Chat Pile: God's Country [FLENSER]

Why you'll love it

This Flenser pressing comes with a printed insert and Jared Stimpfl's master. God's Country earned Pitchfork's Best New Music tag, holds a Metacritic score of 84 and landed on a stack of 2022 year-end lists.

This edition

• Printed insert
• Mastered by Jared Stimpfl

About the album

Oklahoma City isn't the first place you'd look for the heaviest record of 2022, which is rather the point. Chat Pile recorded, mixed and paid for God's Country themselves in their hometown, and the result is a noise rock album with the sludge of the Midwest and the storytelling instincts of a horror novelist. They played a hometown show the day it came out, then sold out two New York nights almost at once.

Raygun Busch's vocals lurch from deadpan to unhinged over Luther Manhole's grinding guitar, Stin's thick, distorted bass and Cap'n Ron's industrial drum samples. "Slaughterhouse" opens with a riff like heavy machinery, "Why" is a raw howl about homelessness that Busch called the scariest song on the record, "Pamela" is surprisingly personal, and "Tropical Beaches, Inc." tells the story of an infomercial pitchman. Busch cites Nick Cave's Murder Ballads as an influence on the characters, and the nine-minute closer is the band at their most immersive.

Touché Amoré's Jeremy Bolm named it his favourite album of 2022. It is not, despite the title, a country record; we have had to explain this more than once.

Also at Kops: more Chat Pile on vinyl · browse Metal

Tracklist

Listen

On The Flenser (cat# FR129), the 2022 album.