Superb

“We decided that what we may have neglected is spontaneity and lightness,” Surprise Chef guitarist Lachlan Stuckey tells Apple Music about the jazz-funk-soul instrumental group’s approach to their fourth album. “We wanted to make a concerted effort of being more spontaneous,” he says—a marked change from their typically meticulous approach of planning every minute detail. For a band that records live to tape, that meant not doing 40 takes of each song until it was perfect, but focusing instead on capturing the right energy. Agonizing over every little decision was also out the window. “Any time we’d catch ourselves debating the merits of an idea, we’d stop and go, what feels superb? So when we got to the end of the record and were like, what’s the album called, it just felt most appropriate to identify the record as such.” Also important to shaping the LP was a comment from Danny Akalepse, co-owner of Surprise Chef’s record label, Big Crown Records. “He’d always lamented that we don’t make music he can play when he’s DJing at a party, so we were like, all right, here it is,” says Stuckey. While “fundamental” influences such as The J.B.’s, David Axelrod, Isaac Hayes, and El Michels Affair are still in play, the Melbourne group also leaned into early-2000s R&B and hip-hop, posing the question, “What would it sound like if we filtered The Neptunes, Just Blaze, and DJ Premier through what we do?” Here, Stuckey takes Apple Music through *Superb*, track by track. **“Sleep Dreams”** “A lot of the titles tend to come from in-jokes. Hudson \[Whitlock, percussion\] thought the expression ‘sweet dreams’ was ‘sleep dreams.’ So it’s been a bit of a running joke in the band that when we’re on tour, at the end of the night everyone says, ‘Sleep dreams.’ That applied to this song because of the dreamy lullaby kind of atmosphere that Hudson was going for when he wrote it.” **“Bully Ball”** “Bully ball is a framework of basketball that is often seen in ’80s and ’90s NBA stuff; it represents the physical style of play that’s more or less been phased out. Initially the working title was ‘Bank Breaker,’ and whilst we’re really influenced by ’60s and ’70s soundtracks and blaxploitation stuff, we don’t want our music to be necessarily placed in that kind of category, and we felt the title ‘Bank Breaker’ was a little too car-chase funk for our liking. We felt like the tough nature of this tune could be considered as emblematic for this specific style of basketball play.” **“Body Slam”** “Again, really just trying to lean into those sensibilities of hip-hop from the late ’90s—really tough drums and an aggressive bassline. That is something we really dig from that era, those hip-hop beats that are raw and aggressive. So that was our opportunity to include that particular flavor.” **“Consulate Case”** “We played in Delhi a couple of weeks before we started recording. And we bought a lot of Bollywood records when we were there, all these killer records from the ’70s and ’80s. We incorporated a lot of those influences into the tune—the kind of out-of-control synthesizer stuff and the funky drums.” **“Dangerous”** “We wanted to incorporate a lot of the sensibilities of Barry White’s arranging on that song. Barry White had some really interesting conventions that he applied when he was producing Love Unlimited and Tom Brock and some of the records he made in the ’70s. And we love those records. Big Barry White fans.” **“Websites”** “We have this expression, ‘the bone zone,’ which is the mental state you get into after many hours in the studio and it’s late at night. You become a little bit uninhibited, almost disconnected from the music because you’re so exhausted or wired. We saved this song specifically for that moment. We turned the lights off, lit some candles, and recorded this weird dedication to the humble website. Websites don’t get the love and respect they deserve anymore.” **“Fare Evader”** “We wrote that when we all swapped instruments; it was the kind of thing we were open to doing moving into this record to create a different energy. It was the first song we wrote for *Superb* and I think it set the blueprint in a way. We jammed out this little idea and went, great, cool, done. We’re not going to play this anymore until the day we record it. We’re not going to overthink it. So I think ‘Fare Evader’ set us on the track of how we were going to approach the rest of the material.” **“Tag Dag”** “A tag dag is what you call someone when the tag of their T-shirt is sticking out. Jethro \[Curtin, keys\] and I collect a lot of independent, private press, low budget soul and disco music from the ’70s and early ’80s. The kind of music where someone’s trying to make a record that sounds like Chic but they don’t really have the budget or personnel to make that happen, so they try and make something that ends up completely different, like on a whole different bent. That was the kind of influence we were trying to incorporate with ‘Tag Dag.’” **“Plumb Tuckered”** “This came from the mind of Andrew Congues, our drummer. Often his demos have lots of ideas in them, lots of different layers, and a lot of the layers don’t really make sense to me, but there’s three or four things going on that are awesome. So we took his demo and got rid of a bunch of stuff and zoomed in on certain things. He was approaching that from a really Neptunes, Timbaland, Just Blaze kind of framework, bumpin’ early-2000s hip-hop style.” **“Dreamer’s Disease”** “That was a tune that Carl \[Lindeberg\] our bass player brought in. We ended up pushing it in a little bit more of this kind of dreamy soul direction. That was the title he had for it, and I think that refers to the condition of being a dreamer; having that disease of always thinking about this and that and the other. I reckon Carl’s got dreamer’s disease, he’s always thinking out loud about this or that.” **“Slippery Dip”** “This was another one trying to lean into those sensibilities of the ’70s independent soul-funk 45s that Jethro and I collect. We did the take and Jethro just fully improvised the outro on the clav, and then the band came in and started playing. We decided that it needed claps. I think it was our drummer that \[said\], ‘Instead of everybody standing around a mic and clapping we should all high-five each other.’ So we all stood around the microphone in a circle and had to work out how to high-five the person next to you in time without looking at them.”