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Surprise Chef

Surprise Chef began in 2017 as a handful of friends in the Melbourne suburb of Coburg taping spontaneous funk jams to analogue, hoping to press a single or two. The chemistry outlasted the plan. Their instrumental cinematic soul borrows from 1970s film scores, library records and the jazz-funk that hip-hop producers have mined for decades, most of it recorded at the College of Knowledge, a sharehouse studio crowded with vintage gear where three of the members also live. The records earned praise from Questlove, a home on Big Crown Records, a Super Bowl halftime commercial and a sample on a Rich Brian and Ghostface Killah collaboration, and in 2024 the band re-scored the Australian cult film Wake in Fright for live performance alongside a restored screening. Their fifth album, Frogs In A Pond, arrives in October 2026 on Concord Jazz as a single continuous forty-minute suite steeped in the shadowy atmosphere of Italian giallo cinema.

Albums (13)

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