Since Chat Pile’s formation just over six years ago, the Oklahoma City-based quartet has grown from a scrappy passion project of four local film and music enthusiasts into one of the defining heavy acts to emerge from the 2020s underground.
Ray B. (vocals), L. Manhole (guitar), Stin (bass), and Cap’n Ron (drums)’s crushing, crass, and cathartic take on noise rock resonates in a cracked reality. Their music captures a raw, undeniably human essence that’s increasingly fleeting in an age marked by ceaseless torrents of algorithmic slop, technological overreach, and the cold, crestfallen state of society. Nothing about their forthcoming third LP, Who Loves the Sun, feels synthetic. In a world increasingly shaped by disposable content, Chat Pile answers with something defiantly real and organic.
Who Loves the Sun’s latest single, ‘PEN I S MALL’ is “…the heaviest Chat Pile song to date. The song and title refer to a stretch of time when Raygun was working as a maintenance man at one of the local shopping malls here in OKC. He screamed himself into a pretty brutal headache tracking this one if I remember correctly,” says Stin. Ray B. continues: “If survival wasn’t so brutal in the United States, a maintenance job at a local mall could in theory be a fun gig… Of course, the awful beast known as Capitalism is extremely rickety with not enough to truly go around in fair share as those in the lower and even middle positions know all to well.”
AA
While Chat Pile’s debut album God’s Country depicted a particularly American flavor of dread, and the follow up Cool World showed a cruel planet defined by global systemic violence, Who Loves the Sun now peels back the skin on how a collective indifference for a decaying world defines this new century. Touring off the back of their previous albums in part lent itself a confidence in the universality of their music. Stin comments, “I’ve always felt that Chat Pile is such an American concept thematically, but it seems like that’s not particularly true – people all over the world are resonating with what we have to say.” Spanning imagery of coastlines devouring cities as a result of inaction on climate change, the dread of working dead-end jobs, and the species’ collective submission to data-driven inauthenticity, Who Loves the Sun depicts the common experience of existing in a doom loop which feeds the malaise that permeates all aspects of our lives.
Reaching into the collective consciousness to commiserate and carouse, Chat Pile now dissects how the apathy-bloated state of 21st-century existence is an active, slow-motion apocalypse, threads of which are woven through the album’s ten tracks. The album is lyrically and sonically as aggressive and confrontational as ever, but here Chat Pile approached the record’s songwriting with hooks in mind, drawing on the melodic tones of pre-2000s indie/alt-rock and new wave.
The perfect allegory for the thematic essence of Who Loves the Sun is the photo embossed on the record’s cover. As with much of Chat Pile’s work, Oklahoma City itself looms over the album like a character, its sprawling isolation, economic contradictions, and underlying sense of decay embedded in the fabric of the record. Devon Tower, a glassy, largely vacant monolith of a building, looms alone high above the Oklahoma City skyline, while an unknown burnt-out home or storefront envelops the foreground. Devon Tower was originally owned by the Devon Energy Company, who announced they were leaving Oklahoma last year. A monument to empty promises stands without a care in the world, while it’s only a matter of time before the blight it was responsible for swallows it up, too.
Live dates:
UK/EU
08/06 – Ancora, PT – Sonic Blast
08/08 – Katowice, PL – OFF Festival
08/09 – Prague, CZ – Fuchs2 ~
08/10 – Budapest, HU – A38 ~
08/11 – Vienna, AT – Arena (supporting HEALTH and Carpenter Brut)
08/12 – Munich, DE – Live/Evil ~
08/14 – Col Du Lein, CH – Palp Festival
08/19 – Dublin, IRE – Button Factory ~
08/20 – Dublin, IRE – Button Factory ~
08/22 – Bristol, UK – Arctangent Festival
NA
09/12 – Oklahoma City, OK – Tower Theatre = (SISU Fundraiser Fest)
09/17 – Minneapolis, MN – First Avenue +^
09/19 – Chicago, IL – Riot Fest
09/20 – Englewood, CO – The Gothic Theatre +&
09/23 – Salt Lake City, UT – The Metro Music Hall + &
09/25 – Seattle, WA – Showbox SoDo + &
09/27 – Portland, OR – Revolution Hall + &
09/29 – Sacramento, CA – Ace of Spades +
09/30 – San Francisco, CA – The Regency Ballroom + &
10/03 – San Diego, CA – Music Box + &
10/04 – Los Angeles, CA – The Belasco + &
10/06 – Mesa, AZ – The Nile Theater + &
10/08 – Austin, TX – Radio/East + &
10/09 – Houston, TX – White Oak Music Hall + &
10/10 – Dallas, TX – Granada Theater + &
11/05 – Detroit, MI – The Majestic Theatre + %
11/06 – Millvale, PA – Mr. Smalls Theatre + %
11/08 – Norwalk, CT – District Music Hall + %
11/10 – Brooklyn, NY – Brooklyn Steel + %
11/11 – Philadelphia, PA – Union Transfer + %
11/12 – Washington, DC – Black Cat + %
11/14 – Charlotte, NC – Underground + %
11/15 – Atlanta, GA – The Masquerade + %
11/16 – Nashville, TN – Brooklyn Bowl + %
11/18 – Columbus, OH – Newport Music Hall + %
11/20 – Indianapolis, IN – Deluxe at Old National Centre + %
11/21 – St. Louis, MO – Delmar Hall + %
11/22 – Lawrence, KS – The Granada + %
~ with Ragana
+ with Soul Glo
^ with Prize Horse
& with Virga
% with Shallowater
= with Portrayal of Guilt, Nightosphere, Traindodge, Primal Brain
AA
Photo credit: Ryan Lawson
Aural Aggravation 