When we checked in on the then-rising Oklahoma City noise-rock wunderkinds just two years ago, Chat Pile were riding the unlikely high of their debut album, God’s Country, even as three of its four members were pushing 40.
The seismic shifts the OKC noisemakers have navigated over their brief arc as a band have been nothing short of life-changing. Consider their trajectory from affable, blue-collar punk outsiders shut out of gigs in their own hometown scene to critically-acclaimed band earning spots on year-end best-of lists for God’s Country and playing packed venues and festivals around the world—all within five years.
For the lovable miscreants in Chat Pile–vocalist Raygun Busch, guitarist Luther Manhole, bassist Stin, and drummer Cap’n Ron–their feel-good rise rolls on. In the subsequent time leading up to their sophomore full-length Cool World, three quit their day jobs, making the transition to full-time musicians. Having logged time in fledgling local bands before Chat Pile’s inception and late-stage breakthrough, Raygun, on the cusp of his 40th birthday (he was hitting the milestone the day after our video call), beams with genuine gratitude. “Tomorrow, I’m turning 40 so I’ve been working at music my whole life and just doing music because I love to make music and love to make art,†he says. “I feel very privileged and blessed to be where I’m at right now. That we got to do God’s Country at all, it’s still kind of amazing to me.â€
Despite expectations being high for the much-hyped Cool World, don’t fret—it’s the same ol’ Chat Pile. All the relatable average Joe qualities remain intact: the goofy pseudonyms; the horror film fandom; Raygun’s Rollins-esque no-shirt-and-shorts onstage uniform and in-between songs shtick onstage; Cap’n Ron’s signature hockey jerseys.
Raygun’s down-to-earth attitude reflects Chat Pile’s overall vibe. “I’ve just always related to bands that are more themselves. I’m just gonna go out there with my slides on, my shorts, and that’s just how I’m gonna do it,†he explains. “I was just listening to Built to Spill’s Keep It Like a Secret. Doug Martsch, I’ve always looked up to him. He’s just kind of a bald, normal dude. He smokes a lot of weed, I guess, and just writes beautiful music that I love. The Replacements were a huge band for me growing up. I’ve always gravitated more towards that versus any kind of glam or posturing.â€
God’s Country lived up to that vision. It was the sound of four working class pals from the Plains dredging up an ungodly, jackhammering, Big Black-ish and grunge-tilted racket that balanced their gory flick addiction with acknowledgement of real-life struggles like the homeless crisis. Cool World follows a similar blueprint, both sonically and thematically. “This album has a lot to do with war and how it affects people, both here and abroad and how we view war and how it’s normalized in our society,†says Busch. “That’s one of the bigger themes of the record and that’s obviously inspired by everything we see in the news every day.â€
He continues: “All this stuff was ramping up in October [of 2023] when we were on tour. Then there’s all this other stuff happening; it’s not just Gaza and the West Bank, although that is the atrocity that we are all seeing and hopefully we are all watching—at the very least, keeping our eyes open about what horrible things [are happening] and being angry about it. Personally, I want more people to be angry about what’s happening—bare minimum.â€
Creatively, what jumps out on Cool World are behemoth and nasty riffs that nod to the early years of Seattle grunge bands like TAD and Nirvana, both Chat Pile favorites. In fact, they recently covered “Scentless Apprentice†as a New Noise Magazine exclusive track. Busch admits that Nirvana is one of a trifecta of bands the four members of Chat Pile actually agree on (the other two being Rage Against The Machine and Sonic Youth). As far as Nirvana’s influence on Cool World, bassist Stin admits it’s inescapable for it to not seep into their sound: “It’s just the age we are and where we grew up. It’s never gonna leave us—you’re just gonna default to making music that way.â€
The ingenious simplicity of Nirvana may have influenced Cool World, but you won’t find any Seattle grunge classics scattered about Chat Pile’s Bandcamp picks. Instead, they went deep–and eclectic–on their favorites, running the gamut from vaporwave, grindcore, doom metal, avant-garde jazz, and more.
Raygun Busch
Astrid Sonne
Great Doubt
Vinyl LP
“For me, so far, it’s in the running for album of the year, in my opinion. I think it’s fantastic. It’s just very spare avant-garde pop music. She, before, had done all-instrumental, very experimental stuff, and this is still very experimental but she’s singing on it. I think it’s just an excellent record. I really like it.
I was looking for just experimental music, just digging and trying to find new music. I was listening to Carmen Villain, some album that came out two years ago that I love. I thought about putting it on this list. Then from similar artists, from her stuff, I think I found Astrid Sonne and when this album came out, I listened to it and I was, like, ‘Holy shit, this is good.’â€
Eyeliner
Buy Now (Deluxe Edition)
Vinyl LP, Cassette
“I was doing research about vaporwave because I had heard some vaporwave song and the two artists I love from that genre are completely different. It was White Banshee and I thought about doing that, too, but I went with [Eyeliner] because this album is so fun. I was listening to it again when I was making this list, and I was, like, ‘Is this one of the best records of the decade? Maybe!’ Maybe my favorite? I don’t know. It’s so playful, it’s dark and mysterious but it’s also mischievous and fun. It’s so silly…’Toy Dog,’ the opening track…it’s so stupid, you know, but in a delightful way. It’s definitely my favorite electronic record in a long time. It would really be up there for me. I think it’s a masterpiece. It’s so fun, a good fun record. I recommend it highly, for sure.â€
Young Galaxy
Ultramarine
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
“I was really, like, ‘Oh, I could take this opportunity to talk about this band’ because I think they are just a super underrated group. They are on hiatus now, I think. They have good albums before this one. Ultramarine is when they become excellent, in my opinion. The one before it is pretty good and the one before is alright but Ultramarine and then Falsework and then Down Time, which I think is the final record, they’re all these masterpieces. They remind me of OK Computer–Kid A–Amnesiac Radiohead, The Sophtware Slump Grandaddy…stuff like that where it’s like these sad songs about living in the future. Young Galaxy is one of the only bands, like pop groups, I know that have songs that address climate change. They’re cool. ‘New Summer’ is a pop song about climate change. They’re like the Eurythmics reborn. I really like them a lot. That album is a masterpiece. I wanted to use my time to tell people about it so they’ll check it out because I think this album is vastly underrated.â€
Stin
Nightosphere
3 Way Split
Cassette
“The reason I picked this one is because it’s actually a three-way split with three different bands from Kansas City. It means a lot to me because I really think that Kansas City might be one of the best music cities in America right now and has been for a couple years. There’s just so many great bands coming out of that area. On that split, you’ve got a band called Abandoncy and then Flooding and, of course, Nightosphere. Nightosphere holds a special place in our hearts. Katabasis, their album that they put out, is easily my favorite album that came out last year. We asked them to do four shows with us around the time of the release and they just blew us away how great they are live. So, we invited them back on tour when we did the Southeast earlier this year, had a great time and we’ve become really good friends with them. I could have picked that [Katabasis] but I wanted to go a little bit broader with it.
“Mainly, it’s just important to me that people put their eyes on Kansas City right now because there’s just so many amazing bands. Nerver is from there, who we’ve put a split out with before, there’s a band called Missouri Executive Order 44 which has members from the band Bummer. They split off into a couple bands and that’s one of the bands. That album came out this year. Actually, it just came out a couple weeks ago and it’s incredible, too. It’s just such a prolifically amazing region that, and I’ll count it as being like… Oklahoma City counts as part of the region as well. That’s why I picked that one.â€
M.S.W.
Hell III
Vinyl LP, Cassette
“M.S.W., that’s actually the guy’s moniker. He has an umbrella of projects. This album in particular, Hell III, is part of a trilogy he calls Hell. I genuinely with all my heart think Hell III might be the greatest and most important heavy metal release of the last 15 years or so, at least artistically speaking. I can’t speak to how popular it is. I know they played Roadburn and some other festivals, and people know who they are. But there’s just something about that record in particular that I think is so powerful and so forward-thinking in terms of the doom metal genre.
“I have a goofy story about that album, which is I’m a big hiker. I love to hike and make a point to go to national parks as often as I can. I went to Zion National Park and I listened to that album while I was hiking around and I had one of the most profoundly emotional experiences of my life. Luckily, I was alone so no one had to witness it [laughing]. I’ll forever connect that album to being in the middle of Zion and just how perfectly it matched. That album is incredible. I would put it maybe in one of my top five albums of all time. When it comes to any artistic endeavors I am embarking on, I can only hope to aspire to something that powerful.
“My hope is that maybe we [Chat Pile] get put on a festival together one day. That would be awesome. So, M.S.W., if you’re seeing this, you are on my bucket list artists to see live.â€
Kaleidoscope
Volume 3
“I have to admit that these guys are a bit mysterious to me. I don’t know their full backstory. I think this one came out in 2017, but I’ll say from 2015 to 2019 there was this huge upswing in this art-punk music that was coming out and Oklahoma City, weirdly enough, was a big hotbed of that type of music, at least in terms of bands coming here. We had a big festival that would happen every year called Everything is Not O.K. I call it ‘Maximum Rocknroll music,’ like that type of punk [laughs]. That stuff was really popular for a while, to the point where it’s been memed a little bit. If you’re familiar with the egg punk versus chain punk…basically what it boils down to is during this explosion of all these punk rock bands, there was one side of it that was more like traditionally hardcore, leather jacket, tough guy kind of stuff and then sort of Devo-leaning art-punk stuff. That’s the stuff that I was into and I really think that Kaleidoscope was at the top of the pyramid, in terms of that little scene that was going on.
“That album, in particular, there’s just something really cool and magical about it. It’s very clang-y but it’s catchy. There’s a song on it called ‘Cloud Control I,’ which is the fourth track on the record, I think, is maybe the best song of the entire genre–like to come out of that era of those bands. That song is so incredible. It needs to be on a plaque somewhere.
Cap’n Ron
Bruford Levin Upper Extremities
Bill Bruford Tony Levin with David Torn Chris Botti
Bill Laswell & Tony Williams
Arc of the Testimony
“Jazz fusion and prog is definitely what I listen to most. And Phish also. These days I don’t really listen to a whole lot of new music between my job and the band. I have this huge playlist of jazz fusion that I just pop on when I’m driving around—mainly just based off my influences, like Bill Bruford and Tony Williams, both huge influences for me.
“These aren’t my favorite releases of theirs, per se, but I do feel like these two releases do highlight a lot of where they shine and it’s also two sides of the same coin, sort of. I feel like Bruford’s a little more focused and groove-oriented and Tony Williams tends to be a lot more all over the place. He reminds me of Keith Moon, just a very unique style—of course coming from traditional jazz. Bruford is part of King Crimson’s best releases. I got to see Tony Levin live with King Crimson several years ago and he’s just a phenomenal player all around, pulling that Chapman Stick out. I generally gravitate more towards the drummers.â€
Luther Manhole
KostnatÄ›nÃ
Hrůza zvÃtÄ›zÃ
Compact Disc (CD)
“I really like that dissonant style of death metal and black metal. I’m typically not into ‘shreddy’ guitar, but it has an avant-garde-ness to it where if you’re getting really in the weeds, it’s kind of microtonal in some ways. Some of that stuff just really appeals to me, but there’s still these really cool melodic progressions through all of it. I picked their first album, Hrůza zvÃtÄ›zÃ. It’s in Czech, but they’re from America. The word I use for this type of music a lot is ‘swirly,’ it’s very swirly to me. That’s the type of stuff we don’t fully get in Chat Pile but I like to try and get some of those kinds of dissonant chords in there. There’s an older EP song of ours called ‘Davis’ that’s maybe the closest we get to that, or on this new record, there’s some parts of ‘No Way Out,’ the [album] closer, that’s kind of like that type of stuff for me. Bands like Krallice, as well, stuff like that. Artificial Brain is another. KostnatÄ›nà is probably more on the avant-garde side than some of that. Since it’s a one-person DIY thing, I associate a lot of that type of stuff with Bandcamp as well. When we first started the band, we put our stuff up on Bandcamp because we self-recorded all that stuff—that’s just an easy way to get your music out there.
“I learned about [KostnatÄ›nÃ] just through music communities online. There’s some metal discords and Rate Your Music and places like that. It’s not very well-known but I heard it and I just think it’s…sick. This is kind of the one where if I get to pick a few records for a thing, maybe people haven’t heard this and it’s pretty cool in the sphere of metal music.â€
Unfun
Sick Outside View
“One of my favorite bands ever is Jawbreaker. My cousin, who’s like a sister to me, is ten years older than me and she has a Jawbreaker tattoo in her 40s. They were just a big band for me.
“I bought [Sick Outside View by Unfun] on Bandcamp, and I have it saved in my phone. That’s a record that you can pretty much only find on there [Bandcamp] now unless you have a physical release from Discogs or whatever because it’s so random. I guess it’s technically pop-punk but it’s kind of like a post-hardcore record, too, or just a punk record. It has some melody in there and stuff. I think it’s a super-noisy kind of version of that, too, which I like. This doesn’t really sound like us but I think they also are interested in making catchy stuff with noisy stuff, that kind of mixture, because this record’s pretty blown out when you listen to it. It’s pretty loud, and it’s meant to be listened to loud as well. It’s on the abrasive side and I think it’s a really cool record, and it reminds me of one of my favorite bands, Jawbreaker.
Nasum
Shift
T-Shirt/Shirt
“They’re just my favorite grindcore band ever and probably in my top five bands ever. This is a great record of theirs. It’s only on Bandcamp, it’s not on the other streaming platforms. That’s pretty much why I mentioned this one. They only have four LPs. They’re all amazing. They’re more listenable than some grindcore, maybe. Some people don’t like that they’re not as absolutely extreme but I just think they write some of the best riffs ever. They’ve been broken up since the mid-2000’s because their vocalist [Mieszko Talarczyk] died in the tsunami in Thailand [in 2004]. He was there vacationing and died in it so that broke up the band, basically.
Shift, the one I picked, is their last album. It’s awesome, it’s 24 songs and still 37 minutes only, a lot of [songs] in the one-minute range but it just goes hard. They have cool politics, too. Helvete, the album before that, is one of my favorite heavy records ever and Shift is too. They’re a very cool band. I wish I could have seen them when they were around, but they broke up when I was 15. They did not come to Oklahoma from Sweden to play. I don’t know if grindcore was that popular enough here for that type.â€
