Chat Pile – Cool World LP highlighter yellow vinyl

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 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.

• Direct follow up to OKC noise rock band’s 2022’s breakthrough album God’s Country

• Mixed by Benjamin Green (Uniform, Portrayal of Guilt, Drab Majesty)

• Mastered by Matt Coloton (The Rolling Stones, Blur, Nick Cave, Sunn O))

• Full US tour in 2024, EU early 2025, with more dates to come

Label: Flenser Records – FR164

Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Limited Edition, Highlighter Yellow

Country: US

Released: Oct 11, 2024

Genre:

Rock

Style: Noise Rock, Sludge Metal

Tracklist

A1 I Am Dog Now

A2 Shame

A3 Frownland

A4 Funny Man

A5 Camcorder

B1 Tape

B2 The New World

B3 Masc

B4 Milk Of Human Kindness