The Chats might have the least aspirational origin story in music: they began out messing around together in a friend’s “bong shed” (where their chosen genre descriptor, “shed-rock”, was born) in a surf town on Queensland’s east coast.
Influenced by 1977 punks like the Buzzcocks and Wire as much as they were Australian outfits Cosmic Psychos and Frenzal Rhomb, the trio of high school friends – Eamon Sandwith, Josh Price and Matt Boggis – started writing their own material: hasty, crude and sparse punk songs with lyrics that channelled what they knew. Being bored in a small town. Bristling against authority. Scraping together spare change for bus fares, cheap beer and pub dinners.
The first time they shared a song was for their Catholic high school’s music class: called Mum Stole My Darts, it still has pride of place in their live shows.
With a strawberry-blonde mullet and a pair of reflective, wraparound “speed-dealer” sunglasses near-permanently attached to his face, Sandwith – the bassist and vocalist – is the most recognisable of the three. He was working as a “checkout chick” at a supermarket before the band took off, a fact that affirms the Chats’ working class image and demonstrates the leap they’ve taken from bumming cigarettes in their hometown to booking headline shows around the world – including at the now-postponed Coachella.
The band’s image could read as bogan caricature or Muriel’s Wedding cosplay: sunburnt barflies wearing thongs and hurling obscenities at any target (one another, passers-by, politicians on the news) with the kind of drawl that invites “Crikey!”-filled impersonations from overseas audiences.
In fact, this image is a product of where they’re from but also what they value: the songs sound tight and the live shows look great, so who cares about the rest?
The ratbag attitude runs deep. Their debut record, High Risk Behaviour – out this Friday, 27 March – is named for a police infringement issued to drummer Boggis for skateboarding in public, and it features a song about how Sandwith’s haircut got him refused entry to a nightclub. He thought the band would end when high school did, but live gigs at parties and local venues gave way to two EPs – a self-titled debut in 2016 and Get This in Ya the following year – and a following that grew exponentially after the video for their single Smoko was uploaded on the Facebook page for a surfwear store and went viral overnight. “They just ripped the full clip and put it up for themselves,” Sandwith protests now. “They didn’t tag us or anything!”
It wasn’t a setback: the Chats began touring in earnest, supporting their heroes the Cosmic Psychos and joining the national Laneway festival run. A rumoured bidding war for their debut record was nullified when they decided to release High Risk Behaviour on Bargain Bin Records, an imprint they started to release their own and their friends’ music. The “where are they now” page on their Catholic high school’s website boasts them among a handful of notable alumnae, writing that the 2016 graduates’ music “may not be everyone’s cup of tea, [but] they have certainly made an impact”.
The Chats are designed to provoke a reaction. In Australia, it’s a mix of familiar affection and an eye-roll; but internationally – especially in the UK and Europe – they fill bigger rooms and are seen as equal parts punk throwback and novelty. “Australians seem kind of exotic,” Sandwith says, “and our music is very heavy Australiana.”
They’ve conjured an impressive fanbase: Dave Grohl showed the Smoko video to Josh Homme, who raved about them to Zane Lowe on Beats 1 and invited the band to open for Queens of the Stone Age on their Australian tour. “When we met Iggy Pop he was like, what’s a dart? What’s a smoko?” Sandwith laughs. (A cigarette and a cigarette break, respectively.) Alt-R’n’B artist Miguel posted a video of him trying to approximate the band’s accent; Idles and Shame have welcomed them into the fold.
The image of Australiana they capture, though, is less The Castle and more Wake in Fright and meme site Brown Cardigan – evinced in their latest film clip, which features the “succulent Chinese meal” guy from an extremely viral video.
Stories of drinking to take their minds off stifling heat and crippling boredom proliferate in their record; a character called “Billy Backwash” waits for the bottle shop to open and claims he can’t be racist if he abuses everyone equally. The beer-soaked, sun-stroked reality of the larrikin steps into frame in 4573, a brilliant, blistering jam that paints a familiar scene: a man, four longneck lagers in, screaming his head off from the sidelines at a local kids’ football game. “He’s just like all the other dads,” the lyrics say, before the repeated chorus of the band’s Coolum Beach postcode – “4573! 4573!” – tinges local pride with something more sinister.
“I think 4573 shows a bit of a darker side about living in a regional town,” Sandwith says. “It’s not so much a celebration, [but] ’cause of that song everyone back home was like, ‘Yeah, [you’re] putting us on the map!’”
That same intention – of tucking thoughtful ideas about the failings of society and the the trap of masculinity beneath quick and dirty couplets – was what motivated Sandwith to pick up his guitar on Christmas Eve, when enormous swathes of Australia were engulfed in bushfires and the country’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, begrudgingly returned from a holiday in Hawaii to address the crisis.
“Merry fuckin’ Christmas, this one’s called ‘I Hope Scott’s House Burns Down’,” Sandwith says, before blasting into the acoustic song for Instagram.
“[I thought] it’d be funny if it, like, sounded, like, real cute and folky … rather than it sounding, like, real dirty.”
The song – and Sandwith’s expression, which flits from the closed eyes of a wistful folk singer to clenched-teeth resentment – manages to capture the furious disappointment of Australians who spent the summer watching their country burn and waiting for a leader to respond.
Sandwith “pumped it out in a day”, he says. At the time of our interview in early February, it has more than 1.9 million views on Facebook and Instagram. “I didn’t expect it to go as nuts as it did,” he says. “It got fucking spread like wildfire.” He catches the turn of phrase a moment too late, shakes his head and offers a dry laugh. “Fuck, sorry. Dark.”
The song covers an impressive amount of ground, from the prime minister’s religious discrimination bill and support of Hillsong to an internet conspiracy theory involving McDonald’s and the regional town of Engadine. The response was split: fans loved it, but the band “copped a bit of shit”. Ted O’Brien, the local conservative member for the electorate where the Chats grew up, railed against them on the news, saying: “It says a lot more of the person who composed the song than it does about the prime minister.”
“We’ve grown up knowing him as, like, ‘that rightwing prick on the Sunshine Coast’,” Sandwith says now. “To see him on the news talking about us, that was so gold. I loved it. That was [my] favourite thing about it.”
Some grim but essential context is that Queensland essentially handed Morrison power, with 25 of the state’s 30 seats voting for the conservative government in the 2019 election.
“Because we have, like, this look and we’re Queenslanders and we talk a certain way, people just think that we’re, like, racists and whatever. It’s fucking stupid. It’s got nothing to do with where you were brought up, it’s how you were brought up.”
Sandwith describes himself as “staunch left” and says he engages in politics more readily than his bandmates. He is aware that the band’s image and local pride attract fans who don’t share his views – the ones who want to chant choruses about tinnies and ciggies – but told them not to “get into politics” after the video’s release.
Not talking about politics is in itself a political choice, I point out. “Exactly!” he agrees. “It’s complacent. It’s real selfish to say that too, like: ‘Just do what I want you to do and don’t think for yourself’. If I’m going to stand by and do nothing, then I’m following the problem.”
• The Chats’ debut album, High Risk Behaviour, is out on Friday 27 March
