A Guide to Chrome’s Dark, Dense Discography
I was pretty excited to see Chrome featured on Bandcamp Daily. I initially found Chrome in my mid-teens through the “New Age” video (probably seen via Night Flight). I was always on the hunt for weird shit™ to help me escape the confines of life in Central Louisiana, and “New Age” fit the bill. The song — and Chrome’s output at the time — was a remarkable portent. It signaled many things on the horizon, not just sonically but culturally as well. Check the cyberpunk current running through the “New Age” video, which also pays homage to A Clockwork Orange and THX 1138.
Around the same time that I discovered Chrome, I also encountered Cabaret Voltaire’s Red Mecca. That’s not too far off of a connection — Chrome were, in a way, the American Cabaret Voltaire when one looks at their respective experiments recorded in the late ‘70s and early ’80s. And as Red Mecca is accepted as the sound of a dark reflection on England’s Thatcher years, Chrome’s 1980 album Red Exposure (alphabetically aligned!) could be seen as a similar reaction to the national mood that brought the US into the Reagan era.
And just listen to Cabaret Voltaire’s “Landslide,” taken off Red Mecca. My favorite DJ in the world will be the one who mixes this with “New Age” in the middle of a packed-out ’80s night somewhere.
https://memora8ilia.com/index.php/2022/07/21/a-guide-to-chromes-dark-dense-discography/