have proved its worth.
It is one of two jams the band worked on live in the studio (the other being uncompleted at this point) and it was only at the eleventh hour that I decided it would have any lyrics at all.
But these arrived and they seemed to suit the overall concept of the album.
PYRAMID/WHEN THE POOR CAN REACH THE MOON
While the bulk of the album was recorded in July 2014 at Albany Street Studios in Dunedin, this, the third of the epics, was recorded the previous October at Karma Sound Studios in Thailand, where we also recorded the reworked Pink Frost.
It is essentially two quite different songs that shared so much topically that they needed to be linked together as neither was quite right to stand alone.
The first half addresses that irritating, misleading claim that if one works hard there is a place at the top for anyone; the second is another fantasy, like America Says Hello, in which the poor of the world are able to reach outer space and see the majestic beauty of our planet from above.
This was the first time the band had worked together in a studio and the results were wonderful.
I am fortunate to have, besides my own very basic guitar and keyboard skills, three members who play piano, three who can arrange music and two others besides myself who also play guitar.
Most of us can therefore play other instruments and all of us sing to some degree.
It was also the first time we worked with British sound-engineer Brendan Davies, who we quickly realised was an absolute godsend as he understood what we were about, offered excellent suggestions and had the temperament and extraordinary work ethic to take on what became a mammoth project.
AURORA CORONA
This is also quickly becoming a new live favourite and it is more like a typical up-tempo Chills song of old.
It picks up the ecological sentiment of Underwater Wasteland and takes it to another level and suggests that if we, as inhabitants of this planet, are actively destroying the world we live on and, if there is an Earth-spirit - Gaia - why would Gaia not decide to wipe us all out?
It's just a bit of apocalyptic fun, actually.
I CAN'T HELP YOU
This is more personal but about a situation many of us have been in where you realise that all your efforts to try to save someone on a self-destructive path are to no avail and you are simply wasting valuable energy which could be put to better uses.
It is never an easy or simple decision to make.
TOMBOY
I have some memories from primary school of ''tomboy'' being used as a taunt towards any girl who chose to disregard gender expectations and be herself and it seemed a sad thing.
I wanted to have school kids singing from one of the schools from my past and it transpired that bassist James Dickson had a son at George Street Normal School, so he was able to arrange to go there and record about 10 children singing the chorus line, which worked out beautifully.
MOLTEN GOLD
This is a rerecording of the single we released last year as we felt the song had developed enough in the interim to warrant another attempt and we think it has been worth it.
It deals with a special moment in my life when I was awakened to a powerful feeling of love connecting all of creation, which gave me the strength to begin finding my way out of a dark hole I was in.
The album
• The Chills' Silver Bullets was released on October 31 on Fire Records. The band performs with the Brian Jonestown Massacre at Sammy's on Saturday, November 7.
