Search Results for:

FLENSER

Chat Pile

This Dungeon Earth / Remove Your Skin Please - 2025 Repress

    In the spring of 2019, a new rock band consisting of four otherwise ordinary Okies would arise out of seemingly nowhere, swiftly turning heads with a grotesque new take on noise rock fuelled 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, soon culminating in the release of its landmark 2022 debut album, 'God’s Country' and 2024’s expansive follow up 'Cool World'.

    While the massive success of 'God’s Country' would propel the quartet from the status of underground favorites to an international sensation, Chat Pile’s mission to take rock music to new zeniths of intensity was part of the plan from the very start. In fact, during its first handful of months as an active project, Chat Pile began writing and recording some of the heaviest, hellish, and harrowing music of its entire catalogue, laying the foundation of the themes and traits that would eventually manifest in the band’s debut LP. The result of these sessions would be a pair of EPs, 'This Dungeon Earth' and 'Remove Your Skin Please', released in the summer and winter of 2019, respectively.

    Initially put out by Reptilian Records in 2020, The Flenser is proud to present a special reissue of Chat Pile’s pivotal first two EPs, each compiled onto a single disc. This dual EP compilation chronicles the earliest moments of the Oklahoma City quartet’s discography, a snapshot of the band’s pre-Flenser days and of the eight tracks of noxious, nihilistic noise rock that would propel the Midwest band to a globe-spanning, underground heavyweights.

    TRACK LISTING

    1. Face
    2. Rainbow Meat
    3. Rat Boy
    4. Crawlspace
    5. Dallas Beltway
    6. Mask
    7. Davis
    8. Garbage Man

    Planning For Burial

    It's Closeness, It's Easy

      Planning For Burial is the solo project of Thom Wasluck, emerging from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. It’s Closeness, It’s Easy is the long-awaited follow-up to 2017’s Below The House. If Below The House was about returning home, following in the footsteps of one’s father and joining a union, and leaving behind youth’s wild days, It’s Closeness, It’s Easy embraces what comes next—the weight of all years, the quiet shifts, the reckoning with what remains. This record is many things. It captures the slow drift of time, the unnoticed shifts in a loved one—the creeping changes in mental health, the quiet pull of addiction, the kind of grief that settles in the bones rather than announces itself.

      At its core, It’s Closeness, It’s Easy is about stepping into middle age and taking stock. It confronts the reality of living with the hand that’s been dealt and searching for meaning in what remains. It speaks to loss—the crushing weight of saying goodbye to a beloved 17-year old cat, the slow-motion grief of watching friends self-destruct, the inescapable passage of time as it bears down on aging parents and the self. But it also reflects the warmth of reconnection, the kind of love that never burns out but instead deepens. The feeling of picking up where things left off, untouched by the years in between.

      While written over the course of two years, the recording process reflects a sense of immediacy. Rather than assembling songs piece by piece over time, the album took shape in singular, immersive sessions—less an act of construction, more an unveiling of something already waiting to take shape.

      Rooted in a staunch DIY ethos, Wasluck handles every aspect of Planning For Burial project himself—recording the music, designing the artwork, and performing live as a one-man band. He books his own tours, ever and independent creative. This hands-on approach has led Planning For Burial to play hundreds of shows solidifying his place in the underground music scene. A defining moment came in 2018 when he performed at the Meltdown Festival in London, curated by Robert Smith of The Cure.

      TRACK LISTING

      1. You Think
      2. Movement Two
      3. (blueberry Pop)
      4. A Flowing Field Of Green
      5. With Your Sunglasses On Like A Ghoul
      6. Grivo
      7. Twenty-Seventh Of February
      8. Fresh Flowers For All Time
      9. Farm Cat, Watching

      Kathryn Mohr

      Waiting Room

        Received an 8.4 Best New Music rating from Pitchfork.

        Low-fi slowcore and ambient from the San Francisco Bay Area. For fans of Grouper, Midwife, The Flenser. The music of San Jose-based artist Kathryn Mohr exists in a liminal space of auditory dissociation. Drawing inspiration from lost items washing up on the shore of the San Francisco Bay, Mohr’s art chases the ephemeral nature of humanity, the warping of memory, and how trauma changes one’s experience of this world. Her new album Waiting Room out on The Flenser was written and self-recorded over the course of a month in eastern Iceland, within the walls of a disused fish factory surrounded by remote nature. Mohr spent hours immersed in the writing and recording of this album in a windowless concrete room lit with a string of multi-coloured light bulbs (which made their way into the album art), taking breaks to wander the factory or disappear up the shoreline—field recorder in hand. What came out of those recording hours are songs inspired by horror as extravagant as limb amputation by a faulty elevator and lyrics as maze-like and misguided as the torturous love and fears they depict. During this period of isolation in the tiny fishing village of Stöðvarfjörður, Mohr was all too aware of a feeling of waiting, attuned to all the worm-like emotions and memories that crawl out of the ground when there is nothing and no one to distract. She spent most time in the factory, which had sat derelict for a decade, and was in the process of being repurposed into a space for artists, with many parts left untouched since the last days of fish production and other rooms made new with heat and light. This state of incompleteness, of loss of meaning, and repurposing became a mirror of her inner world, her abandoned ideas of home, love, affection, and meaning dissolved by traumatic memories of violence. Waiting Room is a processing of nearly untouchable emotions of rebuilding the foundation for which elusive words like affection, passion and home can have a meaning weatherproof to and detangled from the direct, physical and emotional violence that permeates our experiences on earth.

        TRACK LISTING

        1 Diver
        2 Rated
        3 Driven
        4 Petrified
        5 Take It
        6 Elevator
        7 Prove It
        8 Horizonless
        9 Cornered
        10 Wheel
        11 Waiting Room

        Chat Pile

        Cool World

          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.

          STAFF COMMENTS

          Barry says: Uncompromising blasts of guitar, paddling kick drum and hardcore bursts, reminiscent of Jane Doe era Converge or Crowpath's Red On Chrome. Impeccable, scathing hardcore.

          TRACK LISTING

          I Am Dog Now
          Shame
          Frownland
          Funny Man
          Camcorder
          Tape
          The New World
          Masc
          Milk Of Human Kindness
          No Way Out

          Chat Pile

          Tenkiller Motion Picture Soundtrack

            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.”

            TRACK LISTING

            1. TAH
            2. Badman
            3. Dad’s Drunk
            4. The Fabulous Shitheads
            5. LE
            6. The Return Of Badman
            7. Lake Time (Mr. Rodan)
            8. Kids
            9. QUAH
            10. Badman 3: Die Badman Die
            11. B4dm4n
            12. Punishment Box
            13. Beck’s Theme
            14. OK
            15. Badman V: A New Beginning
            16. Bleeding Out
            17. Tenkiller


            Latest Pre-Sales

            217 NEW ITEMS

            E-newsletter —
            Sign up
            Back to top