The video for Ty Segall’s recent single, “Eggman,” is just a static shot of Segall, sitting at a table, eating hard-boiled eggs for four minutes straight. Around the time Segall scarfs down his eighth egg, he starts showing visible signs of fatigue, a shift reflected in the music: What starts out sounding like a pissed-off John Lennon ad-libbing a sequel to “I Am the Walrus” with Plastic Ono Band devolves into a queasy, uncomfortable dirge that feels like a blocked digestive system. By the time the song disintegrates into a murky pool of distortion, you’ll never want to eat another egg again. But Segall and wife/co-director Denée’s “Eggman” video is more than just a high-concept visualization. It’s also a spot-on advertisement for Segall’s own approach to classic-rock revisionism: He takes something that’s supposed to be a source of comfort and makes it seem kinda disgusting. And with his 15th studio album, Three Bells, he delivers some of his most immaculately constructed grotesquerie to date.
While no two Ty Segall albums are totally alike, his first decade’s worth of records at least felt like they were positioned along the same psych/punk spectrum. But since dropping his definitive double-album statement, Freedom’s Goblin, in 2018, Segall has entered an exploratory phase not unlike Neil Young’s notorious 1980s period, approaching each record as a premeditated genre exercise to further dismantle his long-standing reputation as the impulsive garage rocker who can bash out three albums before breakfast. There was the anti-guitar exotica of First Taste, the synth-shocked treatments of Harmonizer, the no-frills folk of “Hello, Hi”—all illuminating additions to his multifaceted discography, but also insular, low-stakes affairs from an artist who didn’t seem all that interested in capitalizing on the momentum that Freedom’s Goblin generated. With Three Bells, however, Segall once again gives himself license to embrace randomness and surrender to sprawl. More than a status update on Segall’s ever-changing whims, it’s an ambitious, uncanny, joyously unpredictable album that invites you to get lost within its house-of-mirrors design.
Three Bells’ vitality is all the more remarkable considering how easy it is to mistake it for the sort of temperate album a once-unruly rocker inevitably makes as they approach middle age. This is a record that relies on acoustic guitar as much as electric. There’s another song about his dog that’s way more chill than the last one. And when he’s not singing about life at home, he’s dropping copious references to bells and vibrations and mirrors and metaphysics, suggesting the Ty Segall of 2024 is more likely found in an occult bookshop than a basement dive. But Segall avoids slipping into the dad-rock zone because he’s still a mischievous punk at heart. He’s not pretending to be the Beatles in ’68 or Led Zeppelin in ’70—he’s imagining the music they’d make today if they were California surfer bums and skate rats just like him: “I Hear” is Bowie’s “Fashion” on a DIY budget, its disco-club bounce replaced by a grimy acoustic groove and the Frippian guitar squeals pushed into the red; “Wait” starts off on Side 1 on The White Album and ends up on Side 2 of Master of Reality.
But Three Bells isn’t just a cruise through Segall’s record collection. The album opens with two multi-sectional prog-folk epics—“The Bell” and “Void”—that apply the battle plan of his madcap 2017 medley “Warm Hands (Freedom Returned)” to more mystical realms, dialing up the delirium with each new melodic fragment and sudden tempo shift. This is rock’n’roll as an M.C. Escher painting—a balance of innovative engineering and disorienting up-is-down logic. But for all their twists and turns, “The Bell” and “Void” clearly lay out the thematic terrain that Segall explores throughout Three Bells: the eternal tension between seeking inner peace while buckling under external pressures. On the rustic power-pop reverie “My Room,” he admits: “Out there, I’m too dizzy/I’d rather be inside my room,” but as the song’s electric-guitar hooks get sharper, nastier, and more intrusive, he seems to acknowledge the impossibility of fully tuning out.
Segall’s prescription for sanity is to draw strength from the ones he loves: his pets, yes, but most notably his wife. On Three Bells, the Lennon influence is as much matrimonial as musical: While Denée has turned up in Segall’s work before (including in their robo-punk project the C.I.A.), with this record, she becomes the muse and creative co-conspirator who’s completely enmeshed in his art, and the agent provocateur pushing it to new degrees of raw carnality. As singer and lyricist, she delivers her idea of a love song with “Move,” a brash proto-metal boogie in which she reveals the couple’s secret to stress relief: “When we are sideways/I disconnect the phone/It’s different in the morning/When we’re alone.”
By contrast, Segall addresses his better half with pure reverence. “To You” begins as a portrait of touring-induced homesickness colored by manic folk-punk strums and ping-ponging synths, but when he declares, “I’m coming back to you,” the song melts into a swooning, faux-symphonic serenade. And toward the end of this long, labyrinthine album, Segall offers up Three Bells’ climactic set piece, “Denée,” whose title constitutes its lone lyric. But while it initially sounds as though Segall is laying down an ad-hoc placeholder vocal, he keeps repeating her name until it blossoms into a devotional mantra, which bursts open into an extended cosmic-jazz jam that’s unlike anything else in his bottomless canon. It may not be an outwardly sentimental “Oh Yoko!”-style serenade, but “Denée” is no less direct a paean to the transcendental power of a love that leaves you at a loss for words.
