Chat Pile's new album is filed under a genre that started as an insult

Chat Pile released their third album on 4 September. By the next morning the busiest Chat Pile thread on the RateYourMusic subreddit had close to two hundred upvotes and seventy-odd comments, and a good share of them were not about the record.

They were about a word.

"Pigfuck"? Wth haha.

That is the top-voted reply. Underneath it someone explains, patiently, that it is a noise rock style from the eighties. Someone else adds the part that actually matters: the people who make this music do not use the word, and when you explain to a band why they have been filed under it, RateYourMusic comes up within about a sentence.

The word is older than the band by thirty-five years

Follow it back and you get to Robert Christgau, who used it in 1983 for the noise Sonic Youth were making at the time. It was an insult. It was supposed to be one.

Then the thing critics never plan for happened. The insult was funnier and more useful than any of the polite alternatives, so it detached from Sonic Youth and stuck to a whole cluster of bands who had nothing to do with where Sonic Youth went next. Big Black. Pussy Galore. The Jesus Lizard. Cows. Touch and Go and Amphetamine Reptile as a postcode.

You can watch the word travel through print. Jersey Beat had it in 1989. Spin reached for it in 2010 to describe Sleigh Bells' guitars. Pitchfork used it in 2014, the Chicago Reader in 2018. Four decades of writers finding it handy and, as far as I can tell, not one band putting it on a poster.

None of that is a problem. Criticism gets to coin things, and half the genre names we all use started as somebody's sneer. Shoegaze is right there. The trouble starts when a word invented to describe a feeling about a record becomes a field in a database.

A tag is a routing instruction

Here is why a joke word on a website is worth eight hundred words. On a site like RYM a genre is not decoration. It decides which chart a record turns up on and what a stranger expects before they press play. It is the closest thing music has to a shelf.

"Pigfuck" shelves Chat Pile in 1986, in Chicago, next to Steve Albini. You can hear the argument for it. Stin's bass is the loudest thing in every mix and the guitar works as weather rather than as a riff machine. Raygun Busch delivers a lot of his lines the way a man gives a statement to police.

But the shelf also promises something about melody: that there won't be any. And that is where the tag and the new album come apart.

What Who Loves the Sun actually does

Ten tracks, recorded by the band with Stin running the desk and mixed by Ben Greenberg. Claire Hannah and Brittany Sawtelle of Nightosphere sing on "Intruder" and "Influence". The Flenser's own copy for the record talks about melody lifted from pre-2000s indie and alt-rock, which is a strange lead for a noise label and also just true. "October All the Time" would not have needed much surgery to pass as a college-radio single in 1994.

The subject matter has not softened to match. Busch put it bluntly when the album was announced: the record is about his grievances with the modern world, and he listed them — AI, genocide, climate change, the power elite, money hoarding. Stin's version is quieter and sadder: it is about trying to keep hold of your humanity in a time of extreme anti-humanity. Oklahoma City is in there too, the way it always is with this band. The Flenser's notes single out the Devon Tower, which is a very Chat Pile choice of landmark.

Compare it to the record that made their name and the distance is obvious.

God's Country (2022) is a band pointing at things. This one is a band admitting it is standing in the picture. That is a harder album to make and a much harder one to sell, and it is nothing like what the tag prepares you for.

There is also a year of evidence that Chat Pile stopped being only one thing. In 2025 they made a full album with Hayden Pedigo, whose day job is American primitive guitar, and then put out two Blood at Night EPs.

A band that spends a year doing that does not come back and make God's Country again.

The band is named after a waste product

Chat piles are the tailings left behind by lead and zinc mining around Picher, Oklahoma. When the mining stopped, hundreds of millions of tons of the stuff stayed exactly where it was, in grey hills over a town that eventually got abandoned. That is where the name comes from.

So: a band named after poisoned ground, filed under a word a critic coined to mean ugly noise. I am not going to pretend that is profound. It is funny, and it is the kind of thing that only becomes visible when a database forces a joke to hold still.

Argue with the shelf

The useful thing about genre tags on a rating site is that they are not handed down. People vote them in, which means people can vote them out, and the reason "pigfuck" survives on RYM is not conspiracy. It is that nobody who dislikes it has bothered.

I do not think the tag is wrong, exactly. Chat Pile came out of that lineage and they know it. I think it has stopped being a description and turned into a filing cabinet, and Who Loves the Sun is the album that makes the difference legible. If you want the full family tree it belongs to, our noise rock guide lays out the lineage the tag is pointing at.

Rate the album above. Then tell me in the comments what you would file it under, because "pigfuck" has had forty years and it has not got any better at its job.