The Chats – Half Cut “I never even imagined we’d make a single full-length album, let alone three. There were no grandiose plans – we did our first EP in high school, decided ‘this is fun’ and then just kept on doing it. So, if you’d asked me back when we started what I thought our third album would sound like, I’d have said we’d still sound the same; we’d still sound like us.” Bassist/vocalist Eamon Sandwith is reflecting on the ten years since his group The Chats formed as teenaged punk-rock wastrels in Queensland. The decade since has been one of unexpected success for The Chats that has reached across the glove, resulting from some of the sharpest, funniest, most ridiculously addictive anthems this side of The Ramones. Solid-gold bad-attitude bangers like ‘Smoko’, ‘Pub Feed’, ‘Struck By Lightning’, ‘I’ve Been Drunk In Every Pub In Brisbane’, and dozens more. Where The Chats find themselves now is a very different place from when they started out, and the distance between those two locations tells some of the story behind their brilliant third album, Half Cut. But don’t get it twisted: Half Cut might be the most focused, muscular, tune-drenched and accessible record The Chats have yet committed to tape, but it very much embodies everything the 16-year-old Sandwith envisaged for their third album: it still sounds utterly, absolutely and unabashedly like The Chats, Sandwith’s bratty, authentic voice intact. Half Cut breaks four years’ silence since the group’s second album, 2022’s Get Fucked. That album marked the debut for new guitarist Josh Hardy, who’s also a member of Melbourne punk supergroup Loose Lips, and plays alongside Sandwith in The Unknowns, and who slotted in perfectly alongside Sandwith and the group’s founding drummer (and moonlighting skateboard wunderkind) Matt Boggis. That the trio spent much of that interim period touring tirelessly across the globe explains the taut, in-the-pocket, tour-drilled sound of their performances on the new album. The Chats recorded Half Cut in a week of sessions in Santa Ana, California, sandwiched between a US jaunt in the company of The Hives and their triumphant performance at this year’s Coachella festival. “I was apprehensive over that whole ‘going to California to record your new album’ thing,” Sandwith admits, “so we flew in our friend, Jay Whalley, to produce.” Frontman of legendary and notorious Sydney punk-rockers Frenzal Rhomb, Whalley was “a cool guy who we’ve been mates with for a long time. It was important for us to not be working with some LA industry guy who was going to try and change the sound of the band.” Whalley ensured Half Cut preserved the soul and the spirit of The Chats, but the album also marks a full-spectrum upgrade in the group’s sound. Gone is the beguilingly amateurish chug of their early EPs, in its place a bold, punk-informed rock’n’roll that does perfect justice to these sky-high hooks and ferociously catchy riffs: a stadium-satisfying noise that befits a band who once cut a single in worshipful tribute to AC/DC, while never losing sight of their punk roots and reverence for The Ramones. There’s a discipline and concision to their playing here, honed by months of incessant touring, that drives every single one of these killer tracks all the way home, powered by Boggis’s unrelenting pummel and Hardy’s adrenalin-rushing fretboard runs. But those four years on the road also explain the sea-change signalled by Half Cut. The lyrics are still hilarious, time having only sharpened Sandwith’s gifts as a storyteller of enviable wit and economy. But there’s a new sophistication at play here, too, new themes being explored. “I hesitate to use the word ‘mature’ to describe Half Cut, but it probably is, a bit,” Sandwith says, of a batch of songs that take a more nuanced approach than before. “I put in more effort with the lyrics than on the other records. This time around, I felt like I could switch it up, do it a bit better.” The band’s puckeringly acid and satirical character studies remain, ‘Turpentine’ capturing a certain kind of auto-destructive punker with all the lurid colour of a wild underground comic. But ‘Drinking For Two’ is a sign of Sandwith’s new approach, tempering his trademark black humour with a little more depth. “I was conscious of not making fun of that main character,” he says, “but exploring her world a little more and asking, ‘How does that person tick? What’s really going on there?’ I was a big reader as a kid, so I guess that’s my interest in storytelling coming out there.” That said, with couplets like “Up the duff and down on luck/Her bloke got a job driving trucks”, it’s still a darkly hilarious listen. Songs like ‘Brown Bottle Flu’, ‘Damage Control’ and ‘Half Arsed’, meanwhile, reference the downside of a regular theme within The Chats’ songbook: getting wasted. “I’ve been ‘sober’ for a few months now,” Sandwith says, though he clarifies he’s not sure if he’s “a straight-edge dude now; I think maybe I’m just taking a break from drinking. The album’s not exactly The Heroin Diaries,” he adds. “Maybe it’s a hangover record. I’ve grown up a bit, and I’m seeing things a bit more clearly. When you're 18 and in a band, you're like, ‘Oh, drinking's fucking sick’. But that gets old after a while. I was pretty dependent on alcohol, and maybe drugs, to a lesser extent. I hadn't played a show sober until a few months ago, and that was pretty eye-opening. Like, ‘Oh – I actually can do this without having to be really pissed, and it still feels good!’” This newly clear-eyed Sandwith is no less feral and spirited than his ever-wasted previous self. ‘Prove You Wrong’ is a slab of perfect punk-pop, the sound of early Green Day taking The Ramones slam-dancing and wasting all the posers in the pit, while the bolshy likes of ‘Off It’ and ‘Hanging Shit’ find him swinging at the assholes up for a scrap with Sandwith simply because they recognise him off the TV – a metaphor for Australia’s tall-poppy syndrome. And the closing ‘Should Know Better’ – a grin-inducing account of self-destruction, set to a slaloming hardcore hurtle – is enough to ignite any mosh-pit it comes in contact with. But Half Cut also finds welcome space for a kind of introspection you might never have expected to find on a Chats record – one that took Sandwith by surprise, too. Sandwith wrote the riff to ‘Falling Down The Stairs’ – one of the album’s finest tracks and a spiritual nephew to The Saints’ deathless ‘This Perfect Day’ – months before the album sessions, but was “a little bit worried to show it to the guys because it sounded kind of vulnerable and was so unlike our other stuff, and the words were a bit too close to the heart. But we ended up recording it too, and I'm really glad we did. That song comes from a period when I was stuck in a rut of drinking all the time and feeling sorry for myself, but not really doing a whole lot to change it. I didn't really have the drive or the strength to do anything about it for a long time. I always thought of The Chats as such a fun band, so I was like, ‘I don't want to you know bum anyone out’. But the stuff that brews up inside of you, it spills out when you write a song.” If there’s a guiding message behind Half Cut, it’s that you can change without losing connection with that which made you great. You can put your drinking and drugging on pause but still stay in contact with the wild side that powers your fastest, fiercest riffs. You can draw your noise into tighter focus and turn the amps up without losing the loose, anarchic attack that set you apart from the identikit punk pack. And you can evolve your songwriting to add empathy and vulnerability to the mix without losing the lightness of touch that makes you punk’s sharpest, funniest and most insightful storyteller. If you can balance all those things, as The Chats do on Half Cut, it’s a magical thing indeed. “And the reward is being able to play those songs with your mates all around the world to a bunch of people who give enough of a shit to spend 20 bucks to come along and see you,” Sandwith says. “That's the biggest reward you could possibly get, I guess. I could never really take that for granted.”