Oklahoma City, OK · noise rock · sludge

Chat Pile

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Oklahoma's nightmare-noise auteurs — grinding, harrowing songs about American rot, critically adored precisely because they refuse any comfort.

Chat Pile formed in Oklahoma City in February 2019, taking their name from the piles of mining waste left across the state's north-east. The four members perform under pseudonyms, Raygun Busch on vocals, Luther Manhole on guitar, Stin on bass and Cap'n Ron on drums, adopted early on to keep their day jobs separate from the band. The members grew up scattered around Oklahoma, in Ponca City, Moore and Asher.

The band play a heavy, dissonant strain of noise rock, drawing on sludge metal and the abrasive 1990s guitar bands often filed under pigfuck, with distorted bass well forward in the mix and vocals that shift between speech, muttering and screaming.

The lyrics deal with homelessness, addiction, poverty and violence in the American Midwest and South, often in blunt, specific detail. Their records have drawn substantial critical attention, and the band's discomforting subject matter is central to how they are received.

Chat Pile self-released two EPs, This Dungeon Earth and Remove Your Skin Please, in 2019 before signing to the label The Flenser in 2020. Their debut single was a cover of Sepultura's "Roots Bloody Roots," and their debut album, God's Country, released in 2022, earned a Best New Music tag from Pitchfork. A second album, Cool World, followed in 2024.

In 2025 the band started their own imprint, Dungeon Earth, releasing tapes of ambient and improvised material left over from the Cool World sessions. They also released a collaborative album with guitarist Hayden Pedigo, In the Earth Again, put out jointly by The Flenser and the label Computer Students.

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noise rocksludge