With 2023’s Taken By Force, Melbourne punks CIVIC seemed to have achieved their goal: channeling the sound and fury of pioneers Radio Birdman, with a record produced by that band’s frontman. Rather than coast on that success, Chrome Dipped (out May 30) finds CIVIC starting from scratch.
This record feels like a rebuke to comfort. Per frontman Jim McCullough: “One of the main objectives for this album was to make a drastic turn in our sound. Break the mold, melt the steel.” Where Taken By Force was all about muscular riffs and livewire energy, Chrome Dipped embraces something even more intense.
Gone is the straight-ahead, three-chord fury that defined their earlier work. These songs sound like they’re being played through blown-out speakers in a grimy, half-lit rock and roll bar. Synths creep into the mix on the opening track—an almost heretical move for a band that built its reputation on the purity of classic punk—and off-kilter rhythms and shadowy textures twist and stretch their sound.
The album is full of uncertain situations and characters on the edge. “Gulls Way” has a desert-like loneliness that shares some DNA with Taken By Force’s “Trick of the Light”, while “Starting All the Dogs Off” spins a mythic Road Warrior-esque tale. Even the fierce, barn-burning moments like “Poison” (featuring what I think is the only guitar solo on the record) and “The Hogg” are cut with a sense of vulnerability and raw emotion, refusing to simply lean on volume alone.
There’s a deliberate chaos here that’s thrilling and unexpected. Songs like “Fragrant Rice” and “Kingdom Come” twist away from punk orthodoxy, moving into new wave or lo-fi psychedelia territory. The closer, “Swing of the Noose,” ends the record on a note of incendiary revenge, a final burst of catharsis that wants to exorcise demons while starting a riot.
The band wrote and recorded Chrome Dipped in a deliberate act of reinvention, working with producer Kirin J. Callinan and engineer Chris Townend in Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art. McCullough lost his mother during the writing of this record, and that sense of grief and dislocation is palpable here. There’s a darkness, but also a kind of unsteady beauty.
Chrome Dipped may not be CIVIC’s final form—it’s another evolution, another testament to the band’s refusal to rest on their laurels. If Taken By Force was about reaching for the heights of punk rock glory, Chrome Dipped is about what happens when you tear that down and start from the molten core. It’s an album of risk and reward, of violent reinvention and new possibilities. With it, CIVIC sounds more vital than ever.
