When we spoke to guitarist Hayden Pedigo about his excellent album I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away back in June, he seemed at least as excited about his upcoming collaboration with Chat Pile, In the Earth Again.
“I think we found an entirely new thing,” Pedigo said at the time. “It’s like melding both sounds, but it created this whole new thing that I don’t know if any of us have ever done before. It just felt brand new and really, really cool.”
Following singles “Demon Time” and “Radioactive Dreams,” the album will be available for streaming and purchase on Friday, Oct. 31. On their own, Pedigo and Chat Pile already make music that resists classification: Pedigo’s fingerstyle guitar is commonly compared to acoustic guitar hero John Fahey’s American primitivism, while Chat Pile’s sonic onslaught was perhaps best described by guitarist Luther Manhole in a 2022 Bandcamp interview as “an actual skeleton stabbing you to death inside a Spirit Halloween store.”
Somehow both find plenty of space on In the Earth Again, which sounds like the eerily peaceful aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse interrupted by flashbacks of the explosions. “All the castles of the world will burn / But someday all the demons will return,” Chat Pile’s Raygun Busch sings on “Demon Time” following the album’s instrumental opener “Outside.” Busch, who also plays guitar on the album, is one of heavy music’s most emotionally dynamic vocalists, and his voice melds the album’s moments of gorgeous ambience and scorched-earth ire, sounding alternately heartbroken, horrified and hate-driven, sometimes within the same song. The album closes on a moment of intimate grief, “A Tear for Lucas,” an elegy for local writer and close friend of the band Lucas Dunn, who died in 2024. Busch said Pedigo and the members of Chat Pile all think of their music as “Americana-adjacent at least” and this certainly sounds like America in 2025.
No joint performances are planned at the moment, but Chat Pile plays 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 16 at Tower Theatre, 425 NW 23rd St., the band’s first show at the venue and only OKC date in a busy 2025. Tickets are $40.92-$53.79. We talked to Manhole, Busch and bassist Stin to get their perspective on In the Earth Again.
How did this collaboration come together?
Stin: Hayden is from Amarillo and has been doing his thing for a little bit, and for whatever reason, about a year ago, he moved to Oklahoma City. And when he moved into town, he actually hit up the Chat Pile account on Instagram and was like, “Hey. I’m new in town. What should I, like, do? What’s there to do in Oklahoma City or whatever?” And so we kind of struck up a little friendship that way and actually met him in person for the first time at a Nightosphere show at The Sanctuary, and we just kind of hit it off, like, right away. And then just kind of after hanging out a little bit back and forth, one day, we actually went to the tiki bar, the whole band and Hayden, and just kind of sat down and talked about, like, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we just, like, made a record together?” And like literally a week later, we were in the studio working on it.
Manhole: We’re not the most prolific band, and when we do work on something, we work on it for months at a time, so it was definitely cool. And I wasn’t expecting it to be so quick, but we kind of just banged it out, like, three to four weeks.
Stin: The easiest project we’ve ever worked on. It just came together so naturally, and we didn’t really overthink anything.
Well, do you think that was because of the nature of collaborating with Hayden, or was it partially that y’all feel more comfortable working together as a band now?
Stin: At this point, we have our workflow figured out really well, so that was definitely a major factor that went into it. But I would say that’s only, like, 50 percent of it. When you play music with someone you’ve never played music with before, it doesn’t matter how good they are at their instrument or how clever they are or whatever. If you don’t mesh, if there’s not chemistry between you, it’s just dead in the water. We got really lucky that Hayden just slipped right in there. He was a member of Chat Pile, essentially. He was just really easy to work with.
Manhole: Working on a normal Chat Pile album, I think maybe it’s a little heightened stakes. With this, it’s like we were all bringing in some ideas that we had been trying to work in and couldn’t. I had a few more melodic things I had been trying to get worked in, and it felt like this was kind of the time. I know Ray had some guitar parts. … It was a lower-stakes thing. It’s, like, we’re all just hanging out, making random stuff. It wasn’t like we have to sit down and write the follow-up to our debut album that people liked or something. I didn’t really feel a ton of pressure with that, but there is more pressure with that than just getting together with a new friend and seeing if we can jam. It’s, like, “Oh. Well, I have a couple ideas that I’ve been wanting to use,” and, “Oh, I have a couple ideas,” and all of a sudden, you have 40 minutes of music, basically.
Were y’all familiar with Hayden’s work before he reached out?
Stin: I was not, actually. I was friends with him first before I knew his music. I think Raygun was familiar with him, though.
Busch: Stereogum had written an article about him, and I like that kind of music, but it was kind of like I heard about him right before we met. I think maybe I read that article and I listened to it and I posted it, and then Stin was like, “Hey, did you know that this guy has reached out to us?” And I was like, “Oh, really?”
Manhole: His music’s really cool, but that American primitivism, John Fahey stuff, I’ve always liked the stuff I’ve heard of that, but I’m just not knowledgeable on that. I’m not really tapped into the new stuff in that type of music.
Stin: And that’s kind otf an interesting thing about this collaboration is that it was really born more out of friendship than it is taste, I guess, if that makes sense. I mean, now, retroactively, I’ve come to really love Hayden’s work. And seeing him write in real time is really amazing. I think he actually might be a genius to a certain degree. But when we first went into this, I couldn’t admit to being, like, a No. 1 Hayden Pedigo fan. I just was like, “Oh, this guy’s cool. We should make some guitar music together.”
Visit chatpile.net.
This article appears in Celebrate the season across OKC.