“Masc” by Chat Pile from their Forthcoming Album “Cool World”: Single Review

I instantly connected with the music of Oklahoma group Chat Pile whenever it is that I first started listening. I think it was early enough that I was already onboard for the announcement of their 2022 full-length album “God’s Country,” which unites its spiraling tales of woe by looking — and, through the forceful, sludgy, and noisy rock instrumentals, physically pushing — inwards, culminating in a lengthy closing track in which the central figure has a grim face-off with some personification of the McDonald’s character “Grimace,” which they imagine to be tormenting them.

And now there’s another one coming! “Cool World,” the newest full-length album from Chat Pile, will be released in October by The Flenser. (Vinyl pre-orders are right here.)

The other day, Chat Pile released their latest single from the new album: “Masc,” which feels difficult to interpret in a linear fashion, and, at least after my first dozen listens, seems more like a documentation of another, particularly self-effacing mental spiral in the face of someone or something that’s… particularly taxing.

“I/ Trust and bleed/ I/ It’s your world/ So cut/ Cut me open,” goes some of the song’s closing segment.

The instrumentals on the track remind me of stalwart heavy rock like Chevelle but morph into a backbreaking, gothic dirge — sweeping guitars à la familiar shoegaze with the scope of spiritual ecstasy rocked by the crush of that cathedral’s stone walls falling into the earth.

As with Chat Pile’s output across the board, “Masc,” a wrenching track, is heavy — and there’s a lot else going on in the music besides the basics of the guitar-playing and the other instrumental performances. The tones sound very unclean. I’ve got no idea what precise kind of instrument and/or pedal formulation that Chat Pile actually uses, but it’s great — not too much, but enough to make you feel like you’re wallowing in the mud or wandering an abandoned building that’s slowly falling apart.

Though each group’s specifics will vary, I always think of this kind of thing in music as just sounding dirty — in a real, physical sense, somehow.

It’s not something I always appreciated with this kind of music — or even caught in the music I was actively listening to, but “Masc” is actually very catchy, with driving rhythms amid the flattening song.

Vocalist Raygun Busch’s singing is mostly not screams: perfectly comprehensible, but delivered with what I’d call a pained quaver that suggests, when accompanied by this particular music, not necessarily teetering on some kind of overwrought edge but at least a profound sense of disconnect: a fear and trembling in the face of a world that grows beyond us as individuals.

The refrains are part of the catchiness. The repetition of the “trust and bleed” mantra that repeats time and again in the song feels eventually like it’s pushing something out of you. And though the group keeps the song moving along, Chat Pile slow down enough that you’re left simmering amid the pummeling, consuming tidal wave of music.

And the new song has a fittingly wild video. See that below: