Chat Pile’s 2022 debut album God’s Country was monstrously, miraculously fully formed. The Oklahoma sludge-metal quartet’s oily guitars and grunting mid-tempo percussion conjured their namesake, mining toxic waste mounds, while Raygun Busch’s throat-shredding vocals drew from the city’s real-world violence. But their releases since, from album-offcut tape experiments Blood at Night to In the Earth Again’s team-up with finger-picker Hayden Pedigo have promised another evolutionary stage.
The brighter alt-rock of Who Loves the Sun is a partial rebrand, foregrounding a love of XTC teased in the jangly riff of 2024’s Funny Man. Compared to previous albums-proper God’s Country and 2024’s Cool World, the structures are more dynamic, the guitars twangier and the vocals hookier, while Busch’s lyrics zoom out from American violence to the abstract horrors of desensitisation: “Scrolling past the screaming,” he seethes on Influence.
