Bio : Surprise Chef

Australia’s premier instrumental ensemble Surprise Chef have long been drawn to the music of Italian Giallo cinema. Italy, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, produced a rich array of low-budget genre films that found cult audiences over time. Today, many of these bloody giallo flicks, hard-nosed poliziotteschi capers, and dreamy erotic dramas, are rightfully regarded as works of genius. Constrained by limited finances, their beloved musical scores conjure entire worlds from small combos of musicians, rather than full orchestras. It’s this quality—the creative opportunities made possible by constraint—that excited them.

For nearly a decade, the members of Surprise Chef have made music, frequently while living together, that synthesizes classic American funk and R&B to create something entirely their own. It’s compositionally precise yet always inviting, giving you the feel of a well-worn Stax sound bed, while gesturing beyond that too. 

The group’s new album, Frogs in a Pond, is more tightly conceived than any of their previous work. In fact, the guys will readily explain that an album this rigorous would’ve been impossible any earlier in their career. Surprise Chef is known for its lively, lovingly made funk compositions, but that’s just one lane the group operates in. Cerebral and deep, Frogs in a Pond is the culmination of the band’s brainiest endeavors, both as skilled musicians and as a close-knit group of friends who have grown up together.

Recorded over nine days and produced by their regular producer and engineer, Henry Jenkins, the album was born from a spirited series of planning sessions, arming them with a strong framework that would provide a kind of bible in the studio for what was and wasn’t permissible, musically. 

“On other Surprise Chef records, we would start writing the music and the shape of the album would become apparent while writing the tunes,” explained Lachlan Stuckey, who plays electric guitar. “With this record, we did a lot of debating, discussing, and head-wrecking on exactly what kind of record we wanted to make beforehand.” 

Instruments were a primary order of business. If they were going to color within specific lines, Stuckey said, “the first big set to draw was what the instrumentation would be.” They arrived at drum kit, bass guitar, electric guitar, nylon string acoustic guitar, piano, clavinet, ARP odyssey synth, vibraphone, and tuned wooden blocks. This minimal palette mirrored the scores of the giallo films, from composers like Piero Piccioni and Piero Umiliani, that they listened to, but didn’t watch (for the most part).

From the blocks emerged the rhythmic theme that repeats on the album, across instruments and songs. These thematic developments are like the introductions of characters in a movie—they pop up in various guises throughout the record’s runtime, building, returning, recapitulating.

As on previous albums, they recorded on eight-track tape with limited overdubbing to let the songs exist as much as possible as live performances. As Stuckey put it, this “imbues the record with a true sense of what we sounded like playing together at the time of documentation.”

The opener “Inside Voice,” which begins as stark notes on the piano before blossoming open, coaxes the listener inside, and then “Outside Voice” acquaints you with the rest of the album’s colors. Slinky bass; persistent, almost itchy guitar playing; and moody vibraphone that builds for more than two minutes before a bright flute joins the mix (played by Grammy-winner Leon Michels). There’s drama, poignancy, and wonder—all contained with the lines laid out by the guys.   

But as any great poet could tell you, sometimes the most thrilling moments happen outside the formal rules. “Leg Day,” one of the funkiest songs on the record, was the only tune that the band didn’t compose together in advance. Instead, Curtin wrote it on his own during a bout of illness before they went into the studio. He emerged from his quarantine, shared it with the group, and they all agreed it filled a hole in the album. In the studio, they merged Curtin’s composition with an evocative piano outro they’d written but couldn’t find a place for and, voila, “Leg Day” is now the group’s favorite song on Frogs in a Pond.

The title, you must be wondering, came to light after they’d wrapped in the studio. Making the album had “felt like being inside this tiny little closed terrarium,” Stuckey said, “and we were these slimy little freaks inside of it. That ecosystem was our entire world.”

If there is a larger message to be extracted from this idea of a world of slimy little freaks trying to work and live together, the group leaves all elaborating to the listener. “What we do making music together is a really inward-looking thing,” Stuckey said. “It's about our own experiences and relationship to music and to one another. It’s a vulnerable experience, making art together, sharing work with one’s friends to see if it works within the context of a years-long group project. 

As inward looking as the process may be, the end result is a real gift to the world, a 40-minute suite that rewards sustained focus, sparking the imagination and satisfying a hunger for the real.

Surprise Chef is guitarist Lachlan Stuckey, keyboardist Jethro Curtin, bassist Carl Lindeberg and drummer Andrew Congues, with producer/composer/percussionist/multi-instrumentalist Hudson Whitlock also on the recording.

 

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Surprise Chef have been celebrated across the globe for a sound that has been informed equally by their isolation in Australia as their deep love for soul, hip-hop, funk, David Axelrod and other contemporary instrumental artists including Menahan Street Band. Highlights include support from KCRW, KEXP and Gilles Peterson, praise from Questlove, and festival appearances at Reeperbahn, Desert Daze, Pickathon and London Calling.  They’ve been sampled for a collaboration between 88 Rising’s Rich Brian and Ghostface Killah, and provided the soundtrack to a Pepsi Super Bowl Halftime commercial.  Frogs In A Pond follows 2025’s Superb, featured on Rolling Stone Australia’s Best Albums of 2025 list.