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.

Besides being the name of a largely forgotten (and panned) 90s film, Cool World makes for an apt title of Chat Pile’s sophomore full-length record. In the context of a Chat Pile record, the words are steeped in a grim double entendre that not only evokes imagery of a dying planet but a progression from the band’s previous work, moving the scope of its depiction of modern malaise from just “God’s country” to the entirety of humankind. “Cool World covers similar themes to our last album, except now exploded from a micro to macro scale, with thoughts specifically about disasters abroad, at home, and how they affect one another,” says vocalist Raygun Busch.

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. “While we wanted our follow-up to God’s Country to still capture the immediate, uncompromising essence of Chat Pile, we also knew that with Cool World, we’d want to stretch the definition of our “sound” to reflect our tastes beyond just noise rock territory,” reflects bassist Stin. “Now that we had some form of creative comfort zones in place after hitting that milestone of putting out a full-length record, album #2 felt like the perfect opportunity to challenge those limits.” 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 of Uniform (Algiers, Drab Majesty, Metz) capturing and further amplifying the quartet’s unmistakably outsider and folk-art edge.

The proverbial thread tying all of the experimentation on Cool World together is the depth to which Chat Pile dissects the album’s theme of violence. Whether it be the cycle of creating and passively consuming literal and figurative violence on sister tracks “Camcorder” and “Tape”, the diminishment of crimes against humanity by way of foreign policy and colonialism on “Shame”, or the mental anguish of hopelessness on “The New World”, Cool World is an apocalyptically bleak record. Sure, Chat Pile’s debut album was plenty disturbing with its B-movie-inspired interpretation of a “real American horror story”; what Chat Pile depicts on Cool World is unsettling not just from its visceral noise rock onslaught, but from depicting how all sorts of atrocities are pretty much standard parts of modern existence. In

film terms, think something like a Criterion arthouse film by way of schlocky grindhouse splatterfest: undeniably gratuitous and thrilling in the moment but leaving a looming dread in the back of one’s mind for how close the horrors depicted mirror reality.

“If I had to describe the album in one sentence,” explains Busch, “It’s hard not to borrow from Voltaire, so I won’t resist – Cool World is about the price at which we eat sugar in America.”

Cool World will be released via The Flenser on October 11, 2024

Chat Pile is:

Raygun Busch – Vocals

Luther Manhole – Guitar

Stin – Bass

Cap’n Ron – Drums

A real big rock band from Kansas City, MO.

Sophomore LP ‘CASH’ is out now via The Ghost is Clear Records & Knife Hits Records.

What’s in a name? Calling your band Empire State Bastard is a statement-of-intent: riff after motherfucking riff, battering ram rhythms and feral vocals from death metal growls to black-hearted howls. The band: Simon Neil (Biffy Clyro) + Mike Vennart (Oceansize, Biffy live guitarist), probe almost every dark crevice imaginable of metal and genre-adjacent extremity.

The pair would spend downtime on tour sharing the heaviest, most avant-garde or confrontational music they found. When embarking on their own sonic wasteland, Simon already had the band name, leaving Mike with a particularly grotesque challenge: what music could he write to live up to it?
The result: “a spectrum of wide-ranging versions of pure sonic annihilation. I’d written songs which didn’t directly relate to each other, but I like to think they all make friends with each other.” Simon’s contribution to ESB is almost exclusively vocals: his voice more varied than ever, from shrieks and gasps to guttural death growls.

Underpinning the duo is a drum performance akin to a runaway train, pulverising and grooving in equal measure. Mike programmed the initial drums, but the pair had a dilemma – who can play like Slayer legend Dave Lombardo? Simon’s solution? “Let’s just ask Dave fucking Lombardo!” He quickly accepted.

So what’s in a name? Simon coined it, Mike defined it: “I set about making the most fucking poisonous vile music I possibly could, just unabridged hatred in musical form.” That’s Empire State Bastard.