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Despite the fact that their music sounds nothing alike, Chat Pile are to the 2020s what Deafheaven were to the 2010s. Both groups are nominally metal bands whose breakthrough albums crossed over into indie-rock audiences by blending conventionally unassociated subgenres of extreme metal and alt-rock into audacious hybrids with class-conscious lyrics rooted in wealth inequality. Like Sunbather in 2013, Chat Pile’s 2022 debut, God’s Country, was the album your metalhead friend received texts about all year from people whose taste rarely leans heavier than Deftones. And like the glowing reception to Sunbather’s knockout follow-up, New Bermuda, Chat Pile’s next album, 2024’s Cool World, warded off suspicions that they’d be enshrined as a gimmicky one-album-wonder.
To follow this analogy to its conclusion, Who Loves the Sun is Chat Pile’s Ordinary Corrupt Human Love: the moment when the trend-hoppers have inevitably exited the hype train, and the band who was initially praised for its novelty is tasked with maintaining its uniqueness without retreading too much familiar ground. Congrats to Chat Pile: Who Loves the Sun retains the breaking-point disorder that makes Chat Pile themselves while also buffing out their sound with steelier melodies, more oblique atmospheres, and bolder deviations from their slanted sludge-metal foundation. The versatility of their music does have its limits, but singer-lyricist Raygun Busch’s bone-chilling portraits of a world in irreparable decline are mercilessly gripping the whole way through.
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You could play spot the influence with Chat Pile’s music all day long, but the hodgepodge of reference points that dominated the narrative around God’s Country (“Wait, they like Korn and Unwound?”) are no longer what make Chat Pile’s music interesting. It’s that they’ve metabolized their jumbled taste into a sound and perspective that’s recognizably their own. Who Loves the Sun sounds like Chat Pile more than anyone else, a gnarled rendering of civil society’s steady degradation: craggy riffs, ugly howls, and stabbing grooves that communicate how our obliteration will likely be the result of an agonizingly slow chisel rather than a swift, painless blast.
Chat Pile don’t speak in subtleties, and Who Loves the Sun might be their most pointed statement yet. Its on-the-nose cover photo portrays two different Americas: despair and destruction in the foreground, and the cruel indifference of capital in the background. One class of people who get to live “a life that’s fair and true,” as Busch sings numerous times throughout Who Loves the Sun, and another who can only dream of such comforts. Busch is less interested in naming our oppressors than he is inclined to zoom in on the insidious diseases that the ruling class breeds among its subjects: paranoia about a coming storm (“Intruder”), wasted lives drowning in a sea of screens (“Deep Blue”), helpless creatures crawling through “an empty world, vast and haunted” (“Creature”). Chat Pile’s characters are too beaten down to fight back, too accustomed to scrolling past suffering to even know how to resist it (“Influence”).
These themes of everyday abuse are most effective when you get the sense that Busch is drawing from lived experience. The raging “PEN I S MALL” is about the self-destructive posturing among blue-collar workers who are conditioned to celebrate their own misery. The song’s protagonist (also named Ray) is scrutinized by a foreman who orders him to work without proper protection, and tormented by a coworker who proves his masculinity by proudly never drinking water. “Hard to think but your whole life can pass as a series of acts of subordination,” Busch growls in a particularly fitful outburst that showcases his trademark brutal lucidity.
That song, which concludes with a seismic doom trudge, is the heaviest Chat Pile get on Who Loves the Sun. Interestingly, most of the other highlights arrive when the band are at their softest. Busch’s dead-eyed moans in “Deep Blue” are backed up by Luther Manhole’s tinkling guitar resonance that’s more reminiscent of Sonic Youth’s Sister than Eyehategod’s “Sister Fucker.” “Same Rules” is even colder and more restrained during its silvery verses, and when the crunchy distortion flips on during its final third, Busch’s yowls are joined by slightly more melodic harmonies from his bandmates that give the song a grungy propulsion. The most exciting stretch beyond their comfort zone happens during “Intruder,” when Claire Hannah and Brittany Sawtelle of Kansas City, Missouri band Nightosphere provide a halo of vocal harmonies around Busch’s groaning chorus, resulting in one of Chat Pile’s first true singalongs.
The favorability toward Chat Pile’s alt-rock touchstones, as opposed to their metal ones, injects the album with enough dynamic variation that it doesn’t feel like a straight rehash. In exchange, some of these songs drag a bit, especially the five-minute “Family Funeral,” but also the final thrust of “Intruder,” when the breakdown/build-up jerkiness Chat Pile’s music relies on begins to feel like a rollercoaster ride that’s taken one too many laps. But that sensation of captive torture—both sonically and lyrically—is what you come to this band for. They’re not a vehicle for gleaning hope or seeking comfort but rather to see and hear the world for what it is: empty, vast, haunted.
