In this present work, a new metaheuristic method called a Harris hawk optimizer (HHO) is applied to achieve the optimal design of a power system stabilizer (PSS) in a multimachine power system. Several well-known chaos maps are incorporated into the HHO to form a chaotic HHO (CHHO) with the aim of improving static operators and enhancing global searching. To assess the CHHO performance, exhaustive comparison studies are made between anticipated chaotic maps in handling unconstrained mathematical problems. At this moment, The PSS design problem over a wide permutation of loading conditions is formulated as a non-linear optimization problem. The adopted objective function defines the damping ratio of lightly damped electromechanical modes subject to a set of constraints. The best PSS parameters are generated by the proposed CHHO. The applicability of the proposed CHHO based on PSS is examined and demonstrated on a 10-generator and 39-bus multimachine power system model. The performance assessments of the CHHO results are realized by a comparative study with HHO through extensive simulations along with further eigenvalue analysis to prove its efficacy. The simulation results convincingly demonstrate the high performance of the proposed CHHO-PSS under various operating scenarios.