The Chats – have announced their return to Ireland with a headline show at 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin

The Chats have just announced their return to Ireland with a headline show at 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin for Saturday, 9^thOctober 2027!

The Chats are back with their third album, Half Cut, out March 5, 2027. it’s more of the loud, fast and distinctly Australian rock and roll they’re known for. Slightly older, possibly wiser. Probably not.

“I never even imagined we’d make a single full-length album, let alone three. There were no grandiose plans – we did our first EP in high school, decided ‘this is fun’ and then just kept on doing it. So, if you’d asked me back when we started what I thought our third album would sound like, I’d have said we’d still sound the same; we’d still sound like us.”

Bassist/vocalist Eamon Sandwith is reflecting on the ten years since his group The Chats formed as teenaged punk-rock wastrels in Queensland. The decade since has been one of unexpected success for The Chats that has reached across the glove, resulting from some of the sharpest, funniest, most ridiculously addictive anthems this side of The Ramones. Solid-gold bad-attitude bangers like ‘Smoko’, ‘Pub Feed’, ‘Struck By Lightning’, ‘I’ve Been Drunk In Every Pub In Brisbane’, and dozens more.

Where The Chats find themselves now is a very different place from when they started out,and the distance between those two locations tells some of the story behind their brilliant third album, Half Cut. But don’t get it twisted: Half Cut might be the most focused, muscular, tune-drenched and accessible record The Chats have yet committed to tape, but it very much embodies everything the 16-year-old Sandwith envisaged for their third album: it still sounds utterly, absolutely and unabashedly like The Chats, Sandwith’s bratty, authentic voice intact.

Half Cut breaks four years’ silence since the group’s second album, 2022’s Get Fucked. That album marked the debut for new guitarist Josh Hardy, who’s also a member of Melbourne punk supergroup Loose Lips, and plays alongside Sandwith in The Unknowns, and who slotted in perfectly alongside Sandwith and the group’s founding drummer (and moonlighting skateboard wunderkind) Matt Boggis. That the trio spent much of that interim period touring tirelessly across the globe explains the taut, in-the-pocket, tour-drilled sound of their performances on the new album. The Chats recorded Half Cut in a week of sessions in Santa Ana, California, sandwiched between a US jaunt in the company of The Hives and their triumphant performance at this year’s Coachella festival.

“I was apprehensive over that whole ‘going to California to record your new album’ thing,” Sandwith admits, “so we flew in our friend, Jay Whalley, to produce.” Frontman of legendary and notorious Sydney punk-rockers Frenzal Rhomb, Whalley was “a cool guy who we’ve been mates with for a long time. It was important for us to not be working with some LA industry guy who was going to try and change the sound of the band.”

Whalley ensured Half Cut preserved the soul and the spirit of The Chats, but the album also marks a full-spectrum upgrade in the group’s sound. Gone is the beguilingly amateurish chug of their early EPs, in its place a bold, punk-informed rock’n’roll that does perfect justice to these sky-high hooks and ferociously catchy riffs: a stadium-satisfying noise that befits a band who once cut a single in worshipful tribute to AC/DC, while never losing sight of their punk roots and reverence for The Ramones. There’s a discipline and concision to their playing here, honed by months of incessant touring, that drives every single one of these killer tracks all the way home, powered by Boggis’s unrelenting pummel and Hardy’s adrenalin-rushing fretboard runs.

But those four years on the road also explain the sea-change signalled by Half Cut. The lyrics are still hilarious, time having only sharpened Sandwith’s gifts as a storyteller of enviable wit and economy. But there’s a new sophistication at play here, too, new themes being explored. “I hesitate to use the word ‘mature’ to describe Half Cut, but it probably is, a bit,” Sandwith says, of a batch of songs that take a more nuanced approach than before. “I put in more effort with the lyrics than on the other records. This time around, I felt like I could switch it up, do it a bit better.”

THE CHATS

HALF CUT ’27 TOUR

Plus Special Guests

Saturday, 9^th October 2027

3Olympia Theatre, Dublin

Tickets €28.00 / €34.65 (Inc booking fees and venue restoration fee) on sale Monday, 2^nd November 2026 at 9am from Ticketmaster.ie. Bookings subject To 12.5% Service Charge Per Ticket (Max €10.50)