CHAT PILE - WHO LOVES THE SUN - FLENSER

In a world increasingly shaped by disposable content, Chat Pile answers with something defiantly real and organic, a mentality that permeates Who Loves The Sun, their third full-length record.

Since the band's formation just over six years ago, the Oklahoma City-based quartet Chat Pile has grown from a scrappy passion project of four local film and music enthusiasts into one of the defining heavy acts to emerge from the 2020s underground. Ray B. (vocals), L. Manhole (guitar), Stin (bass), and Cap’n Ron (drums)’s crushing, crass, and cathartic take on noise rock resonates in this cracked reality. It captures a raw, undeniably human essence that’s increasingly fleeting in an age marked by ceaseless torrents of algorithmic slop, technological overreach, and the cold, crestfallen state of society. Nothing about Who Loves The Sun feels synthetic.

Whereas their debut album God’s Country depicted a particularly American flavor of dread, and the follow up Cool World showed a cruel planet defined by global systemic violence, Who Loves The Sun now peels back the skin on how a collective indifference for a decaying world defines this new century. Touring off the back of their previous albums in part lent itself a confidence in the universality of their music. Stin comments, “I’ve always felt that Chat Pile is such an American concept thematically, but it seems like that’s not particularly true - people all over the world are resonating with what we have to say.” Spanning imagery of coastlines devouring cities as a result of inaction on climate change, the dread of working dead-end jobs, and the species’ collective submission to data-driven inauthenticity, Who Loves The Sun depicts the common experience of existing in a doom loop which feeds the malaise that permeates all aspects of our lives.

Reaching into the collective consciousness to commiserate and carouse, Chat Pile now dissects how the apathy-bloated state of 21st-century existence is an active, slow-motion apocalypse, threads of which are woven through the album’s ten tracks. The album is lyrically and sonically as aggressive and confrontational as ever, but here Chat Pile approached the record's songwriting with hooks in mind, drawing on the melodic tones of pre-2000s indie/alt-rock and new wave. Moments like the repeated, blood-soaked vocal passages on the thunderous dirge “Christabel ‘26” or the jittery guitar work preceding the grimy steamroller of a chorus on the blue-light soaked nightmare of “Deep Blue” are just a sampling of this dynamic in action. Stin comments on this new embrace of melody and hooks, “I know no one on earth will agree with this, but I feel like this album has more of a classic alt rock or indie rock vibe than our previous records. Luther’s guitar work is the most XTC-sounding it’s ever been, and Raygun is definitely approaching this album with more hooks in mind.” 

Luther adds “Everyone in our band listens to a ton of different stuff, and one of the most fun puzzles in writing music is figuring out how to take influences from really disparate things or genres that you wouldn’t associate with us and turning them into Chat Pile songs.” From a 4-track tape recorder on “Same Rules” to concoct the eerie trip-hop beat underpinning the track’s lyrical exploration of isolation to the softly sung croons and strummed acoustic guitars on the hauntingly triumphant closer, “October All The Time”, Who Loves The Sun, despite its allusions to a dying, divided world, is deeply human. 

Further hammering point home are the handful of guest contributions from other artists on the record, with Nightosphere vocalists Claire Hannah and Brittany Sawtelle lending their otherworldly harmonies to elevate the hooks of “Intruder” and “Influence,” Following last year’s collaborative LP In the Earth Again, Hayden Pedigo returns on “Family Funeral,” lending the track an experimental, spectral flourish.

The perfect allegory for the thematic essence of Who Loves The Sun is the photo embossed on the record’s cover. As with much of Chat Pile’s work, Oklahoma City itself looms over the album like a character, its sprawling isolation, economic contradictions, and underlying sense of decay embedded in the fabric of the record. Devon Tower, a glassy, largely vacant monolith of a building, looms alone high above the Oklahoma City skyline, while an unknown burnt-out home or storefront envelops the foreground. Devon Tower was originally owned by the Devon Energy Company, who announced they were leaving Oklahoma last year. A monument to empty promises stands without a care in the world, while it's only a matter of time before the blight it was responsible for swallows it up, too.