There are always many good reasons to be excited about Halloween, and this year we've got an extra one. That's the release date for In The Earth Again, the new collaborative album from mordant noise-rock masters Chat Pile and fingerstyle acoustic guitar wizard Hayden Pedigo. Chat Pile hail from Oklahoma City, and the Texan Pedigo recently relocated there, so these two different entities had plenty of time and space to find common ground. We were already into lead single "Radioactive Dreams," and now Chat Pile and Pedigo have followed it with another song that might be even better.
The new single "Demon Time" doesn't sound like anything that either Chat Pile or Hayden Pedigo has released before, and it serves as a fascinating combination of their respective styles. Pedigo plays ominous, reverb-heavy refrains while Chat Pile's Raygun Busch murmurs threateningly. His opening line: "Hey, stupid eyes." Occasionally, the band comes in with deep crunch-tones that remind me of Earth. It sounds a bit like doom, the genre, and a lot like doom, the concept.
In a press release, Raygun Busch says, "Speaking to Yeats’ widening gyre, things are falling apart. Bad to worse or painful move towards something better is anyone’s guess, but we are living through a difficult time. The cycle continues forever, though. This is one of the first songs we recorded for the new record and is the wellspring from which the rest of the lyrical ideas flow."
Hayden Pedigo says, "This track feels like the gateway to the rest of the album. The calm before the storm. It might be my favorite track on the record just because it sets the tone so well. It’s eerie calm, and you know something might be coming around the corner." Speaking of eerie calm, the video is all slowed-down stock footage, made to look nightmarish. Check it out below.
In The Earth Again is out 10/31 via Computer Students with support from the Flenser. Read our 2023 Cover Story on Chat Pile here.
