The Covid-19 pandemic has been a hard blow for most musicians, but for Chat Pile, it ended up being a catalyst. The band’s music, a brooding mix of Big Black-style guitars, heaviness hinting to Korn or Godflesh, raw, disillusioned Americana, and sludge, turned out to be the ideal soundtrack to the ambient claustrophobia and anxiety—as they say themselves, “the sound of your world collapsing.” Inventive, sarcastic, and confrontational, Chat Pile is a breath of fresh air: the buzz created in just a few EPs landed them a deal with The Flenser, and it’s on this prestigious label that their first album, the aptly named God’s Country was released.

I jumped on the opportunity to chat about these explosive beginnings with the band during the 2023 edition of Roadburn, before their first gig in Europe. Friendly, relaxed, and obviously very happy to be there, Luther Manhole (guitar), Stin (bass), self-professed jokester Raygun Busch (vocals), and the discreet Cap’n Ron (drums) talked about the genesis of God’s Country and life in Oklahoma, whose stifling religiosity and industrial past (chat piles included, obviously) permeate the songs.

This interview took place in April 2023 and was first published on Radio Metal.

Actually, Raygun, you’re in Tenkiller, right?

Raygun Busch: I was in the movie, yeah, and [Stin] had a little part too.

In a way, it sounds like you’re embodying characters too in Chat Pile. Are both things comparable for you?

Raygun Busch: Yeah, I love doing it. My character is kind of a dangerously stupid redneck guy with a big mouth. They let me just say whatever I wanted to in the movie, all my stuff is improvised. I’m in their newest movie too. I’ve no idea how hat we’ll be doing, though [they all laugh]. It’ll be different, I’ll be a sad, silent character… One of my favorite movies I’ve seen recently is Bruno Dumont’s Humanity: I was trying to draw on Pharaon, the main character… I don’t know. We’ll see what happens. But it’s fun to act, I love acting. I love movies, so I would do it again—I will do it again!

Luther Manhole: If anyone wants to put Chat Pile in whatever configuration…

Raygun Busch: And we’ve been working on making some kind of band movie, or movie that the band will be involved with… Film is going to be a part of what we do if I have anything to do with it.

Do you improvise as well when you sing, whether live or when you record or write lyrics?

Raygun Busch: I don’t. Occasionally—I don’t do it that often though. At the beginning, “Rainbow Meat” I think got found through improvisation. But now, maybe to the annoyance of some of the other members, it takes me a long time to find where shit goes. I feel like at the end of the day, it’s worth it.

Stin: Yeah, it takes us forever as well, so.

Raygun Busch: It’s not a lot of improv, it’s a lot of thinking, actually. But once you can figure out where the words, syllables and everything will fit into the thing, then you add the theater to it, and it starts to breathe and becomes a living thing.

Luther Manhole: It’s usually the cadence and the melody that take time because there’s usually a topic you [Raygun Busch] wanna talk about. That’s not the part that’s hard to come by, it’s actually getting the musical side of it for us because we write through instrumentation. At the beginning at least, and then there’s a lot of whittling… The three of us record live, so we try to get a single take without any cuts. Every Chat Pile song has a guitar, bass, and drum track that is a single cut with no edits or anything, and that takes a while to get there and chip away at that.

Raygun Busch: I would say though, now that I’m thinking about it, that the last five minutes of “Grimace” [“grimace_smoking_weed.jpeg”] are improvised. At one point, the lyrics ran out and I just started screaming… There’s a point where I’m like, “I don’t want it, but here it is!” and that’s just me being like, [screams] “This song is never going to fucking end!” [they all laugh] I’ve done it twice in a row, so there’s some real meta frustration of me with the song: “Are you fucking kidding me? It’s still going?” So in the end I figured I was just going to start screaming until it’s done. And it turned out really good!

Stin: Wasn’t “Crawlspace” improvised?

Raygun Busch: Yeah, it was, actually. And insanely, I think “Dallas Beltway” had an element of improvisation to it.

Stin: So it happened more in the early days. Not really so much now, though.

Luther Manhole: Yes, when we had more time to spend on it. We don’t really have to go with our first takes as much. I like all our old stuff, but we spent way more time on the album.

Raygun Busch: I’m versatile, I guess. I can do it all ways [laughs].

Stin: We’re not a band like Phish, changing the set every night. Once we figured our parts out, those are the parts.

You recorded everything yourselves apparently. Was it a deliberate choice or a matter of circumstances?

Luther Manhole: Yes, we paid for someone to master it because that seems to be a very nebulous thing—I’m not sure anyone knows what mastering is [laughs]— but basically Stin is our engineer. We just press ‘record’ and try to get the whole thing. Then we do some guitar and obviously vocal overdubs.

Stin: We tend to record as we write, too. For God’s Country, we would literally write a song, record it, and then write the next one, record it, write the next one, record it… That’s how that went.

Luther Manhole: I talked to some other friends and fans and they were like, “Wow, you guys are insane people. Why do you write like that? It sounds very inefficient and long!” And I was like, “Yeah, that’s how we do it though!” [they all laugh]

Stin: It’s free, that’s why.

So it’s a deliberate choice—it’s just that it’s more convenient, and you can do it as you want?

Stin: It’s a little bit of all of that. I definitely prefer to have the control in our hands as much as possible because we’ve played in bands before where you paid to have someone record you, and when they send you a mix back, it’s like, “Did you even know what we were attempting to do here?” I’ve had whole albums ruined by engineers who had no clue what we were trying to achieve. But then also, again, we started that band just as friends, we didn’t want to spend money on it, so we just figured out a way to do it ourselves.

Luther Manhole: We have GarageBand and an iMac and some mics, so…

Raygun Busch: We’ve always been fiercely independent. I’ve done a lot of music myself and when I’m doing it, I like to be in complete control of it.

Stin: But there’s an artistic element to it too. The aura of the band and the music that we make is very rough around the edges, very loose, there’s a sloppiness to it, and the home recording adds to that.

Luther Manhole: Live too, we’re pretty loose on stage. I mean, we’re playing good shows, but you won’t get the laser precision of a prog rock band with Chat Pile.

Stin: We definitely have a punk approach in that way. And that’s what will make us different than a lot of the bands playing at this festival—they have this European precision and we come in with a sloppy American punk style [laughs].

Raygun Busch: They love Sloppy Joes, though! [they all laugh]

Your range of influences is quite large: you obviously like noise rock bands like Big Black and Scratch Acid, you also mention Korn—

Stin: Yeah, that was me! [laughs]

Did you always play that kind of music? Did you try different things?

Luther Manhole: I think it’s pretty different from what we’ve all done. I’ve never really been in a band that sounds like this.

Stin: It’s kind of a combination of all of our independent tastes.

Luther Manhole: I’ve always wanted to do stuff like this, I just never had anyone to make it with.

Raygun Busch: I’ve long wanted to just sing in a band.

Stin: But I think we didn’t start the band with a pure sound in mind. We found it just jamming together.

Luther Manhole: [Stin] showed me some of his bass riffs and I played a couple of guitar things, just to see if it goes together—I’ve had plenty of friends that are amazing musicians that if I sit down to try and play with we don’t have any chemistry. It doesn’t matter if you know how to play: chemistry is still such a huge thing. I always like to say this: literally the first thing we ever played was [Stin] playing the main riff to “Dallas Beltway” and me playing this completely different guitar part that was even more of a Jesus Lizard rip-off [than the finished version]… It was the first thing we played and it’s still probably our most popular song at least by streams. But yeah, I don’t think we were like, “It has to sound exactly like this.” It’s just the type of riffs that we write, the way [Cap’n Ron] plays drums, and the way [Raygun Busch] writes lyrics. It’s just us coming together.

Stin: I maybe shouldn’t be this absolute but there was never really a point where we were like, “Oh, we’re gonna sound exactly like this” or “We’re going to be this type of band.” And still we’re not; we are very open-minded to changing courses and writing music that doesn’t fit into a very specific genre. We just go with what sounds good to us, and that is what you end up with.

Your music is both fairly intense and extreme, almost alienating in a way, and very groovy and catchy: there are some real earworms in there…

Luther Manhole: We definitely are fans of pop music and hooks. I really like it when I hear a song and I’m like, “Wait, what was this again?” I hope we are giving songs that people can tell apart, and that we make them memorable in that way. That’s definitely a conscious thing. We want songs that sound different and…

Raygun Busch: We all love Nirvana and Rage Against The Machine. They all had hooks.

Luther Manhole: And there’s a way to do it. It’s not like we thought, “Oh, we want to take extreme music and make it accessible.” It’s not necessarily bad—[Stin] and I like death metal and black metal, and we all like catchy songs, but it’s not like we wanted to make catchy death metal are anything like that.

Stin: It’s also easier to write songs that way. If you know that it needs to have a verse, chorus, bridge, and then outro, that gives you a blueprint to write. Whereas if you’re like, “I’m going to make this 14-minute long, extreme blast-beat laden track”…

Luther Manhole: I love that shit, I just don’t know if that’s my songwriting.

Stin: It’s not, and it’s not mine either.

Luther Manhole: We try to keep it groovy…

Stin: We were just poisoned by Nirvana.

The same goes for your lyrics and imagery: it’s gruesome in a fairly unique, realistic way, not “grim” like extreme metal is, but sardonic at times and always down-to-earth. I’ve read that Raygun initially had something more goofily brutal in mind, like Rob Zombie movies. How did you find the right tone?

Raygun Busch: You’re referring to a single song, “Crawlspace”. The story was more Satan-heavy, and [the band] told me, “Don’t do that,” because too many things were like that, and it did turn out better: it’s more scary if the character of that song is a Christian. But there are no real rules or restrictions put on me and what I can do. I just like that kind of stuff. One of my favorite movies is Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, I also love Angst, The Golden Glove… I just wanted to bring that kind of dark realism to the music. But it’s not even all serial killer stuff. The movie Elephant by Gus Van Zant is a big influence as well, The Fisher King… I love horror movies, but I don’t know…

Stin: There’s a sort of realism that does permeate all our stuff. As you mentioned, we’re really trying to just give you a slice of life; the dark side of course, but really make it realistic, or even play out the things that are kind of dark around us that we don’t even notice because they’re just such an everyday part of our lives.

Luther Manhole: I find it funny how much people in Europe and in the UK are into our music because I feel like we’re such a very, very American band in our content… It’s like our version of Americana in a way. Americana is one specific thing for a lot of people, like Route 66 and cowboys and pickup trucks…

Raygun Busch: And we live on Route 66!

Luther Manhole: But to us, real Americana is strip malls and fast food and oil derricks…

Raygun Busch: Broken dreams and no ice cream… [laughs]

Luther Manhole: It’s America. That’s why it’s awesome that people from outside our little bubble find it relatable… I’m sure people everywhere can relate to “The place I’m from sucks,” that’s a universal thing, even if you live somewhere cool—I have friends that are born and raised in Brooklyn, and they’re like, “I fucking hate this place.”

Stin: [laughs] What more do you want, man?

Raygun Busch: We were joking that there’s definitely a teenager in Amsterdam who thinks, “Amsterdam sucks!” [they all laugh]

Stin: We’ve had European artists reach out to us and try to work with us before and honestly, it’s been kind of a bumpy road because they’ll turn something in and it’s just not American enough. So we’re like, “We’re very flattered that you want to work with us and it’s cool if this is your concept, but this looks European to me.”

Luther Manhole: Even beyond that, we’ve been collaborating with people from different regions of our own country and thought, “This is way too New York.”

Stin: “You’re bringing an urban vibe to this.” Our music is more “middle of the country flyover,” that’s kind of what we’re going for.

Raygun Busch: I think that kind of stuff does exist in European art, but I don’t know. Anyway—what were you saying?

I’ve never been in the US, I’ve never been anywhere near where you come from, but I do get a picture of it from your music.

Stin: It’s good to hear! It’s meant to be evocative.

I’m not sure I would wanna go there though now [laughs]…

Stin: [Laughs] It’s not the first place in America you’d need to visit, no.

Luther Manhole: It’s not the last one either though, I’ll say that. There are worse places you can get to.

Stin: It’s maybe somewhere in the middle [laughs].

The artwork of the album is a picture of a jail, right?

Stin: Yeah, it’s the Oklahoma County Jail. That’s in downtown Oklahoma City, and it’s one of the worst jails in the entire country. We actually live in one of the most punitive states: we have more people incarcerated in Oklahoma than in any other state in the country. And that jail in particular is notoriously deadly. Dozens of people die from neglect in that prison every single year. It’s not even a prison, it’s a jail, which is even crazier.

Luther Manhole: You’re there until you go to prison. But it looks like a giant prison, it’s a huge building.

Raygun Busch: Some people are in there for years.

Luther Manhole: It’s along Classen, one of the main streets of Oklahoma City, so if you live in the city you’re driving past this monstrosity of bleakness all the time…

Stin: The place you see on the artwork is within a mile from where we all live. We knew when writing the album that it was political, and since it’s a lot about locality, we really wanted to hit a local political issue.

Luther Manhole: [Stin] takes pictures and it was one of them. We weren’t necessarily thinking, “Let’s have a picture of the jail on the cover,” but it was just so evocative of the whole feeling. And it’s not like it says “jail” on its own. If you haven’t heard any interviews, if you’re not from Oklahoma City…

Raygun Busch: I’ve seen some people confuse it as part of the substation that’s in front of it. The perspective makes it look maybe not as big as it is…

Luther Manhole: I’ve heard people talk about a power plant, too. But even people out of state told me, “Oh, yeah, I’m actually from Oklahoma and as soon as I saw that, I knew exactly what it was about.”

Stin: It’s a nod to people from Oklahoma who know about this place and these issues.

Luther Manhole: But then we will gladly talk about these questions. We have pseudonyms but I don’t think we’re very mysterious as a band. I like to be pretty upfront with our process and how we do everything.

Raygun Busch: Our pseudonyms are all for fun, like Elvis Costello.

The fact that your songs are based on real-life stories makes me think about old punk bands like Crass…

Luther Manhole: I can’t talk for the others but that’s a huge influence for me, so that’s a huge compliment!

Raygun Busch: Oh yeah. The Dead Kennedys are a massive influence for me, for sure. I also love MDC, an extremely underrated hardcore band, and Bad Brains too.

Luther Manhole: Even beyond punk—we’ve talked about the Mountain Goats for instance—I just like plain language in songs, when people are singing and writing lyrics the way that people actually talk rather than it being filled with metaphors…

Raygun Busch: Lou Reed is basically the granddaddy of that kind of shit.

Luther Manhole: It’s not like there aren’t metaphors and themes in our material, but it’s just that I’ve always been drawn to the more realistic, documentary type of stuff that is in a lot of older punk. Listening to the Dead Kennedys for the first time and hearing “Kill the Poor”…

Raygun Busch: “California Über Alles”, “Holiday in Cambodia”…

Luther Manhole: Yeah, absolutely.

The album is titled God’s Country, even though you initially had a different title in mind…

Luther Manhole: Execute God! [they all laugh]

You also did a small tour called “Hell is Real” with Lingua Ignota, whose last album also deals with American landscapes and the religion embedded in them. Do you feel that your approaches are similar?

Luther Manhole: She goes way harder on it, but I felt like at the end of the day, it makes sense for our bands to be together because both of us have lived in places that have so much specifically Christian influence…

Stin: Hers is more Catholic, ours is more Protestant.

Raygun Busch: Absolutely. We’re Protestants for sure, we’re coming from that perspective, at least.

Stin: It’s oppressively religious in Oklahoma in particular: we’re considered the buckle of the Bible Belt.

Raygun Busch: And you see stuff happening that makes you go, “Isn’t this the kind of shit that Jesus was talking about, y’all?” People are living in filth under bridges, but we’ve got so many churches! There are abandoned churches everywhere, I know a guy whose parents buy those kinds of properties and they own all these weird abandoned churches in the city.

Stin: They’re quite literally on every street corner and it’s not like here where you have a church and it’s 500 years old…

Raygun Busch: They aren’t beautiful cathedrals.

Stin: It was built two years ago. It used to be a Walmart that was turned into a church when it went out of business… It’s that kind of thing.

Raygun Busch: It sucks.

Luther Manhole: It’s very easy then to just immediately go for the super anti-Christian imagery with Satan and pentagrams like you see a lot in metal, but there are other ways to be annoyed by that type of shit. I think it’s more relatable, too; there are plenty of people out there who are annoyed by that and don’t just go fully into devil aesthetics. I mean, I have a fucking pentagram tattoo, but…

Stin: But when you’re 40 years old…

Luther Manhole: I’m not really saying “Fuck god!”, but…

Stin: It’s just the irony of it all. We live in one of the fucking worst places…

Raygun Busch: We live in a state where they executed a guy and did it wrong, multiple times. It was four or five years ago: he died in utter agony because they lethal-injected him wrong. Thank you, Mary Fallin! The teachings of Jesus are transferable to all these other things that people worship, it’s all just core humanist beliefs, and as a humanist, I’m very outraged by a lot of the shit I see. And since I’m kind of a jokester [they all laugh], you end up with that.

Luther Manhole: It just made sense for where we live. Once we circled on the title God’s Country, with the art and the name and the subject matter and where we’re from, there wasn’t really another choice.

Stin: It was a pretty perfect confluence of ideas.

Raygun Busch: And this idiot, Blake Shelton from our state, had a hit song called “God’s Country” the same year, so that was a little bit of counterprogramming as well…

A lot of the pentagram-using bands come from fairly secular countries, so if you’re bathing in Christianity, it makes sense that you would oppose it differently.

Stin: Yeah: we got to realize that for all the negative parts of religion, it’s still a positive force in many people’s lives. Some people can’t approach it the right way though, and ultimately, it just ends up being a tool of oppression. But on the individual level, your seventy-year-old mom being religious isn’t hurting anybody.

Raygun Busch: No! And my mom is a better person than a lot of people I’ve met in my life, so.

Luther Manhole: At the end of the day, if we’re gonna do music from Oklahoma, it’d be kind of disingenuous to have some of that in there. It’s such a big part of it, whether you want it or not.

Raygun Busch: And I don’t even think it’s funny, doing the whole pentagram shtick, it’s just a pose—get real. I don’t fucking believe in god or the devil. I see real evil and wickedness everywhere.

Luther Manhole: Sometimes I like the theatrics…

Stin: There’s a time and place for that stuff.

Raygun Busch: Metaphor is a powerful tool and I love the imagery, but it’s a uniform for some people. Then you’re just locked into doing this one thing and you can’t go anywhere else.

Stin: Satan is all around us, you know [laughs], you don’t need the imagery.

Are you looking forward to seeing other bands at the festival?

Raygun Busch: Brutus!

Luther Manhole: We really wanna catch Brutus…

Stin: And Portrayal of Guilt, Deafheaven, Ken Mode, Elizabeth Colour Wheel…

Luther Manhole: We tried to see some Antichrist Siege Machine last night but the line was very long and they weren’t letting artists sneak in…

Raygun Busch: We saw Deafheaven, that was awesome.

Luther Manhole: I didn’t realize that that was their first time doing Sunbather in full, it was actually a pretty special show. It sounded great too. It made me feel good about playing there tomorrow. I think we’re gonna sound pretty good in there!

To see what Chat Pile is up to, see here or there…