“I AM DOG NOW!” Those words, over that music…that might be the most repeated lyric I shouted out in 2024. And to think Chat Pile were a band that, until now I had a cool admiration for but from a distance, their breakout 2022 album God’s Country impressive but leaving me somewhat cold. At the time. Because there was just something about Cool World, the Oklahoma City noise rock quartet’s new album that not only turned me completely around, but shed new light on their previous output and turned me into a dedicated fan. I am dog now, indeed…

Blending noise rock, hardcore, and even shades of nu-metal in their attack, Chat Pile have always had one foot planted firmly in the socially conscious bedrock of pain and misery that is their community, but they’ve also had their tongue planted firmly in their cheek, the humor to better let the barbed commentary pierce even deeper. Cool World expands the scope of their commentary to encompass a much larger and ambitious swath of the country, and they suitably adjusted the scope of their music to match. In the PR for the album vocalist Raygun Bush framed Cool World this way: “It’s hard not to borrow from Voltaire, so I won’t resist – Cool World is about the price at which we eat sugar in America.” The sting of that line is felt in every lyric, but also in every note the rest of the band plays.

My initial listens (I submitted this as my candidate for October’s Album of the Month at Nine Circles, where it beat out Blood Incantation’s stellar new album to win¹) focused on the array of influences I I detected on the songs: the alternative metal of Helmet is a massive touchstone for opening single “I Am Dog Now”, while I’m still convinced that if you soften the stack of the drums just a little and replace Raygun Bush’s vocals with Kim Gordon you’d have a terrific Sonic Youth song in “Shame.” The opening bass on “Frownland” conjures classic Angel Dust era Faith No More, and there are even brief flickers of 80s King Crimson and Talking Heads on “Masc” in the circular guitar riff.

But as the album drew me in I honed in on the lyrical content – something I don’t normally do. And suddenly the music opened up so much more, as the rage and pain over the increasing marginalization of, well…everyone except the 1% creeps more and more into blind acceptance of our current state being what it means to be “Great Again”. The crunchy and oppressive doom of “Camcorder” is supposedly fan fiction inspired by Henry: Portrait of A Serial Killer, but I can’t help but hear lines like “Watch it change in my hands / watch the whole goddamned world change / everything I know, completely obliterated” and think about how we consumer the horrors of the world in the palm of our hand, and how that remove numbs and desensitizes us to it all.

“I can feel it, but I can feel it all.”

¹ The Blood Incantation album is equally fantastic in a very different way, and will be definitely be covered as part of my favorite albums of 2024.