Martin Phillips, whose band the Chills was a mainstay of the 1980s New Zealand indie-rock scene that served as a formative influence on the likes of R.E.M. and Pavement, has died. He was 61.
His death was announced in a statement posted Sunday on the Chills’ social media accounts. The statement didn’t say when or where Phillips died or specify a cause but noted that he’d died “unexpectedly.” A 2019 documentary about Phillips and the Chills chronicled the musician’s struggles with hepatitis C; New Zealand’s Otago Daily Times reported that Phillips had been admitted recently to Dunedin Hospital with liver problems.
A proponent of the so-called Dunedin sound associated with New Zealand’s Flying Nun record label, the Chills played jangly yet propulsive guitar pop that set wistful melodies against arrangements drawing on punk and psychedelia. Phillips, who wrote with a poetic flair about art, death and romance, was the band’s only constant member in a career that attracted a devoted cult following across four decades.
In a statement Sunday, Neil Finn of Crowded House — a fellow New Zealander whose early band Split Enz once enlisted the Chills as an opening act — called Phillips “one of NZ’s greatest songwriters” and described him as having been “fascinated by and devoted to the magic and mystery of music.”
After playing in a short-lived group called the Same, Phillips formed the Chills in 1980 with a lineup that included his sister Rachel; in 1982, the band signed to Flying Nun — whose other other tightly connected acts were the Clean, the Bats and the Verlaines — and proceeded to make a string of scrappy yet tuneful singles including the stomping “I Love My Leather Jacket” and “Pink Frost,” which became perhaps the band’s best-known song.
“I want to stop my crying / But she’s lying there dying,” Phillips sang over an oddly buoyant bass line — a striking juxtaposition that led Spin magazine to advise readers to “imagine Paul McCartney attempting Joy Division.”
Having already cycled through more than half a dozen lineups, the Chills dropped their first studio LP, “Brave Words,” in 1987; for their follow-up, 1990’s “Submarine Bells,” they signed in the U.S. to Warner Bros. subsidiary Slash Records, which helped drive the knowingly titled “Heavenly Pop Hit” to No. 17 on Billboard’s modern rock chart.
Eager to capitalize on that success, Slash brought the Chills to Los Angeles to record the band’s next album, 1992’s “Soft Bomb.” Peter Holsapple, who’d played with R.E.M. on its smash “Out of Time” LP, contributed keyboards in the studio, while Van Dyke Parks devised a characteristically whimsical orchestral arrangement for the song “Water Wolves.”
Parks, the veteran pop eccentric known for his work in the ’60s with Randy Newman and the Beach Boys, invited the Chills to Capitol Studios to watch him oversee the recording session, Phillips told KCRW in 2022. Yet the band showed up late: “We took a wrong turn, so we missed the speech that Van Dyke gave the orchestra about what they were doing,” Phillips said. “But it was beautiful being there and hearing it come to life.”
The Chills broke up after touring “Soft Bomb” but later reunited (with yet another lineup); the band’s most recent album, “Scatterbrain,” came out in 2021.
Information about Phillips’ survivors wasn’t immediately available.
Phillips spoke candidly about the challenges of surviving the music industry, as in a 1992 interview with The Times in which he admitted that the “single biggest problem so far has been just trying to keep bands together when we can’t afford to pay ourselves anything.”
Yet the Chills’ music put across an abiding belief in the power of a great song.
“So I stand and the sound goes straight through my body / I’m so bloated up, happy, I can throw things around me,” Phillips sang in “Heavenly Pop Hit.” “I’m growing in stages and have been for ages / Just singing and floating and free.”