Chat Pile

Tenkiller Motion Picture Soundtrack

Flenser

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...