When I saw Chat Pile at Club Soda in Montreal in 2024, Raygun Busch walked onstage in shorts and a baseball cap, looking surprisingly relaxed for someone about to spend the evening screaming over some of the most oppressive music in modern rock. That contrast between casual humanity and outright sonic violence has always been part of the band’s appeal.
On Who Loves the Sun, it becomes central to their songwriting. The Oklahoma City quartet have written their most melodic and approachable album, but the hooks do not offer relief. They pull you closer to the ugliness.
The band’s third album introduces more clean guitar, recognizable choruses and space between the heavier sections. Its foundations remain noise rock and sludge metal, but there are also traces of shoegaze, grunge, post-rock and acoustic melancholy. Rather than maintaining one punishing atmosphere for 44 minutes, the songs retreat, hesitate and occasionally approach beauty before the pressure returns.
That shift does not make Who Loves the Sun a comfortable listen. Its subject is the normalization of a world in decline. Climate destruction, workplace humiliation, technological dependence and political fear are presented as parts of the same environment. People continue working, consuming and scrolling because stopping to confront the full scale of the problem would be overwhelming.
The album cover places a burned-out structure beneath Oklahoma City’s Devon Tower, bringing abandonment and corporate grandeur into the same frame. The tower appears untouched by the damage below, but the two scenes are not unrelated. One America is left to deteriorate while another rises above the consequences.
Creature opens with Cap’n Ron’s tom-heavy drums, followed by one of Stin’s thickest basslines and a guitar part from Luther Manhole that seems to creep around the rhythm section. Busch describes cities disappearing underwater and living creatures being led towards destruction. His anger is directed not only at those accelerating the damage, but at the excuses that will follow. The disaster will eventually be treated as inevitable, even though the decisions producing it are being made in plain sight.
The more restrained Deep Blue is even more unsettling. Arpeggiated guitars circle above a huge bass foundation while Busch sounds emotionally drained rather than openly furious. The song examines the identities people create to survive corporate life, wearing an acceptable mask until it becomes impossible to separate the performance from the person underneath.
Its reference to Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is grimly funny. Even waking up as an insect would apparently not be enough to justify missing work. Screens provide no escape, only another place where identity dissolves and exposure to suffering becomes routine.
Same Rules pushes the band further into melodic territory. Clean guitars shimmer around Busch’s voice, allowing the sadness to develop before distortion takes over. The song imagines a life that might be fairer than this one, although that possibility feels more like a distant memory than a realistic destination. When the heavier section arrives, it carries emotional weight because the band have resisted reaching for it too quickly.
Then comes PEN I S MALL, whose deliberately stupid title conceals the album’s most punishing song. The band drops into a filthy doom trudge as Busch describes life at the bottom of a workplace hierarchy. Employees damage their bodies, deny themselves water as a display of toughness and report one another for minor acts of disobedience.
The song works because of those small details. A worker dreams about owning a Harley. Someone gets into trouble for reading on company time. Nobody receives security or power for following the rules. They have merely learned to enforce those rules against one another.
It turns labour into a cycle of physical injury and internalized obedience, but the anger never feels abstract. Busch has worked maintenance at an Oklahoma City shopping mall, and the performance carries the frustration of someone who understands how an entire life can disappear into apparently insignificant acts of subordination.
The title’s humour does not diminish that idea. Chat Pile have always recognized the usefulness of a bad joke when the alternative is despair.
The album’s developing interest in hooks reaches its peak on Intruder. Spidery guitar lines and an almost buoyant groove support a story about an unseen figure hiding beneath a bed. Claire Hannah and Brittany Sawtelle of Nightosphere bring soaring harmonies to the chorus, helping turn one of the record’s most disturbing images into something close to a singalong.
That is where Who Loves the Sun finds its most distinctive tension. Melody does not soften the threat. It makes participation easier. The listener can join the chorus before fully processing what is being sung.
Not every experiment lands perfectly. Family Funeral spends too long cycling through its tension, while the final build in Intruder continues after the song has made its point. The album occasionally feels caught between the hostility of God’s Country and a newer identity that has not completely settled into place.
There were more abstract directions available to the band, but the decision to emphasize alternative rock melody makes sense within these songs. The hooks reflect the same systems described in the lyrics. They attract attention, encourage participation and then reveal something far more disturbing underneath.
Christabel ’26 transforms political fear into body-snatching horror. Familiar people appear to have been replaced, suggesting the damage caused when technology, political manipulation and culture-war paranoia alter how communities see one another. The music advances slowly, giving the nightmare time to become ordinary.
Shrine is more animated, moving with a swinging, almost waltz-like pulse. It finds exhilaration inside the album’s bleakness without pretending that communal release solves anything. Sometimes moving with the noise is the only temporary freedom Chat Pile are willing to provide.
Featuring Hayden Pedigo, closing track October All the Time begins with acoustic guitar and a quiet promise that everything will be fine. Busch sounds as though he is trying to convince himself as much as the listener. Distorted sounds flicker around the edges until the full band briefly breaks through, but the eruption does not deliver a triumphant ending. It passes, leaving the reassurance unresolved.
That moment returns me to Club Soda. For all the alienation and institutional failure inside Chat Pile’s music, seeing them live meant experiencing it in a room full of people. Who Loves the Sun understands that contradiction. It describes a society losing its capacity for collective action while writing choruses people can shout together.
The hooks invite you in. What Chat Pile do once you are there is apply more pressure.
Who Loves the Sun is out now via The Flenser.
Photo by Ryan Sam Rockman
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