An ethereal, swelling synth pad invites us into “Cool World,” the brand new sophomore album from OKC metal breakouts Chat Pile, and for 15 short seconds, you might think that their surprise international success has led to an infusion of mainstream beauty and accessible atmospherics.
You’d be wrong.
Before you can get too comfortable, they’re crashing back into the depths, heavy as ever and possibly even more despondent than ever before.
It’s been a long couple of years since Chat Pile’s full-length debut, “God’s Country,” dropped in 2022, with a world’s worth of new wars, new horrors, and new pitiful political posturing, but also, an explosion of new respect for the same nu-metal and 90s alt-metal acts that drive their sound.
Maybe because of all of those elements combined, the band’s overtly bleak – yet admittedly oddly groovy – sound struck a major chord in the metal world, garnering them loads of “best of” placements, international festival slots, and a string of sold-out gigs over the past two years.
So, by the time “Cool World” finally dropped last week, preceded by a handful of buzz-making singles and videos, it was easily hailed as the most anticipated underground metal album of the year.
And if what you were anticipating is a bracingly internal and soul-crushing collection of hopelessness anthems, then it’s safe to say it lives up to the hype.
The entire album feels more focused and coherent than its predecessor, but that’s not to say it’s any less adventurous or varied.
While they’re still covering everything from sludge-metal to post-punk to straight-up noise-rock, it all feels more evenly distributed, maybe even more balanced. There are fewer neck-breaking turns and way more dense, unsettlingly hypnotic, scathing soundscapes that, once established, only become more oppressive and overwhelming.
Tracks barely even break, either starting the instant another one ends or just fully overlapping with one another, inescapable and unrelenting.
Which is all a pretty perfect accompaniment to the album’s lyricism.
Admittedly, there’s nothing quite as bluntly confrontational here as the previous album’s “why do people have to live outside?” refrain from “Why?,” but it feels like that’s more a testament to how internalized and self-deprecating singer Raygun Busch’s songwriting is this time around.
Fewer tracks feel outwardly directed, with the horror and hatred that so often define a Chat Pile song stemming less from looking out at the world and more from staring down the abyss inside.
Even the most overtly anti-war track, “Shame,” feels less about the politics or seething anger of indiscriminate bombing and death and more about the abject helplessness and inevitable guilt that comes to the survivors.
That song also offers what may be the album’s finest lyric:
“All tears flow from the same source.”
It might as well be the mantra of the entire record, each song drawing its own parallels and connections between the sadness of hate, the sadness of inadequacy, the sadness of rage, of guilt, of faithlessness, and the sadness of, well, sadness.
Throughout, Busch leans fully into his well-developed bipolar vocal persona, knee-jerking between dead-eyed monotone and pained, pleading wails, often repeating lines over and over in succession like the intrusive thoughts of a paranoid.
Past Chat Pile releases have seen some big doses of absurd, nihilist sarcasm with lines like “send my body to Arby’s” and the now near-legendary “Grimace smoking weed,” but that’s almost non-existent on “Cool World.”
Maybe there’s just less room for that right now. Maybe the realities of the world have become so horrifying that there’s just less absurdity to find in them. Maybe they’ve become so absurd that it’s just no longer worth it to point it out.
The sarcasm of “Cool World” practically begins and ends with the album’s title.
It’s an album of bone-shattering intensity and unexpectedly poetic brutality, anchored by trance-inducing rhythmic riffs and jagged, atonal anti-melodies.
It’s an album largely devoid of subtlety, of hope, and of respite.
It’s truly an album for our times.
“Cool World” by Chat Pile is available everywhere now from The Flenser.
Follow Chat Pile online at @chatpileband on Instagram.
You can find out about local music and performance happenings in the OKC metro weekly in this music column by Brett Fieldcamp. | Brought to you by True Sky Credit Union.
Brett Fieldcamp is our Arts and Entertainment Editor. He has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for 15+ years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
