With Oasis reuniting for a stadium tour and the jittery, post-millennial indie rock of Interpol and Editors making a comeback, it’s fitting that the Chameleons – the Manchester group to whom all these groups, as well as artists like Billy Corgan, owe a debt of influence – would also be back in action.
The Chameleons emerged in 1981 as part of the U.K.’s post-punk scene, arriving between the demise of Joy Division and the rise of New Order and the Smiths.
The group fused late-’70s punk with prog and new wave, creating an intoxicating, atmospheric guitar-pop sound that foreshadowed shoegaze and “Madchester” bands like the Charlatans.
“When we started, Reg [Smithies] wasn't using any effects – it was just what came through the amp, like vibrato and things like that,” says frontman and bassist Mark Burgess.
“Once Dave [Fielding] got his Roland Space Echo, it changed the vibe of what we were doing. And it kind of just developed from that and a lot of marijuana.”
On Where Are You?, the title track of the band’s 2024 comeback EP, Smithies and Stephen Rice, who joined in 2021 in place of Fielding, dialed the amps to 11 with a rawer guitar tone to complement Burgess’s ethereal vocals.
While the sound is less effects-laden than their older material, the guitars are no less biting on their first new music in two decades.
“I didn’t want us to start trying to emulate who we were 20, 30 years ago for the sake of appeasing tradition,” Burgess says. “I wanted it to reflect who we are now. And I think it does that.”
The Chameleons have been busy playing on both sides of the Atlantic since reuniting in 2021. Coinciding with the band’s 2024 tour, during which they played the 1986 fan-fave album Strange Times in full, they released the Tomorrow Remember Yesterday EP, featuring new recordings of some of the band’s earliest songs.
Burgess, Smithies, Rice and co are currently working on Arctic Moon, their official follow-up to 2001’s Why Call It Anything.
“I’ve come from the point of view of saying to [Smithies and Rice], ‘I’ve got this song and I know there’s a great song in there, but I don’t really know how to execute it,’ because it doesn’t feel like a Chameleons song to me,” he says.
“And each of them have suggested different directions to take it, and we’ve ended up taking the Chameleons forward.”
- Where Are You? is out now via Metropolis.
