“Everything will be fine,” Raygun Busch tells us at the end of Who Loves the Sun. “The sun will continue to shine.” It is the kind of reassurance we hear from the institutions that gaslight us: a phrase uttered as cities flood, the wages stagnate, the endless feed refreshes, and another disaster slides beneath our thumb. Chat Pile‘s third full-length is about that practiced numbness—the small acts of compliance and self-erasure that make a slow-motion apocalypse feel like ordinary life. By the time the record closes, Raygun’s platitudes illustrate a world where the sun will continue to shine, but how much of us—how much of our personhood—will remain to see it?
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Chat Pile have never sounded more confident in their sludge-lined brand of noise rock than here, simultaneously their mellowest, moodiest, most vitriolic, and most vicious. Where Cool World explicitly confronted the more overt state-sponsored and interpersonal violence, Who Loves the Sun looks at the subtler harm inflicted by the modern quotidian. It also benefits from immediately following In the Earth Again, the band’s collaboration with Hayden Pedigo, whose fingerpicking style has left an impression on L. Manhole’s playing. More uneasy melodic textures now interrupt the riffs that slam like Godzilla raiding the Rust Belt.
Clanging anvil-strike chords land across muscular blacksmith rhythms, but the band has become more deliberate about when to swing the hammer. Stin’s filthy, Korn-esque bass tone and Cap’n Ron’s tight, unshowy pocket provide the record with a poured concrete foundation even at its most disorienting turns. Chord modulations and tonal shifts on “Shrine” evoke the dissociation many of us rely on to survive, while choruses like the one on “Intruder” linger like a parasite after the record ends. Raygun’s vocals contort between unhinged high screams, wounded wails, and dissociated spoken repetition in his signature monotone drawl. This is Chat Pile’s most melodically legible songwriting to date, but it carries enough sludge to defy any accusations of mainstreaming.
Climate collapse, degraded labor, and digital submission all populate the same poisoned thematic environment. On opener “Creature,” cities disappear under water, ash, and dust. “Deep Blue” finds landfills creeping into homes as we wade further into a blue-light sea of screens to drown. “PEN I S MALL” makes the soul-crushing indignity of hourly labor painfully specific, its grubby folk storytelling featuring a cast of sketchballs and cretins getting high and jerking off at work matches its dissonant, step-by-step trudge. On Who Loves the Sun, the apocalypse is not a mushroom cloud or a plague but ten thousand tiny cuts delivered on an Amazon Prime schedule.
A recurring vocabulary of skulls, shrines, ghosts, and intruders gives the record a haunted internal logic without forcing it into concept-album territory. The skull speaks on “Creature,” becomes a teacher in the collapsed trust and empty ritual of “Shrine,” then finally enters the feed on “Influence.”
It’s on that track that Chat Pile’s ability to make songs sound like their lyrical themes is sharpest. Over combustion-engine-motivated grooves that feel mechanical and toxic-smelling, Raygun describes scrolling past screaming and raising the threshold for what can still disturb us. His “rough beast replies” nods to W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” but the monster at the heart of Who Loves the Sun is no longer slouching toward some distant birth. It is already here, responding to and manipulating us in a horrific feedback loop: the more horror we consume and discard, the more inhuman the system serving it back becomes.
Beyond the screen, these themes find intimate means of expression on tracks like “Family Funeral,” a contemporary sludgy retelling of Medea. The poisoned gown and coronet, the dying bride and father, the murdered sons, and the chariot of the sun make this less a literary Easter egg hunt than an ancient story shown, again, to be timeless. “And though it hurts me / I needed to hurt you” distills one of the Who Loves the Sun’s central cycles: hurt answering hurt, passed down to people who had no part in causing it.
When “October All the Time” promises that everything will be fine, its indie-rock moodiness offers one final mask rather than relief. The unholy signs and shrines remain lodged in the listener’s mind. A dog barks, the sun keeps shining, and the world continues pretending it is not ending. Or it finally gives up caring.
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Who Loves the Sun is available now via The Flenser.
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