Back catalogue: Metal

Review: With their 2022 debut LP God's Country, the herald of the true face and voice for modern middle-American malaise came in the form of noise-rock/sludge metal purveyors Chat Pile. Broadcasting from their muted home of Oklahoma City, their deformed sonic mutations pulled equally from The Jesus Lizard, Acid Bath and Korn, while vocalist Raygun Busch (that is his credited moniker) appalled and harrowed with his spoken-word nightmare poetics touching on everything from homelessness and the opioid crisis, to real-life recounts of botched robberies and first-person narratives from horror film characters such as the mother of Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th. Expanding their scope both conceptually and compositionally, Cool World takes aim at the entire planet with classism, the horrors of war and genocide, the very real potential for abuse stemming from toxic masculinity, capitalist lies and the nihility of existence all as topics of discussion, while still making time for backwoods journeys into serial killer's isolated farm homes. Musically continuing to pummel with industrial abrasion and hypnotic groove, sonically the band have begun to embrace their sludge-core tendencies while channelling nuanced elements of alternative metal and goth rock, offering new painstaking modes of vulnerability to drive home their despair-laden character studies. Mark our words, there isn't one single other metal/punk/alternative album in 2024 that slaps this hard while instilling such a cold feeling of visceral dread and fear for our ever-despondent cool world.

Review: .By its very nature, Tenkiller is a very different beast to Chat Pile's other releases. Recorded in the winter of 2020 to be the soundtrack to Tenkiller, an indie movie about the lives of ordinary people in small-town America, it sees the noise-rock/post-hardcore combo focus on mood and tone, rather than form and function. As a result, fuzzy and forthright cuts of the sort you'd expect come supplemented by dystopian, industrial-influenced soundscapes, lo-fi alt-country, guitar-laden mood pieces, low-slung and effects-laden creepiness, intense electronica and the kind of slow-burn ambient-not-ambient that was once the preserve of cult bands such as Labradford.

Review: Following on from the unprecedented success of their 2022 debut full-length God's Country, Oklahoma City sludge-metal meets noise-rock four-piece Chat Pile now expand their scope (which initially took their home to task for its homeless and opioid crises), to take aim at the world at large for all of its follies from oil-drilling, to the shoulder shrugs of war, deforestation and genocide. Imbuing their sludegcore heft with gothic grunge melodies while also increasing their heaving tonal bedlam to nauseating degrees, Cool World genuinely sounds like the soundtrack to our own self-designed end times, and what better clarion call to see us over the horizon than Chat Pile's signature industrial-tinged bombast led by frontman Raygun Busch's harrowing, howling spoken word sermons.

Review: With 2022's God's Country, Oklahoma City sludge metal/noise rock manglers Chat Pile took the underground music scene by the throat and dragged it through the twisted drug addled, decrepit, destitute annals of modern middle America. Returning two years on from their major glow up that saw them land on numerous end of year list that usually wouldn't touch their brand of hubris sonics with a ten foot pole, their sophomore endeavour Cool World trades the initial narrow view of the woes of their home country for the rotting globe at large, taking religion, politicians and narcissistic everyday people to task for their ignorance, malice and docile attitudes which are leading to a culmination of no more cool world for any of us. Expanding their sonic scope to draw on more melodious grunge and sultry goth-rock, while tapping outside production help this time around to make their heaving industrial-tinged noise-sludge bombast even more stomach churning, LP2 makes bad on all of Chat Pile's initial, unsettling promise, with a nauseating feeling that they'll be narrating our end times for as long as there are ears to listen.

Review: 2022 saw the unlikely glow up of the one of the most sonically unhinged and conceptually hideous newcomers of recent times - Chat Pile. Hailing from the muted middle-America of Oklahoma City, their debut LP God's Country found itself on many an out-of-place end of year list, with its harrowing concoction of sludge metal, noise-rock and spoken word diatribes based around everything from the opioid and housing crises to first-person recounts of revenge from Jason Voorhees's mother of Friday the 13th fame. In short, it was a caustic, horror-indebted debut about how utterly fucked the US is, and now with their platform and exposure majorly expanded, Chat Pile return to take the entire globe to task for its follies on the deformed, multi-headed behemoth bastard of a sophomore effort that is Cool World. Furthering their signature sludgecore down the mire of audible hubris, yet incorporating elements of swaggering grunge and sultry goth-rock, here the unassuming, deplorable four-piece make their indelible mark on the extreme music underground and make it abundantly clear that God's Country was only the beginning of their Babylonian death chants.

Review: ***B-STOCK: Creasing to corner of outer sleeve but otherwise in excellent condition***


With 2022's God's Country, Oklahoma City sludge metal/noise rock manglers Chat Pile took the underground music scene by the throat and dragged it through the twisted drug addled, decrepit, destitute annals of modern middle America. Returning two years on from their major glow up that saw them land on numerous end of year list that usually wouldn't touch their brand of hubris sonics with a ten foot pole, their sophomore endeavour Cool World trades the initial narrow view of the woes of their home country for the rotting globe at large, taking religion, politicians and narcissistic everyday people to task for their ignorance, malice and docile attitudes which are leading to a culmination of no more cool world for any of us. Expanding their sonic scope to draw on more melodious grunge and sultry goth-rock, while tapping outside production help this time around to make their heaving industrial-tinged noise-sludge bombast even more stomach churning, LP2 makes bad on all of Chat Pile's initial, unsettling promise, with a nauseating feeling that they'll be narrating our end times for as long as there are ears to listen.