The Chats will release their third album, Half Cut, on March 5 through Virgin Music Group. The Australian band has shared the lead single and video, "Off It," the opening track on the record.
"Off It" runs short and lands between punk and power pop, a clipped guitar figure carrying a lyric that leans on irritation. Singer Eamon Sandwith framed the album as a step sideways from the band's earlier writing. "Half Cut is a fun rock and roll record, but it's maybe a little more open than stuff we've written in the past," he said. "I definitely hesitate to use the word 'mature,' but it's a bit of a progression, I'd say."
The hesitation is the interesting part. Get Fucked, from 2022, took the Sunshine Coast trio around the world on the back of songs built for speed and volume, and the touring that followed was long enough to change how a band hears its own material. A record that opens with a song called "Off It," on an album titled after the state of being several drinks past good judgment, is not a band reaching for respectability. Sandwith's "more open" points somewhere else: arrangements with room in them, songs allowed to breathe before the next burst.
The Chats have built a reputation on the physical fact of a room, and ROMBO has followed them through it, including their set at Riot Fest 2026, where the band's pub-rock attack held against a weekend of mud and cancellations. The Australian dates announced alongside the album run from November 13 in Brisbane to December 13 in Perth, seventeen shows that will put the new songs in front of the audiences who shaped them. More on the band sits in ROMBO's Chats coverage.
On "Off It," the riff and the vocal trade the same few beats, and the pleasure is in how quickly the song decides it has said enough. That terseness has been the band's default; here it sounds like a choice. Half Cut will show whether the choice extends to the other eleven tracks, or whether "Off It" is the exception that proves the rule.
