Chat Pile appear in our Winter 2024 Issue with cover stars L.S. Dunes, Wisp, Fall Out Boy x WWWYF, and Chase Atlantic. Head to the AP Shop to grab a copy.
The signature song from Chat Pile’s 2022 debut album, God’s Country, is called “grimace_smoking_weed.jpeg,” a title whose inherent goofiness threatens to undermine the band’s desperate and unhinged approach. Frontman Raygun Busch sounds haunted by a specter (who happens to be a baked McDonald’s character) and is completely falling apart, screaming at a full wail over sludgy riffs. “Ray took it as a challenge to take a silly title and make it one of the most serious songs we have,” guitarist Luther Manhole says. Fans quickly memeified the song — something the band welcome and appreciate. This remains the duality of Chat Pile: how easily memeable their darkness can be.
The memes ultimately speak to who these guys are at their core. The band began in earnest around 2018, with their inception rooted in regularly scheduled bad movie nights. “We would get together and literally pick the worst Joe Estevez movie,” says bassist Stin. A big crew would gather, but it was Stin and Luther who would sit around and talk about music. “We were sort of lamenting how we didn’t really know anyone who had the same taste as us, so we’d never been able to make our dream heavy band.”
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Luther encouraged Stin to start jamming, and as their drop A guitar sound meshed with Stin’s brother Cap’n Ron’s work on electronic drums, they invited their friend Raygun to be their vocalist. “Ray and I have been friends for 20 years, and throughout the history of that friendship, we’ve literally had a long-running joke about us starting a Big Black-style, American Nightmare-like noise-rock band,” Stin says. Ray jumped at the chance to make it happen. He stuffed himself into Stin’s closet to record vocals, which was the band’s first time hearing the utterly wild ingredient to the band’s signature sound. “We were just like, ‘Yeah, this kicks ass. Let’s go with it,’” Stin adds.
Ray is responsible for the lyrics, though he doesn’t write poetry in advance. “Sometimes I think I should because I see my friend Jeremy Bolm selling poetry books at his shows: extra income,” he jokes. Instead, the words spill out of him the day of recording a song’s demo. “It’s not like there was no seed of an idea planted a while before that moment,” he clarifies. Ideas marinate. Topics come to him.
Will Mecca
On the band’s new album, Cool World, which was released in October, there’s one song that arrived to him pretty much wholesale in a moment of inspiration during a drive by a Masonic Temple. “It’s like the story of The Shining when Stephen King is at the hotel and he smoked a cigarette, and within that one cigarette, all of The Shining came to him? That happens to me very rarely. I’d say ‘Funny Man’ is the moment on the album that happened to me.”
“Funny Man” and several songs on Cool World convey a sense of desperation that’s become a thematic signature for Chat Pile. Part of that comes from personal experience for Ray: “I’m 40. I’ve lived a life.” It’s also an exercise in empathizing with individuals on the brink. “A challenge of Chat Pile for me is to write from the perspective of somebody that maybe I view as despicable and try to find the human inside of them.”
Stin cites the work of novelist Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280) as an aesthetic comparison: “In all his books, everybody in the novel is this despicable bad person, but you literally are rooting for the protagonist no matter how evil they may be. The magic of his novels is that you find yourself desperately rooting for this very bad person to get away with their very bad thing.”
One key song on the record is “Frownland.” When the album was initially announced, fans began speculating that it would be a cover of the song from Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band’s cult classic 1969 album Trout Mask Replica. Not so. “I don’t want to go too hard on the fanbase of Captain Beefheart, but those people don’t have a big sense of humor about that music,” Ray says. Stin adds: “You know how many times in my life I’m like, ‘All right, I’ll listen to Trout Mask Replica again and see if it clicks,’ and then I’m like, ‘What the fuck is this? Nobody likes this for real.’”
The song is instead named for the 2007 film Frownland by Safdie Brothers collaborator Ronald Bronstein, which Roger Ebert correctly likened to an “unceasing panic attack.” It’s a movie where the central character is universally despised, has an impossible time communicating, and is crumbling under the weight of every moment. So much of Chat Pile’s approach feels similar to Bronstein’s Frownland. When he watched the Criterion copy earlier this year, Ray found a kindred artistic spirit in that movie. “It was an instant, easy five stars for me,” he says. “It’s not like I’m like that guy, but man, I just felt like this is a feeling I’ve had in my life that I’ve never seen in a movie before. I think the movie is an incredible American masterpiece.” Film is so inherent to the Chat Pile vibe that Ray shouts out local cinema lore at different shows on the road.
The emphasis on discomfort and inherent sonic heft of their songs earns Chat Pile a reputation among listeners and critics as this serious organization. They’d like to offer a counterpoint — that their music is built to get their fans literally moving. “There’s all this talk about, ‘Oh, Chat Pile are these harrowing nightmare dystopia grim suicide music,’” Stin says. “Well, we also fucking rock. You can mosh to these songs, and you can nod your head along, but nobody mentions that. They’ll compare us to Swans until the sun goes down, but we’re closer to Van Halen, in my opinion, in the sense that there’s structure and it’s catchy.”
“You’d think from the reviews that our album is the same as the new Uniform album, which is very good, but we’re not that,” Ray adds. “That’s the real, unfiltered hard shit in my opinion. We have, like, fun time riffs.”
It comes back to how they welcome the memeification of their songs. Even when it’s bleak humor, these clearly are dudes with a sense of humor. “I prefer being seen that way rather than people thinking we’re dark, candelabra-holding mysterious men,” Luther says. “Especially when we’re hanging out on the road. If we were just all stewing in darkness in the van, it would be miserable and a nightmare.”
Stin says that performing with Chat Pile serves as a kind of catharsis — a way to compartmentalize and exorcise the darkness or rage that he keeps away from his personal relationships. Luther describes himself as a mild-mannered person in his day-to-day life. “I love being able to go onstage and go insane,” he says. Of course, they see people letting it out in the crowd, too. “You see people going apeshit to our music, and you can tell that it’s pinging the part of their brain that the heavy music I listened to when I was a teenager did for me,” Stin says. “There’s something really satisfying about that kind of circle of life — being able to provide that — it means a lot to me.”
Matthew Zagorski
Chat Pile pride themselves on creating a welcoming, fun tour environment for the other bands they bring on the road. “We don’t really talk about this a lot, but we’re not heavy drinkers. We don’t do hard drugs or anything, so the tour experience is about as professional but fun as it can possibly be with us,” Stin says. “I feel like the mood is such a fun family vibe. People seem to have fun on the tours with us.”
Luther concurs, saying he’s heard that from multiple bands they’ve toured with. Being in Chat Pile has also opened up the band’s social lives. “We all live in Oklahoma City, so touring is a cool way for us to meet other people and make friends. It’s hard making friends when you’re in your mid-30s, you know? I know a lot of people who make all their friends in high school, and then they have like two friends until they’re 70 and die, basically. That’s been the best part of this.” Stin agrees. “I’ve had an explosion of friends happen with the popularity of the band. It’s amazing to be 41 years old and go, ‘Damn, I need to make time for all these new friends of mine.’”
The ease with which they seem to be making friends at this point in their lives translates even in a brief video chat conversation with a stranger. They immediately establish common cultural touchstones among all of us — we’re all fans of Tom Scharpling’s The Best Show and go deep into the weeds about the Patreon-only bonus content. They talk about how deeply unwatchable the 2001 Planet of the Apes reboot is in a way that’s absurdly funny. “Mark Wahlberg plays a scientist,” Ray says. “That’s a page-one problem.”
So if they’re not hard partiers or sullen dark lords, how do they kill time in the van? “Singing parody songs that we’re thinking of in the moment,” Luther says. When asked if they can sing one, they all giggle and squirm, wondering which one they can actually share. Ray picks one — a recent flip of the New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give”: “Cut it off/I’ve got the penis disease/One inch left!” He elaborates even though he absolutely doesn’t have to: “It’s literally a song about cutting your own dick off.”
That’s who Chat Pile are in the van — a bunch of self-described 13-year-olds giggling while transforming a White Zombie song into one entirely about the movies of Tim Burton. Ray begins giggling uncontrollably when he remembers their hot streak of micropenis songs, including one where Danzig’s “Mother” became “Micro.” He belts one out in his best Danzig impression to demonstrate: “Micro!”