Chat Pile

Oklahoma City noise-rock heavyweights Chat Pile bring their crushing, cathartic sound to KOKO.

In a world increasingly shaped by disposable content, Chat Pile answers with something defiantly real and organic, a mentality that permeates ‘Who Loves The Sun’, their third full-length record.

Since the band’s formation just over six years ago, the Oklahoma City-based quartet Chat Pile has grown from a scrappy passion project into one of the defining heavy acts to emerge from the 2020s underground. They create a crushing, crass, and cathartic take on noise rock that captures a raw, undeniably human essence in an age marked by technological overreach and the cold state of society. Nothing about ‘Who Loves The Sun’ feels synthetic.

Whereas their debut album, ‘God’s Country’, depicted a particularly American flavor of dread, and the follow up, ‘Cool World’ showed a cruel planet defined by global systemic violence, ‘Who Loves The Sun’ peels the skin back on how collective indifference defines this new century. Spanning imagery of coastlines devouring cities, dead-end jobs, and submission to data-driven inauthenticity, the album dissects the apathy-bloated state of 21st-century existence as a slow-motion apocalypse.

The album remains lyrically and sonically confrontational, but Chat Pile approached the songwriting with hooks in mind, drawing on melodic tones of pre-2000s indie rock, alt-rock, and new wave. ‘Who Loves The Sun’ is deeply human despite its allusions to a dying, divided world.