Album Of The Week: Chat Pile + Hayden Pedigo In The Earth Again

By Chris DeVille

3:29 PM EDT on October 28, 2025

Computer Students/The Flenser
2025

The pairing makes no sense, and it makes so much sense.

Chat Pile are a lumbering noise-rock beast, masters of sonic violence peddling the mordantly funny and the outright bleak. At their live shows and on albums like last year's Cool World, Raygun Busch mumbles, screams, rants, and raves over punishing low-end repetition and squalls of guitar that occasionally break away from shrill discordance in favor of eerie glowing beauty. Taking on subjects like homelessness, murderous home invasions, and the overall degradation of society, their music blurs the line between horror as popcorn entertainment and a disturbingly realistic documentary about the American underbelly.

Amarillo native Hayden Pedigo is now based in Chat Pile's hometown, Oklahoma City. Pedigo is an acoustic fingerstyle guitarist, part of a post-Fahey continuum that includes the likes of Jim O'Rourke, William Tyler, Daniel Bachman, and Yasmin Williams. His recent LP I'll Be Waving As You Drive Away is full of instrumentals that render the American primitive tradition in pristine clarity. Pedigo's writing is searching and meditative, his fretwork crystalline in tone, often backed by new-agey synths or elegant symphonic flourishes. Though not without some incursions from the troubles of this world — his album was named after an episode of Little House On The Prarie in which the eldest daughter gradually loses her eyesight — his music is as peaceful as Chat Pile's is distraught.

Nonetheless, game recognize game. Upon moving to Oklahoma City last summer, Pedigo instantly befriended the Chat Pile guys, and it wasn't long before they invited him to collaborate on music. The resulting album is out this Friday. In The Earth Again is a staggering achievement that makes sense within each artist's discography, even as it stands out as an adventurous outlier for both acts. It's a flavor combination on par with salted caramel or dipping fries in your Frosty, though the outcome here is often more bitter than sweet.

One thing both artists have in common is the sense of a great expanse: the endless sprawl of the Oklahoma sky, the bottomless depth of human contemplation. "Our approaches are startlingly similar," Pedigo recently told journalist Larry Fitzmaurice. "Both of us have always had this extra-zoomed-in look at where we're from, and our music is definitely inspired by landscapes and environments." Yet vastness and hyperlocal focus can manifest in so many ways, as Chat Pile and Pedigo's respective discographies demonstrate. It turns out that if you put them together, they veer off in even more directions.

The album starts and finishes in the shadows — launching with the beautiful, wordless "Outside" and the atmospheric dirge "Demon Time," ending with the noise-strewn twang of "Inside" and the stark folk ballad "A Tear For Lucas" — but at times it explodes. Pedigo's arpeggios can bring out the latent heavy metal in Chat Pile's music, lending an apocalyptic edge to the roaring "Never Say Die" or channeling Metallica power ballads like "Fade To Black" on the ensuing "Behold A Pale Horse" (speaking of apocalypse). The instrumental "Fission/Fusion" documents perhaps the most aggressive sound on any Chat Pile release thus far, about 40 seconds of sheer bombardment that gives way to a prettier form of clatter. It leads into centerpiece "The Matador," nearly eight pummeling, shapeshifting minutes that build up to some of Busch's most unhinged vocals on record.

There is a unified palette throughout In The Earth Again, a weariness and creeping twilight that colors moments of silence and clamor alike. Busch mirrors this vibe with vocals that can be as haunting in his moments of quiet singsong as when he's all worked up. "Hey stupid eyes/ There's no turning back now," he warns on "Demon Time," conjuring a bleary melodic nuance rarely glimpsed on Chat Pile albums. He goes on to invoke visions of hellish justice: "All the castles of the world will burn/ But someday all the demons will return/ And they will find you/ And they will fuck you up." The singer has called it "the wellspring from which the rest of the lyrical ideas flow," while Pedigo cited it as "the gateway to the rest of the album," perhaps owing to its placement as the first proper song.

That sense of impending doom — or rather, of doom that is already unfolding — lingers throughout the rest of the songs. It's there, unspoken, in the instrumentals, and it manifests clearly in Busch's lyrics about life slipping away. On this album, "in the earth" can mean dead and buried, but songs like the gorgeous "The Magic Of The World" and the glimmering masterpiece "Radioactive Dreams" just as readily evoke a life spent in underground bunkers, waiting out the end. (Hence, maybe, those dual interludes "Outside" and "Inside.") When Busch pays tribute to bygone friends, including one who lived life "way past the point of no return," it's a rare glimpse of tenderness in the Chat Pile universe — a warmth that holds true whether he's channeling real grief, spinning a compelling yarn, or operating in some gray area in between. If this is a work of conceptual fiction, it's one that feels disconcertingly realistic.

With Busch's voice often at the center of the storm, it's easy to hear In The Earth Again as a Chat Pile album with Pedigo as a visiting catalyst who alters the band's chemistry, and in that context, wow, the guitarist's impact is significant. This music drew something special out of Busch, the same way the right movie role can change your conception of an actor. The vocalist remains potent when letting loose with his usual ferocity, and he brilliantly complements those moments of wide-eyed urgency with trembling, depleted melodies that convey an overwhelming emotional weight. He's rarely been better than in brutally economic lines like "And I don't want to talk, but/ God isn't speaking/ It's a dog I can't outrun/ Unshakeable feeling tonight."

Yet Pedigo is not just Busch's muse, not just Chat Pile's special sauce. His guitar is essentially duetting with the frontman throughout, and often the quartet seems to have wandered into his universe rather than vice versa. On "I've Got My Own Blunt To Smoke," Busch even grabs a guitar and mimics Pedigo's technique in ways that mirror his verbalized laments. But they are at their best in tandem, as on "Radioactive Dreams," Pedigo's harmonics glinting off the industrial-grade heft like the last glimmers of hope exiting Busch's body. It may run counter to this album's ethos to suggest exciting possibilities for the future, but hopefully they can do this again someday.

In The Earth Again is out 10/31 via Computer Students/The Flenser.

Other albums of note out this week: