In a world increasingly shaped by disposable content, CHAT PILE answers with something defiantly real and organic, a mentality that permeates “Who Loves The Sun”, their third full-length record, due on September 4, 2026.
Since the band’s formation just over six years ago, the Oklahoma City-based quartet has grown from a scrappy passion project of four local film and music enthusiasts into one of the defining heavy acts to emerge from the 2020s underground. Ray B. (vocals),L. Manhole (guitar),Stin (bass) and Cap’n Ron (drums)’s crushing, crass, and cathartic take on noise rock resonates in this cracked reality. It captures a raw, undeniably human essence that’s increasingly fleeting in an age marked by ceaseless torrents of algorithmic slop, technological overreach, and the cold, crestfallen state of society. Nothing about “Who Loves The Sun” feels synthetic.
“This record focuses on my grievances with the modern world,” says Ray. “AI, genocide, climate change, the power elite, $$$$ hoarding pigs — all that shit fucks up your life and mine. The band is definitely stretching out their abilities on the album and I too felt inspired to go further— as a huge fan of BOSTON, I like to think Brad Delp is somewhere up there, smiling down, as I take the layering to new heights, but who can say? We have fun with it.” Stin adds: “This album contains a healthy dose of the usual CHAT PILE airing of grievances against the state of the world, but deeper at it’s heart I feel ‘Who Loves The Sun’ is grappling with the challenges of trying to keep one’s humanity in a time of extreme anti-humanity.”
As a first taste of the album, CHAT PILE shares the menacing track “Deep Blue”. Stin comments: “This is the first track we wrote for the album and the one that helped set the tone for the whole thing. I personally love this because it sounds like CHAT PILE doing a Billy Squire song. It’s our ‘Lonely Is The Night’, which is actually a fake LED ZEPPELIN song so who knows what the hell we’re actually doing here?” Ray adds: “Technology is rapidly ruining our lives, all promise seemingly squandered on the worst things, like killing people, wasting resources, destroying art- shrinking our brains and pulling us further apart than ever before.”
Whereas CHAT PILE‘s debut album “God’s Country” depicted a particularly American flavor of dread, and the follow-up “Cool World” showed a cruel planet defined by global systemic violence, “Who Loves The Sun” now peels back the skin on how a collective indifference for a decaying world defines this new century. Touring off the back of their previous albums in part lent itself a confidence in the universality of their music. Stin comments: “I’ve always felt that CHAT PILE is such an American concept thematically, but it seems like that’s not particularly true — people all over the world are resonating with what we have to say.” Spanning imagery of coastlines devouring cities as a result of inaction on climate change, the dread of working dead-end jobs, and the species’ collective submission to data-driven inauthenticity, “Who Loves The Sun” depicts the common experience of existing in a doom loop which feeds the malaise that permeates all aspects of our lives.
Reaching into the collective consciousness to commiserate and carouse, CHAT PILE now dissects how the apathy-bloated state of 21st-century existence is an active, slow-motion apocalypse, threads of which are woven through the album’s ten tracks. The album is lyrically and sonically as aggressive and confrontational as ever, but here CHAT PILE approached the record’s songwriting with hooks in mind, drawing on the melodic tones of pre-2000s indie/alt-rock and new wave.
The perfect allegory for the thematic essence of “Who Loves The Sun” is the photo embossed on the record’s cover. As with much of CHAT PILE‘s work, Oklahoma City itself looms over the album like a character, its sprawling isolation, economic contradictions, and underlying sense of decay embedded in the fabric of the record. Devon Tower, a glassy, largely vacant monolith of a building, looms alone high above the Oklahoma City skyline, while an unknown burnt-out home or storefront envelops the foreground. Devon Tower was originally owned by the Devon Energy Company, who announced they were leaving Oklahoma last year. A monument to empty promises stands without a care in the world, while it’s only a matter of time before the blight it was responsible for swallows it up, too.
“Who Loves The Sun” track listing:
01. Creature
02. Deep Blue
03. Same Rules
04. PEN I S MALL
05. Shrine
06. Intruder
07. Christabel ’26
08. Influence
09. Family Funeral
10. October All The Time
Photo by Ryan Lawson
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source blabbermouth.net ’
