Ty Segall

Working across solo releases and an array of bands plus side projects, Ty Segall has issued dozens of albums that shaped and expanded the boundaries of garage punk for his era. Far from limiting himself to any single approach or texture, he has explored hard rock, folk-rock, and heavy metal, incorporated instruments from synthesizers to xylophones, and issued fully acoustic solo sets. On different projects he can come across as abrasive, as on 2016's Emotional Mugger, or polished, as on 2013's Sleeper, while delivering both tight one-man-band statements such as 2009's Lemons and expansive, wide-ranging efforts with multiple partners such as 2018's Freedom's Goblin. He remains equally gripping when dialing down the distortion and foregrounding synths on 2021's Harmonizer, scoring a film in classic orchestral fashion on 2022's Whirlybird, or working alone at home on 2022's subdued Hello, Hi and the 2024 all-percussion set Love Rudiments. Across every sonic context, his sturdy melodic structures, restless creativity, and the propulsive energy of his songs and shows remain the steady threads running through his constantly shifting catalog.

Ty Segall first drew widespread notice as lead singer of the Orange County, California garage-rock revival group the Epsilons. With them he pursued a rawer, more insolent version of Strokes/Vines/White Stripes-style rock while occasionally reaching further back in time. After that group disbanded he launched a solo career and began flooding the market with lo-fi recordings, starting with a self-titled 2008 album on Castle Face. On the follow-up Lemons he adopted a more classic approach, meticulously replicating 1960s guitar sounds and coating the tracks in vintage reverb. The driving results evoked early garage pioneers such as the Sonics and the Standells along with proto-punks the Stooges and home-recording folk forebear Alexander "Skip" Spence. He followed with Melted in 2010.

The year 2011 proved especially active, bringing the two albums Live in Aisle Five and Goodbye Bread plus the T. Rex covers EP Ty-Rex. Goodbye Bread signaled a move toward Segall's gentler inclinations, suggesting a John Lennon-inflected brand of quieter, more reflective singer/songwriter material. In 2012 he teamed with Strange Boys offshoot White Fence for Hair. That mini-album blended Segall's Beatles-drenched pop hooks and production with White Fence's Syd Barrett-tinged, acid-warped garage aesthetic. Two additional Segall albums appeared that same year: June's Slaughterhouse, credited to the Ty Segall Band and issued on In the Red, and October's Twins, the fully solo successor to Goodbye Bread released on Drag City.

His visibility increased, and 2013 opened with several reissues of earlier work, among them the 2009 collaboration with Mikal Cronin titled Reverse Shark Tank and the long-unavailable 2008 debut by his earlier garage trio the Traditional Fools. Also in 2013 Segall put out the first album by his side project Fuzz, on which he played drums instead of guitar. That year he further demonstrated a fresh direction by cutting an acoustic-ballad collection he called Sleeper. Refusing to settle, he returned to the studio for the 17-track Manipulator, issued by Drag City in August 2014. A Ty Segall Band concert recorded at the San Francisco venue the Rickshaw Stop appeared in February 2015 as part of Castle Face's Live in San Francisco series. Another live document capturing his 2013 Pickathon Festival set came out in May 2015 as a split album with garage/psych outfit King Tuff, who performed at the same event. The year 2015 also brought the second Fuzz album and an expanded reissue of the Ty-Rex EP.

Segall maintained his customary relentless schedule the following year, issuing Emotional Mugger in January and then touring behind it heavily. He also formed Gøggs alongside Fuzz's Charles Moothart and Chris Shaw of Ex-Cult; the trio released a self-titled album in July. The next Segall album, a self-titled set recorded at Steve Albini's studio and featuring a full band that included longtime associate Mikal Cronin plus the Cairo Gang's Emmett Kelly on guitar and vocals, arrived on Drag City in early 2017. Well received, the record climbed to number ten on Billboard's Top Independent Albums chart. In early 2018 the prolific artist delivered Freedom's Goblin, a 19-song album that reunited him with Albini, Cronin, and Kelly while broadening his palette through a horn section; a few months later he released Joy, a collaboration with longtime associate White Fence consisting of skewed psych-rock tracks. In October 2018 he issued Fudge Sandwich, offering his distinctive interpretations of 11 cover songs drawn from artists ranging from Funkadelic to the Grateful Dead. That same month he also released the low-key cassette-only Orange Rainbow, pressed in a limited run of 55 copies sold exclusively at a Los Angeles gallery exhibition of his visual art. Two live performances in Los Angeles from the Freedom's Goblin tour, captured by Steve Albini in January 2018, yielded the March 2019 album Deforming Lobes credited to Ty Segall & Freedom Band.

After exploring his rock-oriented side across most of his 2018 releases, Segall shifted course with First Taste, issued in August 2019 and more overtly shaped by vintage pop and folk-rock textures. Confined at home in 2020, he used the time to record an EP of Harry Nilsson songs released in March under the title Segall Smeagol. He also devoted time to sessions with his regular circle of collaborators (Cronin, Kelly, Moothart, and keyboardist Ben Boye), largely working in isolation. Denée Segall of Lamps participated as well, writing and singing on two tracks. The resulting Harmonizer, co-produced by Cooper Crain of Bitchin Bajas, marked the first album tracked at Segall's newly built Harmonizer Studios; the cleanest and most synth-focused entry in his discography, it appeared on Drag City in August 2021.

His debut soundtrack album, Whirlybird, surfaced in early 2022; the documentary, which follows helicopter-borne reporters chasing stories in the 1980s and 1990s, prompted Segall to pursue a less guitar-driven palette dominated by keyboards, percussion, and occasional strings. After the exploratory spirit of Whirlybird, 2022's Hello, Hi represented a return to a more straightforward method, with Segall performing every instrument and vocal himself, relying primarily on acoustic guitars and stacked harmonies. Despite his own heavy workload he still found opportunities to support admired peers: he supplied instrumental contributions to albums by Shannon Lay (2021's Geist) and Bonnie "Prince" Billy & Bill Callahan (2022's Blind Date Party), produced recordings for Grave Flowers Bongo Band (2021's Strength of Spring) and SASAMI (2022's Squeeze), and joined Cory Hanson for the 2021 single "She's a Beam" b/w "Milk Bird Flyer." Although his output usually runs nonstop, the absence of a new album in 2023 surprised some observers, even as an intimate July 2022 live performance with Emmett Kelly yielded the EP Live at Worship and Segall produced and engineered Flat Worms' 2023 album Witness Marks. He resumed activity with the January 2024 release of Three Bells, a collection of psychedelic-tinged folk-rock songs bolstered by electric-guitar outbursts; recorded at Harmonizer Studio with Segall handling most instrumentation himself, it was followed in August 2024 by Love Rudiments, an entirely percussion-based album on which he charts the arc of a relationship using drum kit, synth drums, tympani, woodblocks, tambourine, xylophone, and numerous additional percussion instruments.