It was a cold morning when I spoke to three fourths of Oklahoma City titans Chat Pile, their warmth contrasting the brisk air outside my window as we talked over Google Meet. (I'm too broke for Zoom, apparently.) The band had recently wrapped up an incredibly successful tour with Fleshwater, as well as releasing a collaborative LP with Hayden Pedigo. The band had practice that day, so we got together early in the morning to discuss, fighting through a slew of technical difficulties along the way.
Sam Owens: Okay, if you guys just want to start talking, test the audio?
Stin: Hey, what’s up, check check.
Luther: Hello, hello. Testing, testing.
Sam: I think we’re good. Why don’t you start off by introducing yourselves and telling us what you do in the band?
Stin: I’m Stin, and I play bass in Chat Pile.
L: I’m Luther, and I play guitar.
Sam: Sweet. Thank you for joining me today.
Stin: Yeah, thanks for having us.
Sam: I’ll just get right into it. Your latest drop was… Oh, here’s another one! What’s up?
Raygun: What’s up?
Sam: Raygun has entered the fray. Alright.
R: I wish I was in The Fray, bro.
L: What was their song? I don’t remember it, but it was still, it was like one of the last bands for the music…
R: [Sings a song]
Stin: Isn’t that Lifehouse?
R: Aw man, I wanna be in Lifehouse.
Stin: I only know that because my girlfriend liked that song.
R: [Continues singing]
L: All I remember The Fray from is that towards the end of MTV doing music videos, there was some Fray video playing all the time.
R: [Singing again] “Can’t take my eyes off of you….”
Stin: THAT sounds right.
L: Let’s see, I think that their song is called "Look After You," that’s their song or something?
R: “Look After You!” That sounds right, that sounds right.
L: "How to Save a Life," is that them?
Sam: That one sounds familiar.
L: Okay, I think we figured it out.
Sam: Alright! My first question, your latest drop was a B-side titled Masks, including a cover of Nirvana’s "Sifting," off of the album Bleach. This isn’t your first time doing a cover, and it’s not even your first time doing a Nirvana cover. That would be 2024’s cover of the, in my opinion, CRIMINALLY underrated "Scentless Apprentice." Is there a desire to do more covers like this?
Stin: Yeah, actually, there is. The reason we swing towards Nirvana is because all of us can never agree on what to cover, so Nirvana is the one thing that overlaps all of our taste. It sounds like Sub Pop would like for us to do more singles with them, so a joke that I’ve been talking about is that if they do enough, maybe over the course of 12 years we can cover Bleach in its entirety.
L: Yeah, sure. It was especially doing something because it’s through Sub Pop, we wanted to do a cover that’s through them, or a classic Sub Pop band. It just made sense to do another Nirvana one. I think especially Bleach, our sound lends itself to Chat Pile-ifying Bleach songs, it’s pretty easy to do. It was fun, that was a fun one. That song, honestly, we had talked about it for years as a potential cover for us to do. It just kinda worked out.
R: What’s this spooky, scary sound happening, does everyone hear this?
Sam: I can hear that, it’s adding a tone of ambience to the recording.
R: I’m fine with it, I’m just, what is this sound happening?
L: Maybe it’s coming from me because I don’t hear this spooky sound.
Stin: It sounds like a mic is being scraped or touched or something.
R: Ah, yeah, it sounds like a rrrhun, rrrhun, rrrhun.
L: Yep, there it is.
Sam: Sample that, put that in your new album.
R: Sure! Sounds like somebody’s trying to get out of a closet or something.
Stin: It’s coming from you, Luther, your little bubble is lighting up.
L: Hmm, I wonder what that is, because I’m not even moving, so…
R: Your mic is really sensitive, perhaps. Picking up some chair squeak or something.
L: Let’s see… Settings, audio… You know what, I’ll put… Can you guys hear me now? I’m trying to set it up.
Stin: Sounds like it went away, whatever it was. By the way, that cover was harder to pull off than our own song, because it’s really long and repetitive, so when we were recording the instrumentals of it, we kept losing where we were at in the song. It was fun, it turned out good.
L: That’s a fun one, and that is one where there’s technically a guitar solo in that song, but its so fucked up sounding that it gave me a lot of… I’m not very good at writing solos, so it was like, “Aw, perfect! I can do some crazy noise and this and that, that works.” I think it turned out pretty decent.
Stin: Another surprising thing about doing that as a cover is, I’m shocked to find out how many people didn’t realize it’s a cover! There was even one dude, he goes, a lot of people were just, “Wow, this is the best Chat Pile song,”, yeah, there’s a reason for that! One guy was even like “Damn, that’s a great Thou cover that they did!”
L: I guess Thou covered "Sifting" at one point.
Stin: So there’s this one guy out there that thinks that we covered Thou.
Sam: That’s really funny, oh my god. Were there any other runner-ups other than “Sifting” on the Masks B-side?
Stin: I really wanted to do a "Tad" cover, but not everyone in the band’s really familiar with it, and then I think, was there another Bleach song that we were talking about? "Papercuts," maybe?
R: My choice is always "Blue," if we do another one, that’d be what I’d push for next. I was down for anything off Bleach, honestly. I felt like it was pretty easy on that one.
L: And "Sifting," just the way that that song sounds, you can hear the influence in our band in that song anyways. It kinda just worked with that.
Stin: The guitar tabs book for Bleach is literally in our practice space. We own that! We can refer to it at any time.
L: I think we did while learning that song!
Sam: Your live performances feature an ever-rotating batch of songs, so do you guys just have a bunch of setlists that you cycle through? How do you determine what songs you play on what nights?
Stin: We have no setlist. We literally just call it onstage every night, which is why the setlist changes all the time. The one thing that we’ll do is, we’ll all figure out what we’re gonna open with that night, but it’s usually while we’re literally backstage and our entrance music is coming on.
L: It’s just one of those things where there’s songs that we like to play in certain spots, but we just kinda do the Dave Matthews thing, the Pearl Jam thing. Playing whatever, it’s fun. Sometimes in the moment, if someone’s up front, just shouting a song, just playing it, I think it just adds something to the performance too. If you don’t have a set setlist, you’re more able to do stuff like that, do the spontaneous stuff. It’s a fun way to do it.
Stin: We’ve done all-request shows also. We just let the audience pick what we play.
L: That’s a razor’s edge too! Sometimes…
R: We let the freaks have the mic, that one.
L: It’s usually worked pretty good. There’s just some times where the requests, I love when people request a song that we maybe just played one song before, that’s fun. We’ll play Grimace[_Smoking_Weed.Jpeg], then they’re like, “PLAY GRIMACE!!” It’s like, I don’t think you know what the song is!
R: I think next time, we should just play it again.
Sam: You guys should do a set where it’s just all Masc.
L: We’ve done that before, we did it in Boston at the end of this Fleshwater tour where we were doing support for them, I think.
R: For Halloween.
L: Yeah, was it on Halloween that we did all 4? Because we did 2 completely different sets where we didn’t repeat any songs. Did we go through them 1, 2, 3, and 4? Like that?
Stin: We went through them in chronological order. Yes, we did.
L: We’ll bust that out occasionally, doing the Mask review, which is playing all 4 of them.
Stin: The Mask! Masc number 2 is the one we tend to play the least live. In fact, it kind of only gets busted out during the review.
Sam: How do you pick what songs you like?
Stin: It’s usually just what we’re feeling. There are songs that are more fun to play than others. Some songs are more aggressive than others, usually you just read the temperature of the room a little bit. Are people going nuts? We should probably keep the energy going.
L: If it’s more of a head-nod night, we can play some of the more melodic stuff.
Stin: Or, sometimes we’ll finish a song and we just look at each other and have question marks over our heads, and then we just look at the audience and go, “Well, what do you guys want to hear?”
L: Who knows! It seems like we’ve already played the ones we talked about or whatever.
Stin: Every once in a while it’ll be like, technical difficulties on stage, so you have a tendency to pick the ones where you know you’re not gonna fuck up.
L: Yeah, there’ll be times where I’ll be having issues with my guitar and I’m like, “Please, god, don’t make me play 'Tape' or something.” For some reason, 'Tape' on Cool World is one where I just need everything working very well, because I’m not the best guitar player. There’s not a lot of room for error. It’s just easy for me to get thrown off, I guess.
Sam: Speaking of technical difficulties, I think Raygun is frozen.
Stin: Yeah. He’ll be back!
Sam: Bits of your music draw influence from film and writing, for example, "I Am Dog Now" being inspired by The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau... Welcome back!
R: Still can’t see you. Oh, there we are.
Sam: Here, I’ll just restart the question.
R: The dreaded Google Meet vs. the Zoom that typically does not do this! Anyway.
Sam: Sorry about that. They decided that they’re gonna charge 19 dollars a month for unlimited calls, and if you don’t want to pay that, you’re limited to 40 minutes. Bits of your music draw influence from film and writing, for example, "I Am Dog Now" being inspired by The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and "grimace_smoking_weed.jpeg" being inspired by In A Glass Cage and Mysterious Skin. I have that right, correct?
R: That’s right, yes!
Sam: When does a movie or book become prevalent in your writing? Is it just something that sticks with you, or do you know when you start writing a song that you’re taking inspiration from this piece of art?
R: Well, I guess in the past there has been an instance or two where I’ve set out to do a thing based on a thing, you know? There’s always a bit of, “I’m just trying to feel out what I can do here.” For instance, I’ll tell you, we’re recording a new album right now. I was just sitting down, I was like, “Man, I’m just gonna write a suicide song.” And not the band Suicide, but just a song about killing yourself. We have so many songs about that, but I was just like, “I’m gonna do another one.” Then I started to think about this book Filth- have you ever read this? By Irvine Welsh, I started to think about the book, and the movie, Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption, the Brooks character. I was just thinking of a lot of instances of suicide I’ve read or seen in movies and stuff. All that just kinda comes in, but it’s not about any of those things at all, it just kind of comes in. There’s a poet I really like, named T.S. Eliot. Do you know T.S. Eliot?
Sam: I do.
R: He would just put in all these references from all sorts of mythologies, and would just be like, “You suss out what it is!" I expect you to know what I’m talking about, you know? I’m doing the most raccoon, garbage version of that. That’s where I’m coming from, what I’m trying to do.
Sam: So, I know that you [Raygun] particularly are active on Letterboxd, so a question that I would ask is, is there a series of 4 films that you would recommend to people to get into the mindspace of Chat Pile?
R: Damn, that’s a good question. I wish there was a way to tee up this discussion, but I don’t want to derail us from your question. Gummo seems like an obvious choice, but fuck Harmony Korine. Any friend of Jared Kushner’s is no friend of mine. Fuck him. So obviously, that’s a huge influence on all of us, but I’m not gonna recommend you see that movie or give that man any of your money, go ahead and pirate it maybe! I think we’d agree, maybe Hype!, the documentary Hype! would be a perfect film to get into the Chat Pile mindset. You mentioned Mysterious Skin and In A Glass Cage, but… aw man. It’s a good question, a really good question. There’s gotta be some kind of horror movie or something.
L: I was gonna say, some sort of dopey horror offerings, or something.
Stan: And then some type of really bad B-movie, too, would need to be in the mix, probably.
L: Yeah, Son of The Mask, maybe Machine Gun Kelly’s movie Good Mourning. Spelled with a U, like the Alkaline Trio album.
Stin: Champagne and Bullets.
L: That’s a good one, yeah, Champagne and Bullets. Dangerous Men.
Stin: It’s hard to pick just 4, though. I think you need like a music doc, you need a serious depressing arthouse movie, some type of action B-movie, and, yeah, horror of some kind.
L: I mean, yeah, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I think, that would just be one. Especially being, we’re not from Texas, but that type of regional horror thing. That’s a big influence for us for sure, for stuff life that. Just Tobe Hooper in general, his style… I feel like Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is the better answer, honestly. The ridiculous, borderline comedy one.
Sam: I got a friend of mine, that one’s their favorite.
L: To me, I’m not easily got by jumpscares, I’m pretty good at just sitting and taking it. I get more creeped out by creepy movies rather than full-on scary stuff, and that is one of the movies that I would say is truly scary, still, is the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
Stin: Absolutely, man. The opening credits scene which has been ripped off and made terrible in so many ways, it does it better than anybody ever has. That kind of creepy, I don’t even know what you’d call it. I’d call it the Seven effect, or whatever. They’ve done it better than anybody, so, or Tobe did.
R: So, what’d y’all come up with, while I got brutally kicked off? I’m on the same internet as Luther Manhole, so that’s baffling.
L: I’m with the Ethernet cable, so that might be the reason I’m not having the trouble that you are.
R: I hate this whole application thing, hopefully I got it all sussed out. Where are we at? Texas Chainsaw? Hype!?
L: We were talking about some bad movies, like Dangerous Men or Champagne and Bullets.
Sam: Son of The Mask was also mentioned.
R: My favorite bad movie is No Holds Barred. I mean, rest in piss Hulk Hogan, but it is a great movie.
Sam: I think the best bad movie I’ve ever seen is probably I, Robot.
L: That’s a funny choice. I don’t know if I actually saw I, Robot. That’s the Will Smith movie, right?
Sam: I love that movie to death and it SUCKS. It sucks.
L: Now I’m intrigued, should I watch I, Robot?
Sam: Shia LaBeouf is a minor supporting character in it, and his whole character is just that he swears. He just uses a different language, like, alright man. The robots in that movie are so unnerving.
L: Yeah, it’s like a 3 or a 4, right?
R: Who directed that movie?
Sam: I don’t remember.
R: Is it Andrew Nichols?
L: No, it’s Alex Proyas, the director of The Crow and Dark City.
R: And Gods of Egypt.
Sam: A friend of mine was actually telling me to watch Dark City the other day.
L: Yeah? Dark City, I’ve seen it before.
Stin: That came up before, on the Siskel and Ebert '90s list I was looking at.
R: Dude, Ebert LOVED it, he compared it to Metropolis. He is in love with Dark City. His review is great, and it makes you think the movie will be better than it is.
L: It’s definitely one of those, I mean I barely remember it, I don’t know if you like it, Ray, but it’s very proto-Matrix still. It’s a year before The Matrix, and it’s still a lot of fashion from it, there’s simulation stuff going on as well. It’s kinda proto-Matrix in that way.
R: That was the role, Kiefer [Sutherland], he had been doing a lot of bad guy roles. He did a really weird nerd scientist role for that and broke out of his bad guy streak. I saw a thing where he was talking about literally what I just said, yes, I have watched the WatchMojo Kiefer Sutherland, counting down his favorite roles or whatever.
L: Shoutout to WatchMojo for sure.
R: Shoutout to WatchMojo. I’ve wasted so much time watching your dumb content.
Sam: Yeah, I remember when I was a kid I would always watch their Top 10s library.
R: WatchMojo’s pretty nu metal, right?
L: I think, yeah. There’s something intrinsically nu metal about WatchMojo.
R: Without nu metal, there’s no WatchMojo.
Sam: Jonathan Davis could be directly correlated to the creation of WatchMojo, and it wouldn’t exist without Hybrid Theory.
R: So, where are we at in the interview?
Sam: I think we’re on question 4, alright. Do you draw from any other forms of media like games or even other music?
R: Oh, we talked about books. Yeah, music, of course! The fellas probably got way more to talk about, I’ll say, I’ve just been listening to a lot of Bad Brains lately. I’ve been listening to White Zombie a lot, and a little bit of, should I say the cancelled, perhaps, Pantera. I’ve been listening to a little bit of Pantera too. I guess all of those bands might be a bit controversial.
Stin: Yeah, that’s just kind of everything these days, you know?
L: I’ve been in full Sleater-Kinney mode lately. That’s been something that I’ve been listening to a lot, Ray and I together. We live together right now, so we’ve been jamming all the records that we procure from our fine record store. Guestroom Records, Knucklehead City.
Stin: Our band has always, it is the Chat Pile thing that we are always pulling these influences out of the air and kind of combining them with stuff. For me, the album that I’ve been obsessed with for the last 12 months is Fast Stories… from Kid Coma by Truly, which is just this forgotten grunge classic. I do feel like it has very much seeped its way into everything I’ve contributed on our most recent record that we’re working on right now.
Sam: Interesting! I will have to give that a listen.
L: I’ve been listening to a lot of Death, too. Sleater-Kinney and Death have been my obsessions lately. Maybe you’ll hear a little bit of Death and Sleater-Kinney in the new record!
Stin: And you will, actually! I can tell you that you will.
Sam: 2025 saw you open for Fleshwater. What was your experience like being on the road with them?
Stin: It was fun. It was a really fun tour. We did it because we wanted to play in front of an audience that might not be super familiar with us, and their audience is young, like really young. We were a little nervous that people in their teens and early 20s wouldn’t understand what four old guys are doing on stage, but every night it popped off. The audiences were really great, really kind to us.
L: It is awesome to do headlining stuff, but it was cool to just be in that second slot and have essentially zero responsibility but to play music for 45 minutes. It was great! It was a really easy tour in general, and the band, they were all fun to hang out with. Balmora as well, Balmora was the opener, they were really, really fun. They’re into movies and stuff too, and so are the Fleshwater people, but we were all chopping it up about stuff like Paranormal Activity, Five, or whatever.
R: Shoutout to Danny. If you’re watching this Danny, we love you.
Stin: The only hard part about it, really, is that we picked a slot that started in Los Angeles and ended in Boston…
R: San Francisco, actually. Even farther.
Stin: San Francisco, yeah! We literally drove to both coasts and back. It was crazy.
L: Started in OKC and drove to San Francisco, and ended in Boston, so it was long, a lot of long drives on that one.
Stin: The routing part of it wasn’t ideal, but otherwise it was one of the easier runs we’ve ever done. That was a good one.
R: Yeah, I liked it too. I had a good time. Just wanted to add.
Sam: My friend Sebastian, I think, on that tour, brought a copy of Freddy Got Fingered for you to sign, Raygun, and he told me you looked him dead in the face and go, “I hate this fucking movie.”
R: It’s true. I did. I remember that. I signed it, though.
Sam: Yeah! He showed me a picture and I said, “That’s fucking sick, dude.”
R: I think I fully defaced it. I wrote, “I hate this movie.”
Sam: I’ll have to find the picture.
R: It’s like when people go, “Why don't you like this movie?” Imagine how I feel! I love so many movies that people don’t give a shit about, that nobody’s even heard of. There’s a billion movies to… whatever. Anyways. Freddy Got Fingered, I’m so tired of talking about that movie. It’s become a thing now.
Sam: What is it like being on a bill where the bands are so incredibly varied?
Stin: It’s something we actually try to do on purpose, honestly. I think people need to broaden their horizons in general. It’s been that way forever, since I was a kid going to shows, it’s like, you’ve got the punk kids here, the goth kids here, whatever. If anything, I guess it’s gotten better over time with the way that the internet has opened up everybody’s minds, tastes, and stuff. It’s just good to be exposed to things that are a little bit different. Even as a fan or consumer or whatever you want to call it, would you not get bored of wanting to see the same thing for four hours straight?
L: Four death metal bands in a row, or something. I can see the point of, you want it all to be some sort of vibe, but if we’re booking a headlining thing and talking about bringing bands, I also want there to be… It’s not my intention for people to show up just for us. I want people to show up for the opener and the middle band and I think there should be a progression of sound. It should make sense between what the first band sounds like and the second band sounds like and what we sound like. I think we’ve done a good job of that, and I think it makes a cool overall show too, that makes it worth coming to the whole thing instead of just, “Oh, well, I can skip these two bands,” or, “I really like this one band, but I don’t want to listen to 4 hours of death metal, so I’m only going to go for the two bands I like.” I don’t know why I’m harping on death metal, it’s my favorite metal genre. That’s just one where you see a lot of death metal packages. That’s not very typical of mixed bills. Any time that we’ve gotten the chance to play with stuff that is different for us, too, like Sound and Fury was that hardcore festival, or Outbreak, we got to play those, and we didn’t really know how that was going to go because we’re not a hardcore band. It has shown to me that people have generally been pretty open-minded to us and it’s gone over pretty well, if maybe they don’t really know what our deal is, we’re maybe kinda novel or weird or something. People can get a kick out of it. That’s the strength of having a mixed bill with different bands on. Maybe you’ll see something that you’d never have seen otherwise, or you didn’t even know you liked yet. I definitely like the mixed bill. I think that it’s something that we’ll try to continue to do.
Sam: I guess that leads into my next question. This year has you guys slated for the 2026 ArcTanGent festival. How are you guys feeling about that?
Stin: Excited! We’re always happy to go back to the UK. It’s kind of the most fun place on Earth for us.
L: I don’t know why it’s so fun! I mean, I love to make fun of the UK too, but my dark truth is that yeah, when we’re there, it’s just so easy to be there as a dumb American tourist. I go to the cool movie theaters, they have tons of Indian food and curry, which I eat a lot because I don’t eat meat.
Stin: The fans there are really cool there, too. I love our fans in the UK. They’re so enthusiastic but really polite, the vibe is just right for us.
R: Our tour manager lives there too, our UK tour manager Toby, who we all love.
Stin: Any excuse to hang out with Toby is cool, too.
R: I would live in the UK in a heartbeat. If I was allowed to just move there and it wouldn’t affect anything, I would definitely do it. I love the UK a lot.
L: It’s one of those places where they have a ton of their own issues, but it’s still just better than here though. We’re really in the nightmare zone worldwide, so it’s hard to find any place where it’s just, “Ah, here’s the good place to go to." Living in Oklahoma City, we could definitely live someplace worse, but every time I’m in the UK, I could totally. Especially when we go up to Scotland, I love Glasgow, it just feels like I’m in Seattle.
Stin: I think Glasgow is where I would choose to live if I could, honestly. I really, really like it there.
L: They have a great cinema there, too. We’ve played there a couple of times, last time we played there was actually at this student union that was huge! I’ve never seen anything like that before, it was really cool.
Stin: Yeah, I think it was like a 700-cap place if I’m guessing correctly, something around there?
L: Well, we won’t be in Scotland, but we’re going to Ireland for the first time this year though. We’re playing a couple Dublin shows. People over there, they’ve been the most vocal online, requesting us. Ever since we finally went to Ohio, and the Ohio people got their fix.
R: With all due respect to Brazil, of course.
L: And Australia. But I do feel like I just saw the Irish fans being very loud for years now, so I’m very excited that we’re gonna go over there for a few days. We’re going to play 2 shows, so we’ll at least be over there for 3-4 days, that’s pretty cool.
Sam: Hell yeah! 2025 also saw you release a collaborative album with Hayden Pedigo, combining your sound with his experimental guitar styling. What is it like bringing another artist into your work?
Stin: Bringing him in was as easy as it gets. That’s the easiest record we’ve ever made. I don’t know about other artists, it could be a nightmare depending on who. Here’s the thing, if you’re not a musician, this is a thing that a lot of non-musicians don’t understand. You could bring in literally the best guitar player, or drummer, or whatever, that exist on planet Earth, but if you don’t have chemistry and you don’t vibe, it just doesn’t work. It’s almost like being in a romantic relationship or something, right? Truly, you might meet the smartest, funniest person you’ve ever met, but if you have no physical chemistry you’re just not going to be in a relationship. That’s kinda how making music is. With Hayden, we just sat him down and in four weeks we had a record.
L: We basically just started jamming and we did an improv session on the first day we all got together, just to be like, “Hey, let’s see you!” It wasn’t even like, “Oh, hey, we’re writing a song right now,” it was more of a “Let’s just see if it even feels good for all of us to jam in a different configuration.” There was actually some pretty cool stuff that came out of that session that actually ended up on the record. Everyone just kinda went, “Oh, I have this idea I wanted to work on,” we’d record that, someone else would lay another thing down over it. Especially because we weren’t necessarily having to work within the confines of, in a Chat Pile song, we’re definitely trying to thread the needle of extreme music while also having hooks and making it have a structure. It wasn’t really bound by structure for In The Earth Again. It was just do whatever, and if stuff sounded cool, then we just did it, we kinda did it in 4 weeks, which is crazy.
Sam: That’s absolutely insane.
Stin: Yeah, unheard of for us! We’re working on our next proper album and we have been working on it since November, and we still have a ways to go. That shows you how hard it can be.
L: But yeah, it was cool. I mean, it’s definitely a different type of, I’ve joked before, we could’ve probably released that as a different band name as the five of us. It sounds close enough to us, but it sounds different enough to me that it’s its own kind of thing. It was cool to play with another guitarist, I’m the only guitarist in the band, so it’s fun to do some dual stuff like that. Maybe one day down the line, all of our lives are very busy right now, but he’s having a kid, maybe in a few years or so we could do another thing with him. I would love to.
Stin: Yeah, I would too.
L: He lives in our city, so the note of that is also, this really only happened because Hayden lives in Oklahoma City too. It’s not really like we’re collaborating with people that live elsewhere, sending tracks and stuff. He was able to just come to the studio and we were all hanging out. It kinda just worked out.
Sam: Any personal highlight from working with him?
Stin: I think just hanging out with him, because he’s a friend of ours too, so I always like hanging out with Hayden. I think one highlight, or something that just made me happy, was that we have this guitar that has been with Chat Pile from the beginning, and it’s mutated over the years due to circumstances. Now it is an aluminum-necked baritone guitar. He played that for pretty much every single song on the record. Seeing him play this PVT-60 with noise rocket power for the whole time was just like, oh hell yeah dude. We’re forcing his hand, in a way.
L: I don’t even play that guitar live anymore, just because of the aluminum. It’s awesome, I track with it when we’re recording, but it’s super heavy physically, and it’s just not the most ‘easy on your fingers’ guitar, I would say.
Stin: It’s a little unwieldy, yeah.
L: The pictures of him holding the gigantic silver-necked guitar, a lot of his parts on that are on that guitar, which is pretty cool. We just did our tuning, starting with our tuning because he plays in a lot of open tunings, so it was kinda, start with our lower thing and transpose to whatever open type of thing he is. Voice down a few octaves. It was cool to do something different and I’m glad people seem to like it, there’s stuff on there that I have been definitely trying to turn into songs that I hadn’t been able to make work in the normal Chat Pile context. This was a fun way to like, “Oh, now these can be songs in this thing and it makes a little more sense.”
Sam: What about you, Raygun, do you have a favorite highlight from working with Hayden?
R: It was just a good time. Me and Hayden are friends now, which is nice. We have this running joke, this morning even, I saw, there’s a certain Spanish guitar player that is the exact opposite of what Hayden’s doing. Hayden doesn’t really like this guy a lot. I’ll, every now and then, send him a post from this guy and be like, “Man, someday you’ll be at this level, dude.” That’s the gift that keeps on giving that came from that album, for sure.
Sam: That’s fantastic. Is there any chance material off that album will be considered for future live versions?
Stin: I think we’ve been talking about doing "The Matador" live, but we’d have to completely relearn it and even reconfigure it a little bit. I mean, who knows, you know?
L: There’s talk of maybe doing an electric version at some point, of "Behold A Pale Horse" for something, but those are really the only two. Mainly "The Matador," I guess we could probably work up "Never Say Die" or something. We would just need Hayden, that’s the thing. A lot of those songs are written with two or three, even four guitars, "Matador" is truly just the most Chat Pile-y one that we could get away with.
Stin: It would be pretty easy to translate that one without Hayden’s part, so even if we did play it live, it would be a modified version of it. We’re not really racing to do it, but there was talk of trying to play shows together with Hayden. It’s just too much of a pain in the ass, maybe it’ll happen one day.
L: That album was just definitely not planned, we kinda just spontaneously made it together. When you’re touring a lot and doing this full-time, we have our years planned out, which makes it hard to say, “Oh, we wrote this excellent extra album out of nowhere with this other person who’s super busy,” you know? It’s hard to find the time to just jam a whole new tour that we wouldn’t normally have done in the middle of all that. I kinda mentioned it with making another record, maybe in a few years or something. I think that album will be a grower, anyways, with people, so maybe down the line we could do something special with that record. We’ll see.
Sam: I love that record, personally. I think that "The Magic Of The World" is probably one of my favorite songs from you guys.
Stin: Thank you.
R: Hell yeah. Appreciate it.
L: That was a fun one. That was definitely one where Hayden started with the bass guitar. Well, not bass guitar, but the underlying guitar part on the acoustic. I just wrote a full harmonic second part to it. Cap'n Ron, however, he’s playing the mellotron on that one, I guess on a MIDI controller, in a way.
R: Yeah, it’s a digital mellotron.
Stin: It’s a total contradiction.
L: But, it sounds cool. Ron got to do a lot of, we all got to switch up a lot of stuff. I like how on "The Matador," that he plays guitar and drums on that song, it’s kinda funny. The rare one of those.
Sam: Chat Pile has been entering the mainstream more as of late. There have been some band tees popping up on TV shows, Grimace was even used for, I believe it was a trailer for a VHS movie. How are you guys feeling about that?
Stin: It’s great! We’re trying to be a full-time band as our primary source of income, so anything helps.
L: I mean, it’s cool that, as a person who loves movies and growing up into music and movies, there’s lots of times where I have found cool bands through a movie. Especially when I was younger. It’s like, you hear something cool on the soundtrack for something. We scored the indie movie here, but it’d be cool to do something like that in the future where, if people are out there making cool movies and they aren’t shitty people, if they’re like, “Hey, we want to use your song in our thing,” I’m definitely down for stuff like that. It has to make sense, but so far any offers like that that we’ve gotten haven’t made sense. Hopefully something with that will be happening in the future, we’ll see. We got to keep writing music that, maybe, works in a cinematic context I guess! Not every song of ours would necessarily work in a movie.
R: We may have some songs being featured in movies that are coming out though.
Stin: There’s a few things that are hypothetically coming out that we can’t say yet.
Sam: I’ll keep an eye out! Alright, here’s one I think you guys are going to really like. So you’re from Oklahoma City, right? Have you ever lost a good restaurant to a car crash?
Stin: I’ve literally been in a restaurant when a car crashed into it.
Sam: No shit?!
L: What restaurant?
Stin: Cattleman’s.
L: Cattleman’s? Oh yeah, you guys were there!
Stin: Paul was there! Yeah, definitely, it happens a lot. In fact, I stopped doing the cars crashing into buildings bit because I’ve really only been using Twitter for the occasional promo, I don’t want to give them any free non-promo type bullshit, you know? And I finally figured out the problem with Bluesky, and the problem is none of our local media is on it. Therefore, I cannot retweet car crashes. I have found a hack, literally, as of today, I’ve restarted the car crash bit on Bluesky if anyone’s interested.
L: Something just happened, anyways, and anytime there is one of those, I guess someone crashed into Top Golf yesterday or two days ago and then fled the scene. Not only, I’m sure, that you, Stin, get @’ed with stuff, personally I got sent that on Instagram and multiple people @’ed me on Discord being like, “Yo, Chat Pile moment,” or whatever. Chat Pile moment, the guy driving his truck into the Top Golf.
Stin: Okay, so you know I do the thing that everybody does that we shouldn’t do, which is like my alarm goes off and the first thing I do is look at my phone, right? So the first thing I did was I looked at my phone, I pulled up the KOCO app, and it said ‘@’ed 3 minutes ago: Car crashes into house in the South Side and flees’ or whatever, and I was like, “Alright, today’s gonna be a good day, I can tell!”
L: It is just crazy how much it happens here, it really is. My theory is that people just go to bars and get drunk and there’s no public transit and everyone is so car culture-pilled that they’d rather just drive their fucking car into the side of a building than call an Uber. I just don’t know why else, it has to be a public transportation thing, right? Just the complete lack of it, you have to drive no matter what here. Maybe other cities have this thing too and it’s not a uniquely Oklahoman thing, but it does seem like in Oklahoma City, once a week, someone drives their car into a house.
Sam: I have never heard of it outside of Oklahoma City. You’d think this would have motivated them to slowly get started on public transportation.
Stin: It’s a long time coming. There’s actually huge strides coming. We’re getting a train that’ll connect the furthest north suburb to the furthest south suburb. Slowly but surely, it’s sort of happening here.
R: Yeah. That’s really cool.
Sam: What is next for Chat Pile?
Stin: We’re working on a new album that will hypothetically come out in September. We have one tour announced, but we will be announcing a ton more over the coming months. I can’t really give any details on that at the moment, but will definitely be more coming soon. That’s really it! That’s enough to keep us busy until the middle of next year.
L: Yeah, it’s pretty much that we’re in the full album-writing zone right now, at least for the next month or two. Then yeah, getting ready to start rehearsing for festival season. Festival season starts up in the summer, so we’ll be doing various stuff like that. I imagine we’ll do a big ol’ tour at the end of the year, and then we’re gonna keep playing shows but definitely take a little time off from writing a little bit. Going from Cool World to In The Earth Again to this third one, it’s been pretty nonstop writing, which is definitely not how we operate usually. I think this album’s going to be really good, but I’m definitely feeling the drain of writing a third album in three years. I’m looking forward to just going into show mode, rehearsal mode, and not necessarily having to be in ‘having to write ten great songs again for the third year in a row’ mode.
R: We’re probably, in that interim, putting out a single or something.
L: Just not having the pressure of, it’s self-imposed pressure, but it’s still pressure. Right now we’re just trying to get this thing done, because if we don’t have a, “Oh, we need to get an album done right now,” type thing it’s like, yeah, we’ll just definitely… There’s also seven or eight song ideas on our board that we didn’t even touch, we had way more extra stuff this time that we haven’t even dug into yet. There’ll definitely be plenty.
Stin: We have more ideas than we have time, is always the thing.
Sam: I get that feeling. Alright, to close it out, this is gonna be a complete and total left-field shift, but should be entirely expected. What is your favorite nu metal band, song, or album?
Stin: I’ll go first because it’s super easy and everyone already knows. Favorite band: Korn, favorite album: Korn, favorite song? It kinda fluctuates between "Me Too" or "Lies" on that album.
L: If we’re going nu metal, I’m not gonna say all Deftones is nu metal, they just kinda become an alt metal band at some point to me. Deftones is the band, Around The Fur would be, it’s not my favorite Deftones album but that’s a fucking nu metal album. For me, it’s probably more "My Own Summer," I guess if we’re doing "My Own Summer" versus "Be Quiet And Drive." "Lhabia," also a great one. I don’t know, something off of Around The Fur would be my answer.
R: Is the first album nu metal?
L: Adrenaline? Yeah, definitely.
Sam: Absolutely. Adrenaline is nu metal to the bone.
R: So my answer then, is Deftones and Adrenaline. But my song, to throw you a left-field choice, is "Push It" by Static-X.
Sam: Aw, fuck yes!
L: It goes so hard, yeah.
R: If I had to tell the aliens what nu metal was, that would be what I pick.
Sam: Hell yeah.
L: Well, in that case, if it doesn’t have to be from the same band, I might just go "Eyeless" by Slipknot. To me, that, with the record scratching and fucking drum-and-bass breaks, it doesn’t get much more nu metal.
Sam: I saw a video of Joey Jordison doing the intro to that song the other day, from a drumcam perspective. He’s fucking insane!
L: Rest in peace.
Sam: Rest in fucking peace. Now I’m trying to think of, what nu metal song would I show to the aliens? I’m thinking "With You" by Linkin Park.
L: Yeah, as much as I’m not a Linkin Park guy, it’s hard to deny that they’re maybe more quintessential than I give them credit for, I should say. I’m a guy that doesn’t listen to Linkin Park.
R: What about "All In The Family?" Fred Durst.
Sam: Oh yeah, absolutely.
Stin: Aliens just instantly nuke planet Earth.
Sam: We don’t need this.
L: They’re like, “Wait a second, that riff at the beginning of the song, it does go hard...”
Stin: What is this Trojan Horse of a weapon you’re sending me?
L: That is the secret of that song, it starts and you’re like, “Damn, this is gonna be the best Korn song,” and then immediately the lyrics, and it’s like Uh oh!
Sam: What do you mean?! It is the best Korn song! Yeah, no, the aliens would hear that song and go, Let’s just accelerate this hyperspace bypass. Alright, I think that about wraps it up. Do you guys have any final comments, questions? Anything?
R: Well, it’s always a pleasure to be on the Nu Metal Agenda, that’s what this is, right?
Sam: Yes, and you’re also going to be featured in our magazine, What’s Nu? magazine.
R: I honestly think y’all have some of the best music journalism going right now.
Sam: Thank you! I appreciate it. This, personally, was really cool for me because I’m a really big fan of you guys. I appreciate you guys sitting down. I think that "Masc" is one of my favorite songs of all time.
R: Hell yeah, thank you!
L: Yeah, thank you so much.
Sam: Yeah, thanks for sitting down with me, this was really fun.
