***Released only a handful of months following the band’s breakthrough debut EP, Remove Your Skin Please signaled that whatever Chat Pile was doing wasn't just a one-off novelty of Midwest metal nihilism. While the band’s foundational sound of caustic and cacophonous noise rock crystallized with its debut, the release of Remove Your Skin Please signposted the vast extent to which Chat Pile could stylistically tinker and conceptually iterate atop it. Heard in the gothy post-punk dirge of “Mask” and the dissonant extreme metal fervor of “Davis'', the more experimental ideas present on Remove Your Skin Please come off less like a selection of the band’s conceptual prototypes and more like fully realized reflections of its member's own tastes and preferences. That doesn’t mean Chat Pile’s noise rock foundation is diluted in the slightest as EP bookends “Dallas Beltway” and “Garbage Man” push its twisted take on the genre to new aural extremes in its instrumentation and subject matter spanning grisly serial murders to the slow festering death of the environment at the hands of mankind. For as ugly and unhinged as Chat Pile’s tales of 21st-century American dread are, Remove Your Skin Please asserts something that is somehow subtly even more terrifying: If a quartet of otherwise ordinary Okies can convey such apocalyptically bleak yet resonate messages in its music, that may mean we feel that same nihilism, too.
MC $12.00
12/22/2023
In the summer of 2019, a newly formed, Oklahoma City-based rock band called Chat Pile would release its debut four-track EP, This Dungeon Earth. Little did anyone know at the time, but this initial taste of grotesque, confronting, and visceral noise rock courtesy of four slacker Okies would kick off the story of what would soon be one of the most widely lauded underground acts in years. Like the towering mounds of toxic waste from which it gets its namesake, Chat Pile’s body of work is emblematic of a distinctly midwestern flavor of American dread, with This Dungeon Earth being no exception to the rule. While raw in presentation, Chat Pile’s debut EP comes across as anything but a rough draft. Much of the band’s hallmark traits, spanning the unhinged vocals of frontman Raygun Busch, the grotesquely contorted guitar riffage, and the industrial smack of heavily processed percussion, appear as far back as this earliest chapter. If anything, the raw, DIY-rooted origins of these uncompromising thirteen minutes of sludged-out carnage make This Dungeon Earth all the more impactful. Between its biting social commentary and gratuitous grindhouse insanity, the unfiltered brutality of Chat Pile’s debut recording has seen tracks like “Rainbow Meat”, “Face”, and “Ratboy” become mainstays in its notorious live shows. Although it depicts the band’s monstrous amalgamation of noise rock, sludge metal, hardcore, and more as it is just beginning to congeal, This Dungeon Earth comes off as the furthest thing from a simple intro and more of an...
MC $12.00
12/22/2023
Oklahoma’s Chat Pile have had an exciting 2022; they released their album God’s Country, toured the midwest and east coast in support of the album, announced their appearance at Roadburn Festival 2023, and while the band is working on LP2, they’re revealing details for their score for the indie film Tenkiller. While not a proper full-length album, the Tenkiller score was written and recorded in the winter of 2020, and it waxes and wanes from the signature Chat Pile sound but also ventures into new ones— including arena country music. The band comments, “The music we made for Tenkiller is quite a bit different than what you may come to expect from us. We were given the freedom to really experiment and explore territories that we’ve never done before.” They continue, “It’s not going to be for everyone, but we hope some of you connect with what we set out to do.” “Chat Pile bring a sense of dirt and squalor to the table.” —The FADER “Oklahoma City’s Chat Pile are the perfect people to expose the dark, seedy underbelly of American life.” —Paste Magazine “Cleansingly punishing.” —Stereogum “Harrowing.” —Pitchfork
CD $12.00
05/12/2023
LP $20.25
05/12/2023
There’s a sick irony to how a country that extols rhetoric of individual freedom, in the same gasp, has no problem commodifying human life as if it were meat to feed the insatiable hunger of capitalism. If this is American nihilism taken to its absolute zenith, then God’s Country, the first full length record from Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is the aural embodiment of such a concept. Having lived alongside the heaps of toxic refuse that the band derives its name from, the fatalism of daily life in the American Midwest permeates throughout the works of Chat Pile, and especially so on its debut album. Exasperated by the pandemic, the hopelessness of climate change, the cattle shoot of global capitalism, and fueled by “...lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of THC,” God’s Country is as much of an acknowledgement of the Earth’s most assured demise as it is a snarling violent act of defiance against it. Within its over forty minute runtime, the album displays both Chat Pile’s most aggressively unhinged and contemplatively nuanced moments to date, drawing from its preceding two EPs and its score for the 2021 film, Tenkiller. In the band’s own words, the album is, at its heart, “Oklahoma’s specific brand of misery.” A misery intent on taking all down with it and its cacophonous chaos on its own terms as opposed to idly accepting its otherwise assured fall. This is what the end of the world sounds...
CD $12.00
07/29/2022
LP $20.25
07/29/2022
MC $12.00
07/29/2022
MP3 $7.99
07/29/2022
FLAC $8.99
07/29/2022