Album review: Chat Pile – Cool World

Chat Pile’s 2022 debut God’s Country marked them as one of America’s most intriguing new bands. Ugly and abrasive music for ugly and abrasive times, their jagged noise rock held a mirror up to their country’s rotten core – but with sufficient swagger and verve to build a huge buzz in alternative circles. Cool World builds on those foundations while pushing things further, both sonically and thematically.

The band’s staccato rhythms and frontman Raygun Busch’s hoarse howls locate Chat Pile in the hammer-blow tradition of The Birthday Party, Shellac and The Jesus Lizard, and lurching opener I Am Dog Now locks into this mode to killer effect. Elsewhere, however, there is evidence of a desire to expand their soundworld. Shame and The New World throw vaguely gothy shapes into more alt-rock songcraft, while Masc has a hangdog catchiness about it. Most insistently, the bouncy, downtuned bass grooves and blown-out industrial beats of Frownland and Funny Man conjure the unlikely bedfellows of Korn and Godflesh in equal measure.

The latter song declares, ‘Outside there’s no mercy,’ a snapshot of the bleak worldview Chat Pile express through a mixture of existential despair and mordant wit. God’s Country felt like reportage from home territory, a long stare at homelessness, addiction and violence in a barely United States. Cool World turns that gaze outwards to consider the way America affects the globe, its focus shifting from street crime to crimes against humanity. Both records share a curious blend of defiance and hopelessness, or as Raygun puts it on Milk Of Human Kindness: ‘I screamed about it all night.’

Bleak as all hell, then, yet somehow this uncompromising music seems so in tune with the times that Chat Pile could genuinely be on the cusp of a major breakthrough. Don’t miss out.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: The Jesus Lizard, Uniform, KEN Mode

Cool World is released on October 11 via The Flenser