by Devin Birse (@devvvvi.b)
In recent years, few bands have put noise rock on the map to the extent Chat Pile has. Despite their newfound attention, Chat Pile has stuck to doing what they do best by continuing to evolve and nurture their howling sludge to perfection. Their excellent second LP Cool World is a testament to how well this methodology has paid off. It’s a glorious mix of gothy riffs, nu-metal rhythms, and raw vocals that carry the torch for Albini-influenced noise into an even gnarlier new era.
Right before their tour, I sat down over Zoom with guitarist Luther Manhole, bassist Stin, and singer Raygun Bush to discuss horror in the digital age, the history of the Oklahoma City scene they erupted from, and their new record Cool World.
Chat Pile by Matthew Zargoski
This interview has been shortened for clarity and length.
Devin Birse: Your new album is titled Cool World, which I'm assuming is after the animated film by Ralph Bakshi, why that title in particular?
Stin: It's a few things. First and foremost, it's just kind of funny. It's funny and ironic in the sense that the world is not very cool. There’s an environmentalist message behind it as well. It's not something I think too much about. We just thought it was funny, but it works for an ironic disposition about what the album's about.
Luther Manhole: We had the image first. Stin took that photo. We knew we wanted to use it, so it was about finding words to match the image. Usually, we pick the title from Ray’s list of ideas. We were circling around a couple names and couldn't agree. I came up with a list and had “Cool World” on it, but I took it off because I thought it might be too goofy. But when Ray presented his new list, “Cool World” was on there, and I was like “oh that's some serendipity.” Even he took it as a sign. We don't have title tracks, so it's unrelated words-wise to the rest of the album. We laughed and we were like “Cool World kind of works.” It went from arguing to agreeing in like 10 minutes.
S: I watched a Ralph Bakshi movie last night, actually, Fire and Ice. Have you guys ever seen this movie?
PT: I haven’t seen that one.
S: Frank Frazetta who does the badass Conan illustrations, it's their team. It's this total fantasy thing, it rocks. But the script for it has to be only four pages long. There's very little dialogue in it. It rules.
PT: I was going to say, Cool World is a funny title compared to the seriousness of God’s Country. It interests me as Cool World is such a bleak album. Do you think there are any moments of comedy within the album itself?
LM: It’s less funny. There's stuff like “Funny Man” where there’s some goofy iconography or just the phrase, “I am dog now.” It's very intense on the record and a little meme-able but it’s just kind of the space we've been in. It's a dark time right now. I think it just happened to be that these ten songs didn't have as much comedy. There isn’t a fast food reference on this one.
S: It was just all really organic. I don't think Ray Gun sat and thought, “no, we're going to be serious this time around.” I would agree that I think “Funny Man” probably has the most humor to it, even though it's a very serious song. But yeah, Cool World just doesn't have as much deliberate humour.
PT: Your earlier works are centered around Oklahoma as a landscape. With this album there’s a wider scope, but do you still find that Oklahoma made its way onto the album?
LM: Cool World is not as literally about where we live. Where we live is a microcosm of the world at large. The things that affect the world affect us here at home. As far as the shift towards right-wing fascism, Oklahoma's kind of on the cutting edge. If you want your right wing fascism fresh off the presses, come to Oklahoma where they're putting bibles in schools and abortion is fully illegal.
S: We're like the test market for all that stuff. All these topics hit globally but the same stuff is happening in our neighbourhoods. It’s unavoidable. We’ll always have it visually; things happening right here in our home.
PT: I found God's Country to be an album with a lot of horror to it but kind of slasher film like horror. With Cool World, there’s a lot of heavy grief and anguish. Is that something you guys see within the album yourselves?
Raygun Busch: Absolutely. I mean, there's just so much horror in the world, there always has been. But now we're seeing it on Instagram. It's different now, but I find myself watching and consuming less horror anyway. I’m more about drama this year for whatever reason.
LM: I still have Instagram, There's a lot of musicians and artists on Instagram still, so it's hard to break away from that. Even with that, I’ve muted and blocked so much bullshit. It’s so easy just to see the darkness all day and just stare into the abyss.
S: It’s good to be informed, but it's poisonous to your mental health to just have the drip feed of brutality nonstop. You don't want to bury your head in the sand, but you got to live your life.
RB: In the past, people who lived through hard times didn't have access to this kind of information. We are on a new frontier with the amount of information that we have and what we know.
S: Also, you can see people just panicking about everything too. Shit's bad and we should be concerned, but I don't need to be in the brain of every single person also panicking.
PT: Do you find performing these songs night after night is in any way stressful or do you find it quite cathartic?
LM: I'd say more cathartic for me. It's a good expenditure of energy on stage and it's good to be part of the live performance. Even when it's dark music, it is fun. We're all pretty chill in real life, so it's a way to be weird and intense in ways that you don't get to be in real life.
S: There’s this quote that has haunted me forever from Kim Gordon. It’s something along the lines about how people are paying for live music to watch you be confident. When you walk out on stage, you have to become this other person because that's what people are there for. They want something a little larger than life, something a little more energetic. I don't walk around as the most confident person ever, but when I'm on stage I’m hopefully able to project confidence that isn't necessarily there, you know? I think a lot of that also comes from music’s the subject matter and the intensity of the music we're trying to project.
PT: Do you find the stage names help with that?
S: You know, I would have never actually thought so. I think the honest answer is that, yeah, it kind of does.
LM: You become Stin as soon as you cross onto those boards.
S: Here's the thing that happens to me, for real. Before you actually play the show you have to go on stage and make sure your stuff is all set up right. When I'm doing that, there are people standing in the audience before we're even playing being like ‘“Stin! Stin! Stin!” You realize that you are this character to these people. It does actually help you get into the character of like the person on stage.
PT: Speaking about playing and touring, how have you found taking your music abroad?
S: Oh, the UK seems to love us.
LM: We're always we got to do well enough in the UK so we can leave fucking shithole America. Even if England's not much better, it's at least a little better right now. You know, it's a little better.
PT: [laughs] I mean, yeah it's a little better over here right now for sure.
LM: [laughs] It's a little better right now. We have a great time in the UK. There have been a few moments like when we played in Denmark or Tilburg where we didn't expect the crowd to be so crazy. We’re told even when they love it, the crowds in Europe aren't going to just go super insane a lot of the time, but we've had moshing and people going crazy at shows. It feels like it's been very positive. We haven't done any true mainland European touring yet. That'll start in a couple months. I think people can relate to this stuff even if we make regional music and as it's gotten a little broader. I think people like regionality, it’s weird when you find some specific thing that seems so specific to your area, and then you see someone else talking about something similar where they're from. They really relate to the themes.
S: I think the inverse is kind of true too that our band is very, very Americana. I think that many European people have an interest in American exoticism or whatever, and we probably embody that to a certain degree.
LM: With the car crashes, and the houses, and all the fast food bullshit. Our aesthetic is kind of associated with that terrible, urban decay and billboards and shitty fast food.
PT: I think that's something that a lot of people I know over here who like your music pick up on. Speaking of regionality, you guys have lived in Oklahoma all your lives and you've been playing there for ages. Have you seen much of a change in the scene over the past few years?
S: Yes and no. Yes in the sense that everything is different post-COVID. No, in that I don't feel like we’ve had a direct effect on anything.
LM: There's not really Chat Pile clones in OKC or anything. There's a lot of hardcore bands and there's a lot of bands right now. It seems like the scene is doing well with stuff.
S: Yeah, it's all hardcore music. We're older than most of the people who are young and starting new bands. Peeling Flesh probably have a bigger impact on the local scene than we do, but I don't know. The scene seems to be in the same status that it has been since the post-pandemic. It hasn't really changed much. There really hasn't been a whole lot of upheaval in the types of venues and bands that are around. It's just kind of this steady diet of hardcore.
LM: I think people here now are stoked that there's just a thing when you're from a place like this. There's just people that have Oklahoma City pride. They’re just happy that any band from Oklahoma City has anyone talking about them at all.
PT: A lot of tracks on God’s Country were inspired by films. Were you finding that films were still an influence on the lyrics on Cool World? Or do you feel like you moved away from that?
RB: Film is part of it, but film wasn’t completely driving God's Country. Cool World is sort of the same thing. I just go where the spirit takes me. “I Am Dog Now” is inspired by The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “Camcorder” is just a straight up movie song inspired by Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.
PT: Another thing that really interested me on the album was the use of the word “world,” with the “new world” and the “it's your world” line in “Masc.” Do you feel like in a way you're kind of referring to the same idea of this new world of capitalism across the two songs?
RB: Yeah I love things that can have multiple meanings. It can apply to the literal planet we live on, to your actual social circle, to your reality in your mind, and to actual reality. It can apply to a billion different things. I like to have unifying terms, phrases and stuff like that.
LM: When people really get into your band that rewards them because they can see the lines, themes and motifs that go through different releases. I know for me when I've gotten into bands or series, or movies or directors, it's cool to dissect and find the different things they spin in different ways. We try it sometimes, and some of that stuff even carries over into instrumentals as well. I think when people are interacting with the art it adds another layer.
PT: Were there any new sonic influences on the album from stuff you were listening to?
LM: LM: I was listening to a lot of Shudder To Think when we were writing this so maybe that's where the indie guitar stuff is coming from. Stin and I were listening to a lot of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. I don't know if it comes through a lot on the record, maybe on a song like “Tape.”
S: We were calling that the sleepy time setting. It's hard to pinpoint, cause I'm always listening to a bunch of everything. It’s more like I'll listen to a song and sometimes be like, “man, we need to do something like this.” I'll write the public domain version riff.
LM: I can't really say that the overall album was influenced by anyone in particular. It’s kind of just leaning more into influences we've already had and trying different stuff. We wanted to make it more streamlined than the last one. We didn't want to have a nine-minute, ten-minute long song again. It maybe leans more into the goth. You just notice patterns. It's like, we're halfway through and five songs in, and we’re like “wow, for some reason, I'm just playing all these gothier things this time”. Or melodies that remind me of these 80s bands. You get those throughlines when you're writing songs together at the same time.
PT: As one last question: are there any smaller acts at the moment that you guys have been really enjoying or want people to keep their eyes out for?
LM: Definitely Nightosphere. I know that's going to be one that we say all the time, but they're a band from Kansas City that we have toured with a couple of times or about to go back on the road with them again. They remain unsigned. Nighosphere just put out a cover of “The Killing Moon” by Echo and the Bunnyman, and it's a fantastic cover. Honestly, it's really good. They're amazing and more people should listen to them.
S: Yeah, I'll second Nightosphere for sure. Kansas City in general has a lot of really cool stuff happening there at the moment. There's a band called Nervur that we're friends with. We put a split out with them before. Really love them. Missouri Executive Order 44 is another Kansas City band that's really cool, and you have Flooding as well.
RB: I'll give a shout out to our friend Sleve. He’s the bass player in the band Holy Ghost Tabernacle Choir. He is now dipping his toes and doing electronic music and it's very very good. I'm enjoying it. And check out his band, Holy Ghost Tabernacle choir.
Cool World is out now via The Flenser
Chat Pile:
19/4 - NL - Tilburg - Roadburn festival
20/4 - UK - Brighton - Chalk *
21/4 - UK - London - Earth Hall *
23/4 - UK - Glasgow - QMU *
24/4 - UK - Leeds - Irish Centre *
25/4 - UK - Birmingham - The Crossing *
27/4 - BE - Antwerp - Trix +
28/4 - FR - Paris - Trabendo +
30/4 - CH - Fribourg - Fri-Son +
1/5 - IT - Milan - Legend Club +
3/5 - DE - Karlsruhe - Jubez +
4/5 - DE - Koln - Gebaeude9 +
5/5 - DE - Leipzig - UT Connewitz +
6/5 - DE - Berlin - SO36 +
8/5 - DK - Copenhagen - A Colossal Weekend +
9/5 - SE - Stockholm - Slaktkyrkan +
10/5 - NO - Oslo - Desertfest +
11/5 - NO - Bergen - Landmark +
7/6 - ES - Barcelona - Primavera Sound Festival
8/6 - ES - Barcelona - Primavera Sound City
11/6 - ES - Madrid - Nazca
13/6 - PT - Porto - NOS Primavera Sound
15/6 - FR - Biarritz - Atabal ^
16/6 - FR - Toulouse - Le Rex #
17/6 - FR - Clermont Ferrand - Le Cooperative De Mai #
19/6 - FR - Clisson - Hellfest
* w/ THE HIRS COLLECTIVE
+ w/ Agriculture
^ w/ C.O.F.F.I.N.
# w/ SPY