December 22 street date. In the summer of 2019, a newly formed Oklahoma City-based rock band called Chat Pile would release its debut four-track EP, "This Dungeon Earth". Little did anyone know at the time, but this initial taste of grotesque, confronting, and visceral noise rock courtesy of four slacker Okies would kick off the story of what would soon be one of the most widely lauded underground acts in years. While raw in presentation, Chat Pile's debut EP comes across as anything but a rough draft. Much of the band's hallmark traits, spanning the unhinged vocals of frontman Raygun Busch, the grotesquely contorted guitar riffage, and the industrial smack of heavily processed percussion, appear as far back as this earliest chapter. If anything, the raw, DIY-rooted origins of these uncompromising thirteen minutes of sludged-out carnage make "This Dungeon Earth" all the more impactful. Although it depicts the band's monstrous amalgamation of noise rock, sludge metal, hardcore, and more as it is just beginning to congeal, "This Dungeon Earth" comes off as the furthest thing from a simple intro and more of an essential first chapter in Chat Pile's story.
December 22 street date. Released only a handful of months following the band's breakthrough debut EP, "Remove Your Skin Please" signaled that whatever Chat Pile was doing wasn't just a one-off novelty of Midwest metal nihilism. While the band's foundational sound of caustic and cacophonous noise rock crystallized with its debut, the release of "Remove Your Skin Please" signposted the vast extent to which Chat Pile could stylistically tinker and conceptually iterate atop it. The more experimental ideas present on "Remove Your Skin Please" come off less like a selection of the band's conceptual prototypes and more like fully realized reflections of its members' own tastes and preferences. For as ugly and unhinged as Chat Pile's tales of 21st-century American dread are, "Remove Your Skin Please" asserts something that is somehow subtly even more terrifying: if a quartet of otherwise ordinary Okies can convey such apocalyptically bleak yet resonate messages in its music, that may mean we feel that same nihilism, too.