But why escape into the noise when you can channel it?
Chat Pile are no stranger to the slackjawed, defeatist haze the world increasingly finds itself in. They’re also stunned, confused at our seeming powerlessness to change our current reality. Yet they refused to use this as a cloak to hide behind; instead, they recognise that explicitness is needed more than ever.
Especially when you live in the literal belly of the beast. Chat Pile’s band name takes from the literal piles of chat (contaminated mining waste from lead-zinc mining) that litter their hometown Oklahoma; giant, unnatural monuments that have become a feature of the state’s landscape. Chat Pile’s unique take on sludge metal thus takes on an almost literal meaning: not only in how it references this, but also how it buries their furious noise under a thick, all-consuming layer of lo-fi slurry.
Cool World continues upon the band’s previous work with a desperate focus. With similar visual design across previous releases, it’s clear the band knows what they want to say, and how. Similarly, with the cement mixer of influences that make up their distinct sound: slow, deliberate and destructive at times, frenzied and riffy at others (it’s obvious that bassist Stin is the nu-metal fan of the group, bringing a melodic touch to the racket).
Thematically, it’s an understanding of heavy guitar music not unlike its metal originators: a vehicle to explore societal taboos, to forcefully yet truthfully pry open eyes to the ugly realities of the world. Chat Pile’s music is a chronicle of a humanity gone deeply wrong; ruled by monsters that are not the fantastical, abstract creations sometimes seen in metal subgenres – no, these devils live among us (try saying frontperson Raygun Busch’s name out loud).
Where their debut record God’s Country explored the specific dread of post-decay midwestern America, their sophomore album Cool World widens that lens to imperialist war and terror worldwide. The directness of ‘Why?’, the most essentially brilliant track off God’s Country – Busch’s nervously escalating vocals, heavy with ashamed disbelief, “Why do people have to live outside?” – is mirrored all across Cool World. How does one carry on, waking up each day to a social media feed of continual, new atrocities; when the worst thing you think you’ve ever seen is a boundary that’s continually crossed? When what you can literally see, with your own eyes is spun, denied, ignored? “I'd heard/Nothing about the way they burn!”
Cool World works not because it centers these feelings of spectator helplessness but because it puts them on trial. The band says the record is about “the price at which we eat sugar in America”, making the connection between the malaise of God’s Country and the horror of our current Cool World. More than a year of genocide in Gaza; a sick, terminal capitalist reality – and for what? For a world system that is, at its core, as rotten and abnormal as the shrines that gave Chat Pile their namesake. We must be better than this. Cool World is not an album with answers. But at a time when it feels impossible to think about anything else, that first, cathartic howl of despair, of true anger - is as needed as ever.
Words by Lindsay Riley