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 In the spring of 2019, a new rock band made up of four otherwise ordinary Okies emerged seemingly out of nowhere, swiftly turning heads with a grotesque new take on noise rock—one fueled by the existential anguish that has defined the 21st century. Taking its name from the towering mounds of toxic waste that stand as monuments to capitalism’s cruel hubris across its home state, Oklahoma City’s Chat Pile made an immediate impression. That momentum culminated in the release of its landmark 2022 debut album, God’s Country, and its expansive 2024 follow-up, Cool World.

Highlighter Yellow, Indie Exclusive

Like the towering mounds of toxic waste from which it gets its namesake, the music of Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is a suffocating, grotesque embodiment of the existential anguish that has defined the 21st Century. It figures that a band with this abrasive, unrelenting, and outlandish of a sound has stuck as strong of a chord as it has. Dread has replaced the American dream, and Chat Pile’s music is a poignant reminder of that shift—a portrait of an American rock band molded by a society defined by its cold and cruel power systems.

Though very much on-brand with Chat Pile’s signature flavor of cacophonous, sludgy noise rock, the band’s shift to a global thematic focus on Cool World not only compliments the broader experimentations it employs with their songwriting but also how they dissect the album’s core theme of violence. Melded into the band’s twisted foundational sound are traces of other eclectic genre stylings, with examples of gazy, goth-tinged dirges to abrasive yet anthemic alt/indie-esque hooks and off-kilter metal grooves only scratching the surface of what can be heard in the album’s ten tracks.

Besides stylistically stretching the boundaries of the Chat Pile sound, Cool World is also the band’s first record to have someone else handle mixing duties, with Ben Greenberg (Uniform) capturing and further amplifying the quartet’s unmistakably outsider and folk-art edge.

While Chat Pile’s debut album was plenty disturbing with its B-movie-inspired interpretation of a “real American horror story”, what the band depicts on Cool World is unsettling not just from its visceral noise rock onslaught, but from depicting how all sorts of atrocities are pretty much standard parts of modern existence. In film terms, think something like a Criterion arthouse film by way of schlocky grindhouse splatterfest: undeniably gratuitous and thrilling in the moment but leaving a looming dread in the back of one’s mind for how close the horrors depicted mirror reality.

Oklahoma’s Chat Pile have had an exciting 2022; they released their album God’s Country, toured the midwest and east coast in support of the album, announced their appearance at Roadburn Festival 2023, and while the band is working on LP2, they’re revealing details for their score for the indie film Tenkiller. While not a proper full-length album, the Tenkiller score was written and recorded in the winter of 2020, and it waxes and wanes from the signature Chat Pile sound but also ventures into new ones— including arena country music. The band comments, “The music we made for Tenkiller is quite a bit different than what you may come to expect from us. We were given the freedom to really experiment and explore territories that we’ve never done before.” They continue, “It’s not going to be for everyone, but we hope some of you connect with what we set out to do.” “Chat Pile bring a sense of dirt and squalor to the table.” —The FADER “Oklahoma City’s Chat Pile are the perfect people to expose the dark, seedy underbelly of American life.” —Paste Magazine “Cleansingly punishing.” —Stereogum “Harrowing.” —Pitchfork

Cobalt Blue Vinyl

A full-length collaboration between Oklahoma noise-rock legends Chat Pile and Texas-born enigmatic guitarist/composer Hayden Pedigo.

Captures the tragic beauty and desolation of the American heartland through cinematic, post-apocalyptic soundscapes.

Follows Hayden Pedigo’s breakout success with The Happiest Times I Ever Ignored (Mexican Summer) and earned widespread acclaim and established him as one of modern guitar’s most distinctive voices.

Gatefold vinyl release featuring artwork by Malcolm Byers

For something to be “ecstatic,” the feelings and emotions it evokes must transcend what one tends to experience most regularly in their lives. Ecstatic joy isn’t just happiness; it’s a feeling of jubilation which impacts one emotionally and in a metaphysical, arguably spiritual sense too. Although it has long been associated with connotations of the dark and macabre, extreme music has the ability to be a powerful mode of expression for these feelings of absolute bliss, overwhelming love, and awe-inspiring sublimity. Extreme emotions no less and those which black metal quartet Agriculture evokes with its ecstatic subversion of the subgenre’s tropes.

What was initially a meeting and subsequent series of jam sessions between Kern Haug and Daniel Meyer, two musicians in the Los Angeles underground noise scene, would eventually manifest as a shared vision to portray the sublimity of the human experience through the vehicle of heavy music. Following the additions of veteran guitarist Richard Chowenhill and bassist / vocalist Leah Levinson to the band’s lineup, this idea would crystalize into the “ecstatic black metal” backbone of Agriculture’s music, first heard on the band’s 2022 debut EP, The Circle Chant.

With Agriculture’s self-titled record and first full-length LP, it’s abundantly clear that the band’s use of heavy music to showcase the most resplendent emotions and moments of the human experience has a far deeper meaning. Woven between the flurries of soaring tremolo picking, crescendoing guitar harmonies, celebratory screamed vocals, thoughtful improvisation, and meditative atmospheric passages is the record’s mission statement to experience the wonders and joys of both the esoteric and physical world.

• Highly anticipated new album from rising Los Angeles collective

• For fans of emotionally intense and genre-expansive metal like Deafheaven, Alcest, Liturgy, Lingua Ignota, Have a Nice Life, Swans

B11 variant.
Issued in a single LP jacket with a printed inner sleeve and 24" x 36" poster.

Burrowing through the mire of the endless Floridian swamps like an arcane travesty of nature, the shadow-bound entity more commonly known only as Worm present Foreverglade, a strange amalgam of things that ooze, things that crawl and some things that remain still for centuries before crumbling back into the dust and dirt unobserved by mortal eyes. Utterly ambitious while being steeped in the ancient practices of tradition and ritual observance, on Foreverglade Worm finds its truest incarnation, where the catacombs of funereal and oppressively heavy death doom are further thrown open, letting drift out the lurking obscurity of black metal’s cemetery stench. And yet an adept virtuosity and ghostly ethereality invokes the grim dark beauty of the swamps as much as the veiled creeping horrors. What’s certain is Foreverglade is suffocatingly heavy, filled with shimmering gloomy atmosphere and a reeking foul humidity that superbly embodies the mysteries and monstrosities of the murk. To that end, Worm reach a new apex of creative sorcery while signaling it has only begun to unleash what lies beneath the mists.

• Highly anticipated third album and first domestic release for Floridian funereal death doom band 
• Wild and fantastic artwork from Brad Moore (Tomb Mold, Morpheus Descends, Organic Infest) 
• For fans of Disembowelment, Thorns Of The Carrion, Ceremonium, Spectral Voice, Goatlord, Evoken, Gorement, Atramentus 

B9 Variant.
Issued in a single LP jacket with silver foil-stamp logo and additional metallic ink throughout.
Includes a double-sided insert and 24" x 36" poster.

• For fans of Disembowelment, Abigor, Thorns of the Carrion, Limbonic Art, Ceremonium, Evoken, Emperor, Obtained Enslavement, Atramentus, Unhol

B4 variant.
Issued in a single LP jacket with a double-sided insert & 24" x 36" poster.
Tracks are listed sequentially regardless of side.