Ty Segall – Three Bells

The discography of garage-rock’s sickeningly prolific High Goblin, Ty Segall, is as vast and indomitable as anybody else skronking today. Contained within are delicate finger-pickin’ folk records, monolithic chunks of stoner metal, and demonic, fuzzy takes on garage rock. Perhaps the best recent jumping off point into his oeuvre, Three Bells is Segall’s 2024 offering, an album that fuses winding passages of meditative acoustic guitar with boisterous Sabbath riffs, and some of his most focused songwriting to date.

A decade and a half on from his debut, Segall manages to effectively distill his own essence perfectly across Three Bells, the multi-instrumentalist remains enigmatic after all this time. He’s willing to push the boat out every now and again, like on the lysergic jazz-fusion cut ‘Denee’, fried krautrock number ‘To You’ or winding freak folk cut ‘Void’, but the backbone of the album lies well within Ty’s tilted garage rock realm.

Taking cues from 2022’s Hi Hello, Segall has his acoustic guitar at the ready for much of this album, and its sound on the whole is characterised by Segall meandering between acoustic mystère and electric devilry – the mangling of Marc Bolan’s Tyrannosaurus Rex and T. Rex, no doubt Segall’s key influence here. ‘Wait’ is the archetype of this, a dainty fingerpicked intro gives way to a cosmos of psychotropic riffs and elven shredding.

At around an hour’s runtime, Three Bells is a long record, but each track yields something new. Apt, then; for as Ty Segall approaches elder statesman status, he too shows no signs of stagnating.