Chat Pile

Chat Pile

This Dungeon Earth / Remove Your Skin Please

Flenser

In the spring of 2019, a new rock band consisting of four otherwise ordinary Okies would arise out of seemingly nowhere, swiftly turning heads with a grotesque new take on noise rock fueled by the existential anguish that has defined the 21st Century. Taking its name from the towering mounds of toxic waste that stand as monuments to capitalism’s cruel hubris across its home state, Oklahoma City’s Chat Pile made an immediate impression, soon culminating in the release of its landmark 2022 debut album, God’s Country and 2024’s expansive follow up Cool World While the massive success of God’s Country would propel the quartet from the status of underground favorites to an international sensation, Chat Pile’s mission to take rock music to new zeniths of intensity was part of the plan from the very start. In fact, during its first handful of months as an active project, Chat Pile began writing and recording some of the heaviest, hellish, and harrowing music of its entire catalog, laying the foundation of the themes and traits that would eventually manifest in the band’s debut LP. The result of these sessions would be a pair of EPs, This Dungeon Earth and Remove Your Skin Please, released in the summer and winter of 2019, respectively. Initially put out by Reptilian Records in 2020, The Flenser is proud to present a special reissue of Chat Pile’s pivotal first two EPs, each compiled onto a single disc. This dual EP compilation chronicles the earliest moments of the...

Chat Pile

Cool World

Flenser

Like the towering mounds of toxic waste from which it gets its namesake, the music of Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is a suffocating, grotesque embodiment of the existential anguish that has defined the 21st Century. It figures that a band with this abrasive, unrelenting, and outlandish of a sound has stuck as strong of a chord as it has. Dread has replaced the American dream, and Chat Pile’s music is a poignant reminder of that shift—a portrait of an American rock band molded by a society defined by its cold and cruel power systems. Though very much on-brand with Chat Pile’s signature flavor of cacophonous, sludgy noise rock, the band’s shift to a global thematic focus on Cool World not only compliments the broader experimentations it employs with their songwriting but also how they dissect the album’s core theme of violence. Melded into the band’s twisted foundational sound are traces of other eclectic genre stylings, with examples of gazy, goth-tinged dirges to abrasive yet anthemic alt/indie-esque hooks and off-kilter metal grooves only scratching the surface of what can be heard in the album’s ten tracks. Besides stylistically stretching the boundaries of the Chat Pile sound, Cool World is also the band’s first record to have someone else handle mixing duties, with Ben Greenberg (Uniform) capturing and further amplifying the quartet’s unmistakably outsider and folk-art edge. While Chat Pile’s debut album was plenty disturbing with its B-movie-inspired interpretation of a “real American horror story”, what the band...

Chat Pile

Remove Your Skin Please

Flenser

***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.

Chat Pile

This Dungeon Earth

Flenser

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...

Chat Pile

Tenkiller Motion Picture Soundtrack

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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

Chat Pile

God's Country

Flenser

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...