24 January 2025, a cold flash sweeps through the American Midwest.
Since 2019 Chat Pile has confronted ongoing forecasts of despair, their dark dissections of modernity and dungeons of sound compelling The Flenser to sign them in 2020. This touchstone has since laid the ground for their most complete statements yet: God’s Country (2022) and Cool World (2024).
Credit: Matthew Zargoski
When Stin (bass) spoke with Soundsphere in June 2024, the band were preparing for a highly-anticipated set at Outbreak Festival. Now, in the run-up to a 3 month tour spanning North America and Europe, Soundsphere is joined by Luther Manhole (guitar) and Raygun Busch (vocals).
Contrary to his name, Manhole joins the Zoom call in what looks like a cozy home studio. Then comes Busch, right on time, adjusting his vertical iPhone frame as he moves from one room to another. While Cap’n Ron (drums) remains MIA, Stin is busy mixing and mastering the band’s upcoming collaborative project. As anticipated, there’s a stark contrast between band and sound. Both Manhole and Busch emanate a conversation-between-friends dynamic that, if I were to stereotype, speaks to a Midwestern friendliness.
Based in Oklahoma City, the band formed out of a “bad movie night.” The quartet had previously played in separate bands across OKC’s small independent scene, but Chat Pile is the first to gain major success. The band’s relationship with Oklahoma is a complicated one; over the decades, it has grounded and grinded them in simultaneity.
Manhole: “Some people have to stay, right? A lot of people relate to this. You live in a place that sucks but you also kinda love it.”
For a band whose identity is centred around Oklahoma, particularly the things about it which “suck”, love manifests in curious ways. Take, for example, their striking record sleeves; signifiers of authority – detention centres obscured by pylons, a colossal Christian cross overlooking a retail park – provide psychogeographical insights into America’s ‘Bible Belt’. Chat Pile’s music seeks to unearth the darker histories beneath these conservative landscapes, scoring ideological resistance under a brutal concoction of noise rock and sludge metal.
Lyrically, Busch explores the breakdown of the social contract, its trickle-down effects on the average citizen. Systemic failures are often elaborated through gruesome depictions of the human body, packaging the quotidian violence of American life – both symbolic and physical – into microscopic case studies.
It’s impossible to talk about the band’s style and purpose without referring to cinema, Busch being a devout cinephile. One of his ‘truth about life’ films, Killer of Sheep (1979), expresses a similar sentiment in relation to Black life and its fungibility. Systems of racism, exploitation, and cultural displacement, as inherent to America as cowboys and milkshakes, are laid bare in relation to burgeoning Black fatalism.
Prominent cinematic influences also include Mike Leigh, forgotten B-Movies, and of course, horror cinema. With Killer of Sheep, it’s clear how, exactly, Chat Pile has transposed similar ideas into sonic form. The role of social masking is one such idea, all mainline projects – excluding This Dungeon Earth (2019) – including a mask-related song. “It’s a word I like,” Busch confirms, “a motif I enjoy, and it has many meanings – societal masks, literal masks, horror masks.”
It has since become a staple of their discography, a directorial motif “with many more to come.” According to Busch, however, there’s a “comedy element that should not be ignored.” It’s not just listeners confused by which mask song belongs to which album, it also confuses the band themselves, especially when performing the material live.
The line between concept and comedy brings us to ‘grimace_smoking_weed.jpeg’. Concluding the hellish God’s Country, this nine-minute nightmare opens with a powerful barrage of riffs and percussion, before spiralling into a disjointed, psychotic breakdown. Like an urban legend, it muddies truth and fiction into a disturbing whole, concluding with
the narrator’s futile plea to escape the listening voyeur. Alongside cinematic influences, Busch draws inspiration from past struggles with substance abuse:
“I truly understand what it feels like to withdraw (…) I have a lot of empathy for people going through that because it’s rough as hell. Most people don’t make it out.”
Likewise, Manhold has battled addiction, pointing to the frequency in which one “can go from hurting their knee, going to a doctor, and becoming a heroin addict (…) especially in this part of the country.” Yet, in spite of the lucid subject matter, ‘grimace’ has sometimes been sensationalised by listeners as a musical jumpscare. In turn, this sort of misperception has shaped the band’s image.
Manhole: “Whenever we get called nihilistic I think, ‘do you really get nihilism from our music?’ It’s more like we’re angry that shit is bad. When you have these character songs, there’s always a level of empathy within them”
Manhole and Busch agree that empathy is a skill. Art plays a vital role in honing this skill. “I feel like novels are one of the best tools for making empathy grow,” Busch suggests, “but it’s something we’re going from with people only reading YA or nothing.” In this respect, the challenging aspects of Chat Pile’s sound – the harrowing instrumentation, demented growls, grotesque lyricism – can be understood as forming an exercise in immersive empathy.
Humility is equally important to the band’s dynamic. Reflecting on their current success, Manhole and Busch provide grounded takes:
Manhole: “This is all so fleeting. It’s cool for us right now, but who knows how long this will last? When we put out our record on vinyl, that was all I could have imagined before the band.”
Busch: “We’re really blessed that we can make money from our art but we were creating before without it, and we would even if we didn’t.”
Collaborating with Texan artist Hayden Pedigo, Chat Pile’s upcoming project will trade their signature sludge for material that could “be released under a different band name,” according to Manhole. The band aren’t ready to spawn a new project, however, and besides: “There’s one traditional Chat Pile in the middle that will satisfy,” says Busch, alongside “two tracks that are straight up just me.” Those familiar with his solo project – Randy Rulz – will have an inkling how the latter tracks might sound, the singer jokingly titling it “our sadcore album.” It could, fingers-crossed, see the light of day later this year.
As for the band’s mainline discography, they’re still toying with ideas for LP3. One certainty, Manhole jokes, is “more evil”. How and to what extent “more evil” can be quantified is anyone’s guess, but Busch makes a pertinent point: “We said that for the last one!”
If God’s Country explored the pitfalls of a spiralling region, Cool World damned a universe. Emphasising raw melodies and gothic textures, ‘The New World’ is one such invocation: maintaining a rare full-throttle tempo, its lyrics detail a vivid Judgement Day scenario. In true Chat Pile style, this story of damnation is all bangs no whimpers, the sound of an incoming apocalypse and its primitive aftermath.
Before this apocalypse comes to pass, the band will treat Europe to an extensive tour, from Roadburn to Primavera, Glasgow to Brighton. “Fleeting” or not, these gigs are important milestones in a short, but explosive run. Doomed forecasts – political and existential – move well beyond the Oklahoman plains. Understanding this, Chat Pile are ready to cool the flames of a combusting world.
Upcoming live shows can be found here.
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