So I did not know much about Chin Ho! as of last year, when I started my record store online. After I came into the Big Heavy World CD collection, I had one of their CDs, The Girl EP, and I put it into my inventory, and that is pretty much where I left it. Sometimes when you deal in records and CDs, something can sit right in front of you for months before you finally figure out what you have been missing.
Fast forward to the Green River Festival in Greenfield, Massachusetts, in 2026. I met one of the Wyman brothers, and he told me that Chin Ho! was releasing a new album. In the moment, I told him I would get back to Vermont and that my next Vermont Artist Highlight would be Chin Ho!, and so it went. I started learning about the band, digging into their history and listening to a lot of their original music. Honestly, I got really excited about new music coming. The Girl EP went from sitting in my inventory to being on regular rotation in the shop, and now that we have The Mystery of the Curse of the Chin Ho! Mystery Curse, I have been elated to listen.
There is something funny about discovering a band this way. Chin Ho! had already lived an entire musical life before Maple City Music existed, and here I was catching up decades later because an old CD happened to come through my record store. That is one of those things I love about physical music. Sometimes you discover the music and go looking for the record. Other times the record finds you first and waits patiently for you to figure it out.
The album opens with "Tractor, Pull," which puts you into an alternative trance right at the start. Must be the snake-trance jingle, and then it full-out jams into an infectious hook. I can now understand why Andy needs a cane in the video. Other than the fact that he is a bit older now, if he didn't have it, that hook might make him break out into a frenzy of uncontrollable hipster movements, a sight to behold indeed. "Tractor, Pull" does just that: it pulls you into this new launch and gets you ready to meet the rest of the layered zingers.
What I like is that there is history inside this music without the record feeling like it is trying to live in the past. Chin Ho! isn't standing around attempting to recreate its younger self. There is life in these songs. This isn't a museum piece. It jams.
Scene two is "At The Duck," a catchy reverb of a local Vermont watering hole, and its summation is quite literally how one approaches, interacts with, and eventually leaves such an establishment. The lead guitar licks are fresh and carve in and out of sections where I want to scream, More Cowbell!" The track is reminiscent of some delicious alternative rock I remember from my late teens and early twenties, and I would be remiss not to say it brought me back to Burlington at one point.
That is something music can do better than almost anything else. A particular guitar sound, a drumbeat, a vocal, or even a few seconds of a song can suddenly put you back into a place you haven't thought about in years. "At The Duck" did that for me. There is enough familiarity to bring back those memories without the song sounding like somebody is simply trying to reproduce the past. It sounds like Chin Ho!, and apparently that sound was sitting somewhere in the back of my musical memory even before I knew enough about the band to recognize it.
One might say Yeah… which brings us to six helpings of the yeah.
I like the energy behind "Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah." It has angst, a drive to move forward from whatever you have going on, and raw execution, with all the members jamming out to the fullest. It feels like a smashing good time getting to Recovery, minus the Marshall Mathers reference. And that is "just the way it is."
Yes, I went there.
Underneath the fun of a title that gives you six yeahs for the price of one, though, there is something real going on. There is anger, fear, doubt, and frustration in there, but the songisn't interested in sitting around feeling sorry for itself. The energy moves forward. That is what I hear most in it. Take whatever is rattling around inside you, turn the amps up and do something with it. Sometimes rock and roll does not require a more complicated prescription.
Then comes "Stay Away From Sarah," and I really felt like I was a line being drawn right into this song. It catches your ear because everyone has been in "that" relationship with someone, something, or maybe even themselves.
Train wrecks, here we come.
And aren't we all train wrecks anyway? You have to choose which ride you want to get on. There is something wonderfully contradictory about wanting and needing someone while simultaneously knowing you need to stay AWAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYY from them. The track somehow manages to be misery and bliss at the same time, playing with everything right, wrong, and somewhere in the questionable middle of any relationship. You know youshouldn'tt. You probably know exactly how this is going to end.
You get on the ride anyway.
LOL!
Maybe that is what makes "Stay Away From Sarah" work so well. It doesn't try to clean up the contradiction. Love, attraction, relationships, whatever we want to call them, are rarely that tidy. Sometimes the person you want to run toward is exactly the person the flashing warning sign is telling you to run from. Chin Ho! turns that particular human train wreck into one hell of a song.
Then "Big Heavy World" gets me right in the feels, and this one is personal.
The opening takes me straight back to being in my truck, racing down the highway to meet up with Big Heavy World, not really knowing what I was about to discover when I started digging through those boxes and boxes of local talent. Somewhere in all of that music was Chin Ho!, waiting for me to catch up.
There is something almost beautifully circular about hearing Chin Ho! sing "Big Heavy World" now, knowing the connection I have developed with Big Heavy World themselves and thinking about the impact that organization has had on so many Vermont bands and artists over the years. It was a place where local music was championed, documented, and given a home, including music by artists like Chin Ho!
And when I was starting as a record store owner and trying to figure out exactly where Maple City Music fit into Vermont's musical landscape, Big Heavy World was there for me too. In a way, they became that older sibling who had already traveled the road and could point ahead and say, "This way," while simultaneously reminding you that there is a "big heavy world ready to fall on you."
And indeed there is.
It is ready to chew you up and "spit you out."
Maybe that is why the song hits me differently. I'm not just hearing a Chin Ho! track when it plays. I'm hearing those boxes of Vermont music. I'm hearing the beginning of my own record store. I'm hearing all those local artists who came before the people who decided their music was worth saving and me. Somewhere inside those boxes, before I even knew enough to appreciate it, Chin Ho! was already there.
That is what preservation really means to me. It isn't simply keeping an old record clean or putting a CD into a box and making sure it survives another twenty years. Preservation means somebody gets the opportunity to discover it twenty years later. Somebody saved this stuff. Big Heavy World collected and championed Vermont music. Those boxes eventually reached me. I started digging. The Girl EP surfaced. I met one of the Wyman brothers. I started listening. And now I am sitting here writing about a brand-new Chin Ho! album.
That is a pretty big, heavy circle.
And then along comes "Miss Vermont," and whatever serious thoughts I was having about music history, relationships, and the big, heavy world coming down around us are going to have to wait a few minutes because Miss Vermont wants to dance.
Dance! Dance! Dance!
There is an infectious playfulness to this track that makes sitting still seem like the wrong response. This is the point on the record where I can picture somebody walking into the shop, hearing it coming through the speakers and beginning with that subtle head bob we all do when we are pretending we aren't actually dancing.
Then comes the foot.
Maybe the shoulders.
Before long, dignity has left the building, and Miss Vermont has another dance partner.
There is something wonderfully uncomplicated about a song that permits you to enjoy yourself simply, and Chin Ho! knows when to stop thinking about the destination and enjoy the ride. So find yourself a little room between the record bins, forget who might be watching, and dance with Miss Vermont.
Dance! Dance! Dance!
And if anyone asks exactly what you are doing, tell them Chin H! made you do it.
That variety is really where The Mystery of the Curse of the Chin Ho! Mystery Curse starts revealing itself. One minute I'm thinking about questionable relationships and mutually assured emotional destruction, the next I'm remembering the beginning of Maple City Music and the history of Vermont music, and a few minutes later I'm apparently dancing between the record bins with Miss Vermont.
This record takes you places.
And throughout it all, there is a sense that the band is enjoying doing this again. That matters because reunion albums and comeback records can be dangerous territory. Nostalgia will only get you so far. There is always the temptation to grade them on a curve.
They still sound pretty good. They've still got it.
Not bad after all these years.
Nope.
I don't think Chin Ho! needs the senior discount.
This thing sounds alive.
There is history all over the record, certainly, but that history feels more like an ingredient than baggage. Chin Ho! can reach backward into the alternative and indie-rock world that helped shape the band without getting stuck there. That is an important distinction because nostalgia might convince somebody to listen once, but songs are what make somebody put the record on again.
And I want to put this one on again.
The wonderfully ridiculous title, The Mystery of the Curse of the Chin Ho! Mystery Curse starts making more sense the deeper you get into the record. There is something very Chin Ho! about refusing to give your comeback album a sensible four-word title when you can apparently use nine. Why make it easy on record-store owners trying to type the thing into inventory?
But maybe "mystery " really is the right word.
There is a mystery in how music survives. Pieces of a band's past somehow make it into the present. Musicians find one another again. Songs survive. Recordings survive. CDs end up in boxes. Boxes end up with record-store owners. Record-store owners meet musicians at festivals. Old music becomes a discovery, and suddenly a band you barely knew becomes part of the soundtrack in your shop.
As a collector, I'm fascinated. We spend enormous amounts of time talking about original pressings, masters, demos, unreleased recordings, alternate takes, and artifacts that capture musicians at a particular moment in time. But what happens when the storyisn'tt actually finished? What happens when musicians get another shot decades later?
Apparently, sometimes you get The Mystery.
There is also something distinctly Vermont about the whole thing. Not because every guitar chord sounds like maple syrup and mud season, but because bands like Chin Ho! are part of the musical history of this state. Music scenes are not built solely by the handful of artists who eventually become household names. They are built by bands, clubs, radio stations, record stores, engineers, promoters, fans, photographers, collectors, and all the people who save a CD, record, cassette, poster, or flyer because it means something to them.
That history matters to me as the owner of Maple City Music. One of the reasons I started highlighting Vermont artists was because I realized how much music has been made here and how easy it is for pieces of that history to disappear. Recordings are sitting in boxes and basements all over Vermont, telling part of that story.
Chin Ho! belongs to that history.
But The Mystery makes an important correction to that sentence.
Chin Ho! isn't just part of Vermont music history.
Chin Ho! is making Vermont music right now.
For all the history surrounding this record, though, I keep coming back to the simple fact that Chin Ho! sounds like a band having a hell of a good time being Chin Ho! again. The album doesn't feel like musicians carefully protecting a legacy or trying to demonstrate that they can still do what they once did. It sounds like people who rediscovered why they enjoyed making noise together and realized there was still something worth saying.
There is humor here. There is history. There is weirdness. There is misery and bliss. There are train wrecks and watering holes. There are hooks. Some guitars occasionally make me want more Cowbell, even when additional Cowbell isn't actually required. There is a Big Heavy World ready to fall on you and spit you out, and apparently Miss Vermont is standing somewhere nearby waiting for you to get over yourself and dance.
Dance! Dance! Dance!
Some moments take me back to a particular Burlington, and others remind me why Vermont music should never be discussed exclusively in the past tense.
Above all, there’s energy.
Here I am, the record-store guy who hardly knew Chin Ho a year ago, now spinning The Girl EP on regular rotation in the shop, with The Mystery right alongside it.
Funny how music works.
Sometimes you spend years following a band, eagerly waiting for their next release.
Sometimes their music just sits quietly on the shelf, waiting for you to notice.
And sometimes you realize the real mystery was never whether Chin Ho! could make a comeback after all this time.
The mystery is how the hell some of us missed them the first time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.