God's Country

There’s a sick irony to how a country that extols rhetoric of individual freedom, in the same gasp, has no problem commodifying human life as if it were meat to feed the insatiable hunger of capitalism. If this is American nihilism taken to its absolute zenith, then God’s Country, the first full length record from Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is the aural embodiment of such a concept. Having lived alongside the heaps of toxic refuse that the band derives its name from, the fatalism of daily life in the American Midwest permeates throughout the works of Chat Pile, and especially so on its debut LP. Exasperated by the pandemic, the hopelessness of climate change, the cattle shoot of global capitalism, and fueled by “...lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of THC,” God’s Country is as much of an acknowledgement of the Earth’s most assured demise as it is a snarling violent act of defiance against it. Within its over 40 minute runtime, God’s Country displays both Chat Pile’s most aggressively unhinged and contemplatively nuanced moments to date, drawing from its preceding two EPs and its score for the 2021 film, Tenkiller. In the band’s own words, the album is, at its heart, “Oklahoma’s specific brand of misery.” A misery intent on taking all down with it and its cacophonous chaos on its own terms as opposed to idly accepting its otherwise assured fall. This is what the end of the world sounds like.

Terrifying and thrilling in equal measure, the debut album from the Oklahoma City sludge-metal band is a vivid rendering of the towering piles of poison littering America’s psychic landscape.

Grim and discomforting, Chat Pile are staring into the void of America and the outcome is God's Country, a brutal, dissecting of its gritty underbelly and everything it surrounds

The Oklahoma noise-rock band's debut proves they're a terrifying, formidable force cutting to the rancid core of capitalism's dehumanization.

Chat Pile fashions sludgecore into a display of trauma caused by an afflicting world. God’s country indeed… If God has looked the other way.

A review of God's Country by Chat Pile, available worldwide July 29th via The Flenser

God's Country by Chat Pile Album Review by Greg Walker. The band's new full-length is now available via the Flenser and DSPs

It’s fair to say that if you aren’t angry about the state of things then you aren’t paying attention. The incessant vicissitudes of late-stage capitalism, war profiteering, soaring energy prices coupled with soaring profits for energy companies, the climate change denial of mainstream media platforms that threatens the very existence of humanity, the overturning of

Chat Pile - God's Country review: You may not remember me, but bet your last fucking dollar I remember you