In the summer of 2022, Chat Pile’s debut album God’s Country served as something of a call-to-arms for anyone who felt completely insane at the tail end of the deeply mismanaged COVID-19 pandemic as our focus returned to the more familiar ruin rampant capitalism has reduced just about every facet of modern existence to. And while the Oklahoma City noise-rockers have spent the past two years amassing a loyal fanbase through constant touring—alongside sludge-metal royalty Baroness and as a headliner—and landing spots at nearly every metal-permissive festival across the world, their music still sounds like its creators have never left their mildew-scented basements.
Cool World, Chat Pile’s second album, expands the lyrical themes of God’s Country to more broadly address the absurdity of day-to-day life, further channeling the unique feeling of helplessness at seeing the morning’s headlines. If their debut’s focus was on the visceral feeling or rage at seeing another Cybertruck crusing by, Cool World investigates the source of this wholly legitimate response (while the album title makes reference to the ludicrous Ralph Bakshi film, I read it more as meme-speak: “Cool world you got there, hope the embodiment of cringe who razed one of our only remaining online spaces that was even remotely democratized doesn’t fill it with poorly rendered tanks for the rich!”).
Meanwhile, death-metal growls get added to the sonic mix on “Shame,” while the instrumental on opener/lead single “I Am Dog Now” takes the guise of a clanging runaway train. “Now that we had some form of creative comfort zones in place after hitting that milestone of putting out a full-length record, album number two felt like the perfect opportunity to challenge those limits,” shared the band’s bassist, Stin, when the record was announced.
Ahead of the album’s release this week via The Flenser, all four band members—additionally including drummer Cap’n Ron, vocalist Raygun Busch, and guitarist Luther Manhole—shared a handful of non-musical influences on Cool World, which range from the normalization of spam calls to the action films of John McTiernan. Check out their picks below, and pre-order the album here.
STIN
Found VHS/cassette tapes
I’ve been obsessed with bizarre VHS and public-access footage since childhood, having been exposed to a healthy cross section of amateur religious and right-wing conspiracy tapes shared physically in the pre-internet days by zealot family members and smalltown Okie crackpots. This whole phenomena has been expertly documented or spoofed upon by the likes of Tim and Eric, Everything Is Terrible!, Found Footage Festival, and others, and the impact this type of media has had on me is immeasurable. I spent a good portion of time during the recording of Cool World scouring local thrift stores for the finest VHS and cassette oddities I could find and actually found ways to weave some of it subliminally into the record. There are hours of additional ambient music (?) we recorded using this stuff that may or may not see the light of day soon.
Spam calls and constant fraud attempts
There are many unique frustrations that come with living in the modern age, but perhaps the strangest is the constant white noise of scams that smothers us 24/7. Our band email is stuffed to the brim with people who “discovered our music on Instagram” and want to take our career to the next level. One person showed up in our DMs claiming to write for a large music publication and offered us a feature in said publication for a fee (we were literally the cover story for said publication mere days before this once-in-a-lifetime offer was presented to us).
This just scratches the surface of the ceaseless phishing attempts, ticket bots, AI miasma, right-wing grifting, online health miracles, and countless other attempts to separate people from their money and attention. Of course the most ubiquitously maddening of all these are the never-ending spam phone calls that have turned our phones into cortisol-raising torture devices (more than they already are). I received such an extraordinarily ridiculous spam voicemail during the recording of Cool World that I felt inspired to make an interstitial piece of music that was ultimately cut from the final record.
RON
Walking
I find it very inspiring to go on a walk and take in all of the sights and sounds around me with no particular destination in mind. It’s my go-to for any kind of mental or creative block that I may be struggling with at the time. It helps me to clear my head and come back to whatever it is I may be working on with a fresh perspective.
Footbag
The size of the circle. The weight of the bag. The parody of the lyric. Footbag is not a hobby. Stamp collecting is a hobby. No fear.
RAYGUN
Dogs
I’m not sure if there’s any creature on Earth more divine than dogs. I have two boys—beautiful, soulful creatures with huge personalities. A whole lot of my life revolves around taking care of these guys, and their presence in my life seeps into everything I do. I greatly admire the simplicity of their wants and needs. Watching them roughhouse is better than any movie. Everyone needs a dog.
Russell Banks
Not many authors cover the American Dream like Russell Banks. His is some of the most haunting fiction I have ever encountered. I first discovered him when I was working maintenance at a local mall. It was a bad job that I hated, and also my home life wasn’t so hot either at that time. The big dog was very depressed and felt as though there was no way out. So Banks’ work really resonated with me at that time, and still does. The amount of empathy he shows for his characters—who are often in the bleakest situations, many times by their own design—is really special. It’s harsh, occasionally grinding realism rooted in humanist philosophy—the best kind of fiction.
I’ve read and enjoyed many of his novels, but the four I insist you check out are The Rule of the Bone, a modern update of Huckleberry Finn, and Banks’ funniest work; Cloudsplitter, a furious and melancholy epic historical fiction about the heroic, troubled John Brown; Lost Memory of Skin, a difficult and necessary portrait of an unhoused sex offender; and Continental Drift, a dual tale of Haitian immigrants and a working-class New York family both looking for a better life in Florida, perhaps the most emotionally shattering book you will ever read, and certainly one that I think of often when I write lyrics for Chat Pile.
LUTHER
John McTiernan’s Die Hard with a Vengeance
We started writing Cool World in earnest in December [2023], but every year in January the band and some of our friends go on a cabin trip for two days in the middle of nowhere. We cook food, watch 10,000 movies, maybe hike a bit, and play board games that make us yell at each other. One of the movies we watched this year was John McTiernan’s Die Hard with a Vengeance, the third Die Hard movie. It’s a movie we’ve all seen before, but something about watching it this time truly exploded my brain. Over and over throughout watching the movie we’d say out loud “They don’t make ’em like they used to” as we saw them destroy an actual train or set something on fire. It was so impressive to see the craftsmanship behind it all.
When it ended we talked about how much it rocked and then decided to put on a modern action movie favorite, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. About an hour into the movie I remember us looking at each other and going “Wow, I guess this movie kinda sucks if you watch it immediately after Die Hard with a Vengeance.” I’m a big fan of the Mission: Impossible series so it was definitely not what I expected my reaction to be. When I got back from the trip I couldn’t stop thinking about Die Hard with a Vengeance and how this movie I never considered to be essential was not only better than a movie I considered to be a peak modern example of “good action,” but even better than the original Die Hard, as true of a classic as there is in the genre. I think there’s a lot of value in the reappraisal of “non-canon” art and finding what’s special in stuff that might not always be considered “the best.” It’s definitely something I kept in mind throughout the rest of the writing of our record.
Two 100-hour-long JRPGs
Most of my free time during the writing of the album was spent playing Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth and Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth. Usually when writing music I tend to stop listening to music at home or for fun and instead just kind of zone out into oblivion playing extremely long video games. I’m not going to turn this into a review of those games, but I will say that both of them are two of the most impressive games I’ve ever played, and having them to melt my brain a bit after spending hours playing a song 100 times in a row every day definitely helped me to stay sane and disconnect a bit from obsessing over the music.
