With everyone still chattering about Chat Pile, it can be easy to overlook their titular uncles, Pile, who forked over their ninth studio album and first for Sooper Records, Sunshine and Balance Beams, last month. Now in their 18th year, the band continues to be led by vocalist/guitarist Rick Maguire, who spawned Pile as a solo affair in Boston in the year…well, I’ll let you do the math. Maguire maintained that model until he hired a handful of cohorts who helped him pivot Pile into a rousing post-hardcore project. Subsequent years found the group gradually toning down their noisy antics, album by album, culminating in 2023’s wicked quiet All Fiction.
The band underwent a rebirth of sorts with its signing to Chicago-based Sooper Records last November, exiting longtime home Exploding in Sound. Pile—which also features drummer Kris Kuss, bassist Alex Molini, and guitarist Matt Connery—rejuvenated their career by touring with Cursive earlier this year and, of course, releasing Sunshine and Balance Beams. Maguire has described the record as a return to Pile’s prenatal post-hardcore sound, as well as an exercise in self-examination amid the strife artists (and, frankly, the majority of Americans) are facing across the country.
We caught up with Maguire to probe a bit deeper—but not too much deeper, because, alas, as only three wishes can be proposed to a genie, only five questions can be asked of the musicians gracious enough to participate in our “5 Questions” series.
After more than a decade on Exploding in Sound, what prompted Pile to sign to Sooper last year?
I’d known [co-founder] Glenn [Curran] for years. We met at basement shows through mutual friends, I think. At one point, he told me he was starting Sooper Records. And he may have been the only person I knew in that world who also practiced law. At the time, I had a super-old landlord [with whom I had a] no-lease, month-to-month arrangement. Occasionally, I’d give her a ride to the pharmacy to pick up her medication. And then one day, out of the blue, she was like, “You got to get out of here.” I was, like, “What?” But because I was paying cash and the rent was super-cheap, it was kind of worth putting up with her erratic behavior.
Essentially what happened was I just ended up staying there and pretended her requests weren’t real. But one of the first longer conversations I had with Curran was, “What do I do about this?” He was, like, “You’re in Massachusetts, chances are that the tenants’ rights are pretty robust there.” It became clear that not only were our values aligned, which I had sort of known since we became friends, but [we also had] a business strategy perspective that was compatible. It became a sensible choice. He really is someone who cares a lot about his artists and doing their releases right. You hear these terms all the time now like “artisan” and “handcrafted” and “bespoke” or whatever, but he really means it. I definitely feel supported by him. He’s a very strong advocate, and I’m grateful to have someone in my corner like him.
What makes you most proud of Sunshine and Balance Beams?
I think it’s our best-sounding record. Fidelity-wise, I think I’ve been pretty apprehensive about putting my vocals forward. In some cases, it’s been an aesthetic choice, like, “Oh, I’m gonna have more room on the vocals.” But this feels like it’s there and with more articulation. I still kind of feel self-conscious about [my singing] sometimes. There are so many great musicians out there. You hear what a great vocal sounds like and it’s a lot to aspire to, so I feel that [pressure]. During this recording process, it was nice to be like, “OK, I do feel proud of these vocal performances.”
How long did it take to record? You guys turn around a new record pretty much every two years, which is pretty impressive.
About two weeks, and then we took a couple weeks off and then came back in for three days to do the last bit—you know, to allow ourselves to sit with the material a little longer and make any tweaks we wanted to. After that, we got into the mixing process. We toured behind All Fiction in fall 2023, and then I did a solo tour that ended in January 2024. So I had bits and pieces lying around that I then strung together starting in February 2024. I wonder if [our pace] will end up changing anytime soon. I’ve felt for a while the pressure to have something every two years just to kind of keep the machine going. I hope that kind of pressure, or the cultural trend of “putting out content,” so to speak, becomes a relic of the past. Something that was confined to the aughts or the ’10s or whatever you want to call it. I hope we can move past that.
I’m fascinated by bands that have a really strong allegiance to the punk or hardcore ethos but don’t necessarily bring music of that ilk to their concerts. Does that notion ring true to you at all, or am I totally off-base?
I think there may be some people who agree with you and some people who disagree with you. Even though we may not play the heaviest music all the time, I think it still has the capacity to resonate with people because it can exist in the same setting, and there’s a respect for those settings—you know, basement shows, the DIY attitude, the fact that music is about playing with people more for the humanity of it than the income of it. It’s funny, I was listening to a Fugazi record yesterday, and it’s just so subdued and quiet and brilliant—one of those records where you’re kind of hinging on every note, but they’re such masters of what they were doing that you feel confident, not nervous, that they’re not gonna make a wrong move.
What I’m driving at is that it seems like things are shifting in such a way—not just musically. I don’t want to get into politics, but just broadly and nationally, people are kind of bonding over shared values, which is what it used to be like in the ’80s and even the ’90s. Given how fast things are changing, it’s becoming this real survival-of-the-fittest kind of world we’re living in. There seems like a lot of scenes that are forming that don’t necessarily have the same musical aesthetic, but they share the same values of what you’re talking about—community-building and being nice to each other and getting some energy and anger out. But at the same time, at the end of the day, people are picking each other up.
I haven’t experienced much of that, perhaps because I’m older. But that’s not to say I believe it isn’t happening.
If there is a potential for people to just be able to express themselves in whatever way that feels honest and authentic, and that’s resonating with people, and there can be bonding over shared values, I think diversity [can be accepted]. Politically, there’s such a push against diversity, if there can be ways that people understand the importance of it, then maybe it can inspire some real change and there can be some resistance to the awful shit that’s happening.
