Album Review // Chat Pile // Cool World

The Flenser

4.5/5 stars

As a rising name in heavy music, Chat Pile is known just as much for their nightmarish lyrical content as they are their borderline-unclassifiable brand of industrial noise and sludge metal. (After all, two of the songs from their debut God's Country were about real homicidal incidents horrifying enough to send you down a Wikipedia spiral). The band's sophomore release Cool World widens their scope both in terms of the turmoil that inspires them and the genres they pull from; fortunately, it's still enough to shape one of the darkest, heaviest, and most unique albums of the year. This includes newfound melodic moments, but fans of God's Country's unrelenting nature shouldn't scoff at that. "Shame" may be straightforward enough to sound like Self Defense Family, but by the end, vocalist Raygun Busch is still growling in multiple registers, each one sounding less human than the one before. And on album highlight "Frownland," a bass tone indebted to (none other than) Korn leads the band through primal verses that explode into a shockingly bright (and heavy) instrumental refrain. Chat Pile is still making music that sounds like almost no one in the industry, and it's hard to imagine metal fans not being happy about that.