Just four years after their debut album God’s Country, Chat Pile return with their third longplayer Who Loves The Sun. It’s a testament to living in the apathy and agony of late-stage capitalism. But between the ugliness and hostility, there’s hope, as the band explains in our interview.
Few bands manage to capture the current feeling of acute existential dread as accurately as Chat Pile. Building a nightmarish soundscape out of sludge, grunge and noise rock, the Oklahoma City residents paint a haunting picture of a working class struggling to navigate the hell of corporatized existence while simply trying to survive. While apathy, indifference and technology taking over our lives are the main themes of their third album Who Loves The Sun (further broadening the Americentric focus of their debut album God’s Country), the band refuses to believe all hope is lost. Bassist Stin explains how the album went from “most evil” to “most catchy”, what role The Velvet Underground and Black Sabbath played, and how the American experience becomes universal.
Stin, when you started working on this album, what vision did you have?
The thing with Chat Pile is that we never have a whole vision before we start. We just jump in together and start writing, and the album presents itself as we go along. An analogy we like to use is that it’s like making a statue out of a block of marble: All you have is this gray slab, and then you start chipping away at it until it starts to represent or embody something. I think at first, our guitar player Luther and I were like: We want this to be the most evil Chat Pile album. And then as we started writing it and working on it, it turned into something totally different. Even when we have minor intentions, it never ends up that way.
What were the ideas and themes that you noticed showing up and reappearing while writing?
It’s almost hard to put a finger on it. We noticed that we were leaning into more traditional verse-chorus-verse type structures, and we were having a lot of fun with that. Deep Blue is the first song that we finished for the record, and I’ve been joking around that that’s like our Billy Squier song because it’s as much of an arena rock song as Chat Pile’s ever gonna write. (laughs) But it was really fun to do that because God’s Country almost has a prog element to it and it’s overly complicated at times. It was cool to just be like: Here’s the big verse, the big chorus, the big stupid drums that you can clap along to. It felt fun to do a song like that through the lens of Chat Pile. That set the tone for things a little bit. We were like: It’s okay if we go Nirvana-style on all the song structures for this record. And then on the lyrical side, when our singer Raygun Busch was putting this all together, I think AI and these evil tech corporations were weighing heavily on his mind.
It’s funny that you talk about traditional song structures and hooks while your music still has this rather disturbing quality to it. A lot of bands of your nature shy away from being catchy …
Oh, we’re very drawn to it. In fact, we complain to each other that it’s so much easier to write a catchy song than it is to try to write something intentionally ugly or off-putting. It’s just the kind of music that we grew up with. I think it’s embedded in us. Stuff like Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, Korn that has very traditional songwriting, but through the lens of this heavy, aggressive type of music. That’s ultimately what’s in all of our souls and what’s easy for us to put out there. But something I’ve noticed with us: We can write a traditional or hooky song, and it can still be upsetting or off-putting because, for one, we play in such a low tuning that no matter what we do, we’re always a little bit out of tune, and that out-of-tuneness creates this disturbing feel to it. I always think of Flipper whose songs are very basic and simple, but they sound so disgusting because of how crazy the tunings are. And then Raygun just has such a unique approach. I think no matter what we write, it’s always gonna feel a little bit insane.
I think making your songs hooky and catchy makes them even more disturbing because they’re not “supposed to” sound like that. It’s like The Cure, who write the sweetest melodies that just make their songs even more crushing.
Yeah, because it sticks with you. It just has a way of penetrating through the noise a little bit, when you can suss out an actual song happening.
I was wondering about the album title, Who Loves the Sun. Is that a reference to The Velvet Underground?
Yeah, it is. But there’s not one focused reason why we picked that for the title. We like that it’s a Velvet Underground reference, and that it’s a Doug Yule song, too. It makes it even weirder that we would pick that title of all the other Velvet Underground options that would be out there. (laughs) It works with a couple of themes: One, it has this vague ecological feel to it. Earlier we were talking about how this is going to be the coolest summer of our lives going forward. So, who loves the sun? But likewise, it evokes this question of “Are we allowed to feel any sense of optimism in times like now, and if not, why even continue?” It’s important in these scary, dark times that we have some positivity and a goal that we’re working towards as far as making things better.
And then also it just matched the picture that we have for the album, too: I was driving around one day, and this building was on fire. I thought, oh no, this would be a perfect Chat Pile photo opportunity. Put the pedal to the metal, ran home, got my camera, and then took a picture of the building while it was still smoldering. I was able to frame it with a homeless person’s tent in the foreground, and then this giant building that’s kind of the center of our downtown called the Devon Tower. That’s an oil company, and they built this thing like 15 years ago. It’s been mostly vacant the entire time that it’s been there. And then we just got word that this company is leaving Oklahoma to go to Texas, meaning that this building is pretty much going to be empty, so it all kind of fit together in that way.
Regarding the question of hopefulness, this record deals a lot with the apathy and indifference that many of us are feeling right now because I think we’re all just overwhelmed. Do you think Chat Pile is a way to help you get out of this apathy and confront it?
For me, it’s more of a catharsis. Like you said, all this negative information that we’re fed all the time, and all the bad news that we get, feels so overwhelming, and I like to think of our band as a vessel to scream back at it a little bit because sometimes that’s all you can do. A lot of these things are well beyond our personal ability to fix. So sometimes all you can do is just sit back and cry a little bit about things. But that said, we are not a nihilistic band at all. We want things to be better, and we see a path for that. And not that Chat Pile’s music in any way is going to fix the world, but maybe we can help make people aware of certain issues or share in their frustrations. Maybe there’ll be some level where we can help people unite against certain causes. I’m under no delusions that Chat Pile is going to fix the world. But if we can contribute even slightly, that’s meaningful to me.
The album captures this state of being torn between feeling like you can’t really change anything and being unwilling to just sit back and do nothing. At least you have to try, for your own sanity’s sake.
That’s exactly how we feel. For instance, our album release show is going to happen on September 12 here in Oklahoma City, and we’ve tried to make it as much as we can a fundraising event for Sisu Youth Services, which is a local charity that helps unhoused youth with a transitional housing option, and then they also give them life skills to figure out how to get their own apartment or their first job. It’s something that’s really near and dear to our heart. And again, it’s not going to fix all the problems, but it’s a way that we can at least use the lucky position that we’re in to hopefully help our city and make our community a little bit better.
Talking a bit more about references: You commented that the album “doesn’t necessarily sound like Black Sabbath’s Dehumanizer, however, it is very much in line thematically with the Dehumanizer album cover.”
That album cover is so sick. It’s like a Grim Reaper guy who’s also a robot man. And then the guy he’s killing is hooked up to a computer, and he’s kind of turning into a computer or whatever. It’s really badass. And it does relate thematically to our record because our record, in many ways, is about how being too sucked into social media and doomscrolling, and just technology as a whole, is completely isolating all of us and taking our humanity away. There’s got to be a better way to live without being completely leashed to our phones. It’s kind of a cliché, and people have been saying this forever, since smartphones and stuff came out. But the problems that we’re experiencing right now are so much bigger than how quaint it was ten years ago when people were just distracted at dinner. Now it’s getting to the point where AI and the way the algorithm works is just making people truly stupid. There’s scientific evidence that it’s shrinking our brains and making us less competent at problem-solving and retaining information, or even our self-image and our self-worth. We’ve got to get to a place where we are less reliant on this technology and less reliant on it to be a boredom killer. Because boredom is a good thing. It can inspire you to take action in your life or create something. If you’re just always taking the path of least resistance and looking at your phone, it’s gonna erase all that.
I guess almost in response to that, you were really focused on making an organic album. What does that mean to you, and what creative and technological choices did you make to achieve that?
From a technological standpoint, we do use the laptop – we record ourselves, so that is involved. But the way we try to make it more human is we don’t play to a click track. We record all of us live in a room, with the exception of the vocals; those come later. But what you’re hearing is literally us playing in the room together. There’s no quantizing; the pieces aren’t stitched together. You’re hearing a full performance from us, and then on top of that, we try to have as few effects and plugins as possible on the tracks themselves. All you’re hearing is a little bit of EQ and compression, and that’s it. And then, stepping away from the technology side of things, the way we bring a lot of organic feel to the record is that there’s no singular songwriter in our band. We all come together, and it’s all four of us contributing to the songs. So, it’s not like this thing where I write a guitar part to a drum machine and then email it to another guy who puts something on it. We are figuring this out together. It couldn’t be more of an in-the-room, in-the-moment group effort making these songs.
You also recorded Same Rules on a four-track tape recorder, right?
We actually did a lot of experimenting on four-track for this record. In fact, I’m working right now on putting a compilation together of all that stuff that didn’t make it to the record. With Same Rules, we literally had a Tascam four-track. For the first three-fourths of that song, before the whole band kicks in, that’s just Luther doing guitar, bass, and he had a little drum machine, and then we had Raygun do vocals over that. So, it’s about as primitive a recording as you can get.
Did you find that limiting at all?
It is by its very nature limiting, but it’s good. Another problem with technology is that it gives you, at least in the context of making music, infinite options all at your fingertips. And I think sometimes people get really trapped in this choice paralysis when it comes to what they can and can’t do. Sometimes it’s good to have limits because it just stops you from overthinking things. At a certain point, you just have to say this is good enough, or this is what this is, and move on. And with four-track, that’s it. Once it’s put down, outside of very crudely affecting the EQ of it, that’s all you can do. You’re just stuck with it being what it is.
I feel I see more analog recording again, or artists recording digitally and then running it through a tape recorder because I think we’re all starving to hear or feel something real – something with imperfections and grittiness, something that’s not too polished because everything is so fucking polished right now …
Yeah, even bands that are good right now are still a little over-polished. It feels one or two degrees too removed from reality, and it kind of blows my mind because we’re recording digitally, we’re recording into a laptop and stuff, but somehow I feel like our music sounds way more analog than any of that stuff.
Your music has a very cinematic quality in terms of storytelling and worldbuilding. Do you have some movie recommendations for people to get into the mindset of this album?
There are infinite answers because all of us are movie nerds to a certain degree, and Raygun specifically, since he writes all the lyrics. But here’s one I actually watched last night, and it’s like the tenth time I’ve seen it, and I love it. I would recommend it to any Chat Pile fan out there: The Stepfather. It’s kind of a slasher movie from the 80s. It feels like you’re watching a Hallmark or Lifetime movie, but then it goes super hard into the violence and disturbing nature. The juxtaposition of the beautiful and the ugly going on in this movie is so much fun and so creepy.
I just watched The Burbs with Tom Hanks and thought it was a good fit as well.
Yes, that’s very thematically in line with it. Absolutely, they’re both about how beneath the veneer of these perfect suburban households lies darkness.
It also relates to something you said about Chat Pile being a very American band. How do you think the American point of view or life experience differs from others?
A lot of it comes down to aesthetics, which I know sounds a little superficial. American life is just so much different than European life in the sense that, where we live, you have to drive a car to go and do anything. It’s impossible to live life without a car. Urban sprawl is a problem. We don’t build concentrated, dense urban areas; for the most part, we build out, and Oklahoma City in particular is one of the largest cities on the planet, just from the amount of acreage. With that in mind, everything you see in your life is just strip malls and big-box chain stores and chain restaurants. It’s this very homogenized, corporatized factory way of living life. So, when you look around you and feel inspired by the kind of ugliness of that, that just feels very uniquely American. And what’s crazy is now that we’ve done so much touring and I’ve seen so much of the world, I feel even more that way because truly Europe seems like heaven on earth to me, compared to where we live. Even within America, Oklahoma City is one of the worst cities. It sucks so bad. The reason we stick around is that it’s cheap to live here. And of course, everyone we know and our family and stuff are all here. So in that sense, it feels like our experiences would be so localized. But I guess there’s still a universal quality to the frustration that we’re expressing that appeals to everybody. What helps us, too, is we’re talking about how mad we are at America, and everyone else on the planet is also mad at America. (laughs)
It’s only been four years since you released God’s Country. You kind of blew up with music that is quite hard to approach and digest. Why do you think so many people feel drawn to it – is it this sort of frustration that resonates?
That’s as close of an answer that I’ve been able to come up with, is just that anyone who’s paying attention right now probably feels scared, angry, and alienated in a very specific but universal way. I don’t want this to sound hubristic or anything, but I feel like maybe in some way we are doing a better job than other bands of expressing that exact feeling, like there’s a very specific type of existential dread that we’re able to get across that seems to be relatable to other people. None of what we’re writing is steeped in fantasy or heavy metaphor. We’re just telling it like it is, and I think that might be refreshing for people. But generally speaking, why we are popular and having a moment like this, your guess is as good as mine. I just feel like we won the lottery or something.
I’ve been reading the comment sections, and I’m gonna wrap up by asking the question that everybody else is asking: Is the song Same Rules connected to the upcoming Digger movie? That seems to be driving people insane.
(laughs) It is one hundred percent not. The story behind that music video is that there’s a comedian named Bug Man, and he’s a very niche performer. Not many people know about him, but the people who do are obsessed with him. We happened to strike up a friendship with this guy and asked him to do a music video for us. We were getting really close to the deadline, and we were like, “Hey, Bug Man, are you still making that video for us?” He took a minute, and then he was like, “Yeah, I’m going to do a parody of Digger with Tom Cruise”, and we were like, “Oh, okay, that is the most Bug Man thing we have ever heard. Just go with it, dude. Have fun.” We thought he was going to do a parody, but he just full-on recreated the logo and everything, which was even funnier to us. We knew it would be confusing, but again, we would not expect anything less from Bug Man than to have a super confusing music video that references something that in two months nobody is even going to remember.
