Core. Presents: Chat Pile + The HIRS Collective
WEDNESDAY 23RD APRIL 2025
Doors 7pm
Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile have returned with their follow up to 2022's breakout album *God’s Country* with *Cool World*, the new 10-song LP out now!
Besides being the name of a largely forgotten (and panned) 90s film, *Cool World* makes for an apt title of Chat Pile’s sophomore full-length record. In the context of a Chat Pile record, the words are steeped in a grim double entendre that not only evokes imagery of a dying planet but a progression from the band’s previous work, moving the scope of its depiction of modern malaise from just “God’s Country” to the entirety of humankind. “'*Cool World*' covers similar themes to our last album, except now exploded from a micro to macro scale, with thoughts specifically about disasters abroad, at home, and how they affect one another,” says vocalist Raygun Busch. “If I had to describe the album in one sentence,” Busch continues, “It’s hard not to borrow from Voltaire, so I won’t resist – 'Cool World' is about the price at which we eat sugar in America.”Like the towering mounds of toxic waste, the music of 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.
The HIRS Collective
The HIRS Collective rely on an ethos of de-individualization. It is their strength, and their love. Through co-opting the anarchist phrase “No Gods. No cops. No masters,” as a ‘fuck you’ to the disingenuity of too much art and life of the capitalist world at large, the group introduced themselves as humanly as possible. Yes, there are individuals who make up this band/Collective/organization. Yes, the politics are in play, which a listener might likely expect from a group that comes from the leftist punk rock world that boasts community, acceptance, and radicalism. However, these are the foundations the HIRS Collective itself. As such, the Collective watched these community virtues and ideologies change through overuse and abuse and holds to them more tightly because of it.
14+, under 18s must be accompanied by an adult.
