The best Chrome albums of all time
According to Chrome guitarist Helios Creed, his distinctly warped guitar style was born from “listening to Black Sabbath on LSD on headphones” as a teenager.
It’s a succinct capture of Chrome’s sound to the uninitiated. Hailing from San Francisco’s vibrant musical underground in 1976, core duo Creed and Damon Edge would take punk’s raw volatility and slather their DIY sound with layers upon layers of garbled effects and studio trickery to create an unholy swirl of psychoactive acid punk. Nightmarish, discoloured, alien, Chrome scooped up the hippies’ psychedelic residue and laced their trippy post-punk interruptions with a perennial cosmic menace that could still snarl as viciously as anything from the city’s Dead Kennedys or Flipper.
Taking cues from Hawkwind’s hard-nosed, lysergic expanses, Chrome didn’t just gunk their punk attacks with dollops of synths and effects pedals. Their distorted sci-fi blast across their classic run soars across a heady and disparate mulch of styles and terrain, often scrambled into the same cut. Amid the noise sting can lie the remains of a decomposed disco tune, prog painfully stretched and distended, static-encrusted funk echoes, or even the gurgling gasps of a pop hook buried underneath their chewed-up tape experiments. Chrome were masterful conjurers of aural chaos without ever denting their taut, punk laser focus.
Edge would move to Europe without Creed in 1983, taking the Chrome moniker with him while his former guitarist and psychonaut comrade forged a successful solo career. With their eclectic mulch of electronic fizz and spaced-out rock, Chrome would inexorably skirt mainstream attention but endure as a signal across the alternative world’s shifting scenes, namechecked by Butthole Surfers on influencing their disembowelled projectile metal, as well as the slew of industrial juggernauts that exploded across the late 1980s.
Edge would sadly pass away in 1995, leaving Creed to pick up the Chrome moniker and continue to release successive albums with a roll call of original collaborators and new guests. Leaving an indelible yet fringe impact on the world of punk, new wave, neo-psychedelia, electronica, and whatever genre permutation you can think of, we delve into Chrome’s rich body of work and highlight the select few you must listen to pronto.
The best Chrome albums of all time:
Chrome’s perfect introduction: Red Exposure
Release Date: April 1980 | Producer: Damon Edge | Label: Beggars Banquet
By their fourth LP, Chrome was reduced to the core duo of Edge and Creed. With this came a refined approach to their distorted punk invasion, the wide breadth of their sonic universe crumpled into a tighter and more immediate slice of psychedelic bite.
Gone are the previously heard song fragments and fuzzed-out intrusions; Chrome dares to keep a light focused on the murk to tease out their most confident pop offerings yet on Red Exposure. Skulkers such as ‘Static Gravity’ and the evocative ‘Eyes on Mars’ all vibrate with weird but infectious energy, and ‘Electric Chair’ is the hit single that never was, dipping Billy Idol’s cartoon sexuality into a vat of toxic waste and growling a red-blooded ode to young lust and mini-skirts against ‘the last chair you’ll ever sit in’s acrid, burnt flesh.
Also peppered with terse but gripping soundscapes to ensure the dread is never too far away, Red Exposure serves as the ultimate beckon to Chrome’s novel, mutoid rock.
Defining track: ‘Electric Chair’
Chrome’s most interstellar record: 3rd from the Sun
Release Date: May 1982 | Producer: Helios Creed, Damon Edge | Label: Don’t Fall Off the Mountain
It’s hard to make out quite exactly what is aggressively adorned on Chrome’s sixth album effort. Like a cross between an extraterrestrial artefact and some galactic, insectoid deity, the bug-eyed creature that glares on 3rd from the Sun’s arresting cover hisses with instinctive warning, a sign Chrome has travelled way, way, beyond the outer reaches.
Edge and Creed steer their Chrome craft to an infinitely more gothic realm on 3rd from the Sun, to a chillier and icier plane that frosts up the windows with black hole condensation like Heavy Metal meets Alien. With an expanded line-up, and boasting Edge’s girlfriend Fabienne Shine on backing vocals, Chrome coax a proggier and epic ambit to the corroded new wave, an eerily exotic flourish they’d never quite visit again.
‘Future Ghosts’ pummels in a buzzing vacuum, ‘Shadows of a Thousand Years’ prickles and slithers with degraded sensuality, and ‘Off the Line’ flirts with lacerated rock opera. The last of the classic era, 3rd from the Sun takes Chrome to the deepest and farthest coves of their evocative, heavy onslaught.
Defining track: ‘Off the Line’
Chrome’s most hippy offering: The Visitation
Release Date: 1976 | Producer: Damon Edge | Label: Siren
OK, “most hippy” is a stretch. Chrome always had a love for psychedelia but a contempt for hippies, the pair having to navigate San Francisco’s wasteland of burnt-out flower children zonked on quaaludes looking to jam tired blues for the rest of time.
Yet, before Creed had joined the band and Edge had been exposed to the punk new wave, Chrome orbited the same lo-fi collage world of R Stevie Moore or the city’s The Residents. Formed as a quintet and featuring Mike Low as lead vocalist, The Visitation had yet to capture the later serrated fumes, but it’s still a heady listen and rewarding venture for anyone seeking a bridge between two different musical worlds, replete with expert solo rock and strutting garage swagger.
While making little splash upon release, The Visitation would end up in the hands of a young Creed eager to meet the brains behind the record, mutually hitting it off and eagerly pulling Chrome’s embryonic sound to more belligerent aural zones.
Defining track: ‘My Time to Live’
Helios Creed’s best solo album: X-Rated Fairy Tales
Release Date: 1985 | Producer: Helios Creed | Label: Subterranean
By 1983, Edge’s trust fund had run dry, and he and Shine decamped to Paris to ignite Chrome’s European 2.0. While his solo records offered some intriguing nuggets, the string of Chrome albums under Edge’s sole direction shuffled along limply, never bottling the caustic magic that shrouded former glories.
Creed, however, was the true successor to the Chrome story, dropping a slew of incredible solo albums well into the 2000s. A prolific artist, it’s difficult to glean just one pick from his solo oeuvre—deserving a list of its own—but Creed’s debut following Chrome’s departure is an excellent place to start.
Mean, blistering, and panged with occasional flashes of askance elegance, X-Rated Fairy Tales avoids Chrome’s then leaden lack of direction for an unwavering fuzz rock cruise down the midnight highway teeming with mutilated cattle and killer hitchhikers. Keenly affixed with a cinematic visor, X-Ray Fairy Tales welds choppy punk kicks, sinewy grooves, and even a slice of inside-out haunted folk along its fraught drive.
Defining track: ‘The Descent’
Chrome’s key resurrection album: Feel It Like a Scientist
Release Date: 2014 | Producer: Helios Creed | Label: King Of Spades Records
By 1995, Edge had passed, and Creed was left to carry Chrome’s legacy. Creed released several Chrome LPs in tandem with his solo work across the ensuing years, but it took repeated stabs before a truly cohesive album would touch the quality of their definitive era.
2014’s Feel It Like a Scientist was a glorious bewitchment of everything palpably psychotropic and brain-clawing, authentically zapped from the zenith of Chrome’s heyday. Saturated in oodles of writhing synths, rippling rock arrangements, and a phantasmic chorus of twisted vocal effects, Creed had rustled up the most thrilling effort he’d attached his name to in years.
While it could have done with an edit, Feel It Like a Scientist nonetheless hurtles through its space-punk mayhem with a steady pace, nebulously careening through the myriad of gelatinously-fused genres and styles in pure Chrome fashion. Flying as close to his idols Hawkwind as he’s ever done, ‘Prophecy’ stands as one of Chrome’s, or indeed Creed’s, most cosmically majestic gems.
Defining track: ‘Prophecy’
Chrome’s most pivotal album: Half Machine Lip Moves
Release Date: March 1979 | Producer: Damon Edge | Label: Siren
With Creed officially on board, an attempt to score a psychedelic strip show yielded Chrome’s sophomore album, Alien Soundtracks, in 1977. While a gristly and more buzzingly paranoid affair, the pair were still dabbling in the world of lo-fi freak attacks loosely tethered to the studio and band set-up of their debut under Edge’s prior oversight.
Two years later, Chrome was overwhelmingly stripped down to the definitive duo, and armed with a clarified vision of what they were capable of when let loose in San Francisco’s Alamar studio. Sonically ripped and aurally ruptured, Half Machine Lip Moves maintains the fuzzy dirge but moves away from the lo-fi cut and paste editing for a heavingly multi-dimensional engulf of black hole squalor and post-junk sci-fi pulp.
Forever caught between two radio transmissions, Half Machine Lip Moves quivers and jerks around its new wave detritus, saturated with a queasy density of sampled jabber and TV pollution among the broken punk signal. Still sounding light years ahead to this day, Half Machine Lip Moves seizes the senses with an inventive ferocity, a disquieting cyborg glow of psychedelic grimace radiating with inhuman energy.
Defining track: ‘Mondo Anthem’
