A few weeks ago, a new billboard appeared in downtown Oklahoma City. Positioned atop a nondescript Mexican restaurant advertising “OKC’s Best White Queso and Margaritas,” the advert featured a fisheye photo of a group of scruffy-looking men standing in front of an enormous cross. White letters spell out a cryptic message about the impending release of Chat Pile’s new album, Cool World. All the other ads nearby are for ambulance chasing lawyers and medical marijuana, emphasising how odd it is to see Chat Pile, a gnarly noise rock band, getting the same sky-high treatment. The billboard marks yet another unexpected landmark in the quartet’s rise from hobbyists to heavy music stars. “I feel like the label did it just because they knew we would think it’s funny,” chuckles guitarist Griffin “Luther Manhole” Sansone as we drive past it. “My parents do think I am fully famous now, though.”
They’re not exactly pop stars yet, but Chat Pile have had an awfully good run given their humble beginnings. Founded in 2019 by bassist Austin “Stin” Tackett, Sansone, drummer Aaron “Cap’n Ron” Tackett, and vocalist Randy “Raygun Busch” Heyer, the band was never meant to be a big deal. “It literally was an activity in the way that a board game night would be, or a bad movie night, which is what we were doing at the time,” says Stin. All four friends had known one another for years (the Tacketts are brothers), and came out of the same Oklahoma City independent music scene. The band’s name is a homage to the toxic byproducts left behind by the area’s heavy metal mines, and the members’ stage names initially served a purely practical purpose: making it tougher for their employers to find out what they were up to on their days off.
Chat Pile’s sound is difficult and mesmerising, a sonic garbage sculpture mashed together by 30- and 40-somethings raised on 90s metal and grunge in one of America’s most conservative states. In 2022, the band released their first full-length, God’s Country, a corrosive metallic ode to industrial decay, the horrors of the American political landscape, and the sinister emptiness of the Oklahoma plains.
On its follow-up, Cool World, Chat Pile serve up an urgent, disorienting listen, one that expands beyond the purely American horror of God’s Country to paint a bleak vision of a world in crisis. Lyrically speaking, Raygun pulled inspiration from authors such as Tolstoy, Voltaire, Nawal Al Saadawi, and Shakespeare, as well as a litany of arthouse films – August Underground, Beatriz at Dinner, Frownland, and many more. “This album is mostly about war and violence, and how we all are under some form of violence in our lives, whether it be imposed by the state or fellow citizens,” Stin says. “Being alive is kind of painful, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way.”
A shared love for terrible 80s slasher movies, cringe-inducing music videos, and oddball pop culture ephemera melded with the band’s own offbeat musical influences to create Chat Pile’s sludgy, off-kilter sound. Despite the outfit’s overall commitment to crushing heaviness, Stin and Luther are the big metalheads in the group, while vocalist Raygun is a huge Cat Power fan, and Cap’n Ron is all about jazz fusion. As much as Stin gravitates to classic 90s death metal, he’s also an enormous Korn fan, and has no problem owning up to nu-metal’s influence on Chat Pile. “If such a thing as a nu-metal purist exists, I think that they would find some solace in knowing that we’re incorporating those elements in a very authentic, non-ironic way,” he said. “I genuinely think that Korn has some of the best riffs ever.”
The band initially struggled to find a footing in their insular home town scene, but now Oklahoma City (and beyond) has begun to take Chat Pile seriously – a fact that the band members themselves find very funny. “When we first started touring properly, people were seeing what we looked like in real life, and they were shocked,” Stin tells me with a grin. “They wanted us to be these sort of candelabra-waving cape guys who sulk in the distance. And we’re just goofballs.”
In a way, Oklahoma City feels like a fifth member of the band. Its gritty influence bleeds into every aspect of Chat Pile’s existence. The former boom town’s demeanour varies wildly, switching from dystopian rot to consumerist excess, artsy cool to quiet dread in the space of a few blocks. Oil derricks stand sentinel around its outskirts, pumping crude profits from rusty soil dotted with megachurches. The nearest major city, Dallas, Texas, is a three-hour drive away.
“I don’t think that a band like ours could happen anywhere else,” says Stin. “Part of it is that we live in this isolation, artistically, from other metal bands, noise bands, whatever, so we’re just doing exactly what we want, and not really getting any input from anyone on the outside.”
As we drive around Stin and Luther’s neighbourhood, they point out places where they’d shot various Chat Pile album covers: there, the abandoned school that peeks through rusted power lines on the cover of God’s Country; here, the “Hot Dogs Cause Cancer” sign from the cover of This Dungeon Earth EP. Their shiny new billboard looms above streets lined by cracked sidewalks and fast food franchises.
By the time Chat Pile started up, Stin had already been recording local bands for years as a way to document the Oklahoma City scene. He’d transformed a one-bedroom building that sits behind the cute little house he shares with his wife, their cat, and a tiny white chihuahua into a recording studio. There, in a corner of the carpeted, poster-bedecked practice nook, he recorded and produced all of Chat Pile’s material up in between picking up the bass himself. The studio’s two rooms –now officially repurposed as Chat Pile headquarters – are now crammed with Cap’n Ron’s drumkit, assorted band memorabilia, and boxes of merch for their upcoming North American tour.
Stin, who acts as the band’s manager and overall problem solver, has been glued to his phone all day putting out various fires. He resumed his usual duties behind the desk for this album, too, with one big change: Cool World marks the band’s first foray into also using an outside producer, Ben Greenberg of NYC noiseniks Uniform, to help polish up their new tracks. Stin admits to being a bit worried. “There’s kind of an outsider folk art element to the way our records sound, because literally, I am the one who records and mixes them, and I barely know what I’m doing,” he says. “The reason that our music is very untechnical is because we are untechnical. We’re just making the most of what we have, which is a very Oklahoma mindset, I think”
“If you grew up in a place like Oklahoma, and you’re a big music dork, you always wish that your own city had an identity, or had a stronger, more vibrant music and art scene than it does,” Stin observes. “I feel like it’s sort of our position, having the eyes on us that we do, to make sure that the local community can benefit. That’s really important to us, because at the end of the day, Oklahoma City is our home, and I want our home to be cooler.”
Cool World by Chat Pile is out now.
