The Chills: Scatterbrain (Fire/digital outlets)

Three years ago, on the release of the Chills' album Snow Bound, Martin Phillipps noted people were saying “it sounded like the Chills”, his particular style evident almost 40 years after the band first appeared out of Dunedin.

“If there is a reward that I would dreamt of, it is that,” he said. “That there's a signature style and [I'm] being recognised for it.”

With the Chills' new album Scatterbrain that aural autograph is largely intact (the swirling, moody pop of Worlds Within Worlds, the surreptitious psychedelic prog of You're Immortal, the uneasy title track).

But Phillipps frequently dials back the energy for reflective songs where acoustic guitar or piano underpin lyrics with intimations of mortality (the folksy Hourglass and swaying Destiny with “I'm soon to leave and I won't be seen again”).

Given his well publicised addiction and serious illness, these songs -- many about the passage of time, the brevity of life and the damaged world as it is today -- were perhaps to be expected, although not everything works.

The piano ballad Caught in My Eye is a slim idea (“I won't cry, it must be something caught in my eye . . . there must be some other way of saying goodbye”) and while Safe and Sound is poetic in its imagery, its domesticity (“cosy on the sofa, warm in our home”) sounds a retreat from the lyrical ambition – evident on the grandeur of The Walls Beyond Abandon, the best song here – which has been Phillipps' hallmark as much as that identifiable Chills sound.

With strings and spacious arrangements, Scatterbrain is well crafted and while there's no surging, heavenly pop hit here among Phillipps' more muted delivery and themes, this is still the Chills®.

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Scatterbrain is on digital platforms, CD and limited edition vinyl.