Review Summary: Please be quiet, the skull is speaking
Since
God’s Country clawed its way out of Oklahoma City in 2022, Chat Pile has operated around the numbness of being stuck in the disaster loop of modern life, and of feeling guilty about feeling nothing. I got caught in the webs of that record later than everyone else, specifically with the popularized gut-punch track “Why”, which talks about walking past unhoused people without doing anything about it, delivered with zero metaphorical padding. In the indie-adjacent sludge / noise rock landscape, it was blunt, ugly, and more inclined to the industrial branch of the genre’s namesake (the band name refers to the toxic waste mounds produced by Oklahoma’s lead-mining factories). Poverty, violence, exploitation and addiction were a few of the discussed topics painting the picture of a place that you don’t really want to live in, detailed by an unfortunate witness with extremely concrete observations about American reality.
That perspective was widened to more global issues of decay on the follow-up album,
Cool World. The foundations of queasy, de-tuned noise-rock held well, but with subtle additional ounces of melody and atmosphere, and an overall excellent delivery that saved them from being a sort of one-album novelty band. I haven't listened to the collaboration with Hayden Pedigo on
In the Earth Again as much as their other material, but still remember being stricken by the duality of sound of the artists involved, creating a mixture of slowcore, post-rock Americana, and discordant drone. In time, I have learned to keep Chat Pile’s records in high regard (to “enjoy” them is the wrong verb here), now being a major voice in the heavy music scene of this generation. Thus, every new release is bound to get under the microscope, as with
Who Loves the Sun, and how well it thrives on newfound clarity.
Right away, it’s best to say that this is the most stylistically open and accessible work to date, but that’s not meant as a knock. As with previous records, the title is, at first glance, almost ironically inappropriate for the music, but it succeeds in capturing the underlying contradiction: there is fairly more light than before in a musical sense, but still very little optimism. Chat Pile has started writing prettier songs, but without becoming a happier band, still pushing their way through late-capitalist rot across a wasteland of focused, cold industrial sludge. The album’s lyrical world is one under surveillance, environmental worry, and how people collectively become accustomed to their own misery (my favorite line, from “Christabel ‘26”:
All they really need / Every drop of blood / All your family's blood / To spit in the face of God). On the front cover, Oklahoma City’s glassy Devon Tower over a visibly deteriorated landscape strikingly delivers the band’s message, and one way or the other, you’ll receive it.
Who Loves the Sun has ten tracks, and is immediately more structurally varied than anything in the catalogue. Openers “Creature” and “Deep Blue” follow quiet-loud-quiet dynamics, combining dissonant chords that could bring Sonic Youth in mind, with the straight-up force of Eyehategod, especially in some moments of high-pitched yelling. While rambling about a society entirely mediated through screens and how catastrophe has become ordinary, Raygun Busch’s vocals already prove pivotal in making the record at least memorable. Between exhausted spoken passages and increasingly distressed screams, he keeps the levels of discomfort high across the whole album, especially at times when you can follow the lyrics. A few instances of straightforward heavy rock riffing paired with gravelly, abrasive barks recall Red Fang’s Bryan Giles (e.g, on “Influence”), though bands like The Melvins and Unsane are the most obvious touchstones.
As always, I’m quite appreciative of these heavier sections, also indicatively like the tense ending of “Shrine”, or the weighted groove metal punch “PEN I S MALL”. By the way, is that someone coughing after lighting it up on that track? “Christabel ‘26” felt to me like Chat Pile’s version of a traditional doom metal track, while the unconventional melodies of “Intruder” are reinforced by additional female vocals (which you will also find in a rather grimy part of “Influence”) in what is the band’s closest approximation of an actual singalong possibility. What might feel like a strange inclusion to
Who Loves the Sun is the third track, “Same Rules”, which is built on a loping, almost trip-hop rhythm and battered bassline that sounds pulled from a decade Chat Pile has no obvious business referencing. Even among bulkier pieces, it totally fits the album.
One of the most difficult stretches the listener will come across is the penultimate track, "Family Funeral". With its counter-intuitive flow, several directional shifts, and disturbing vocals, the band delivers its signature nauseated filth-rock, but this time from the upside down. To me, this is the record’s anti-mainstream treasure and Chat Pile at their mightiest, one of these songs you listen to and then feel violated. Finally, the deconstructed, somber acoustic-based finisher, “October All the Time”, is weirdly unsettling for how calm it tries to appear to be. Personally, it’s my least favorite from the record, but regardless of its music, hearing Busch whisper “everything will be fine” on that track somehow made me feel even worse than before. The aftertaste you’re left with is also a difficult one. It all happens on our watch. The dissolution of “community” from a growingly fractured world, going on in the background while everyone continues scrolling.
On whether Chat Pile are getting softer or not, I’d say that
Who Loves The Sun is a more confident album than a softer one. There are plenty of enormous riffs, varied patterns, grotesque vocals, and terrifically unpleasant lyrics, presented after the band’s legitimate progression since their debut. It's great to see that, after two highly impactful releases, not only do they have more to say, they also have more ways of saying it. I’m positive about how well this will be received by fans, but also hopeful it introduces them to a wider audience. And yet, the title's question therefore remains unanswered. Who loves the sun? Apparently not Chat Pile.
