‘I‘ve only been to Scotland once, when I was 16, with my church youth group,’ says Raygun Busch, singer of Oklahoma City noise-rock terrors Chat Pile. ‘We flew into Inverness and then spent a week painting walls on this youth-group building in Dornoch,’ he adds with a faint, mischievous smile. ‘But we’ve never been to the UK as a band before,’ adds bassist Stin (none of the band members have revealed their real names to the press).

Chat Pile, named after the toxic piles of lead-zinc mining waste that scar the Oklahoma landscape, come to Scotland in August to headline Core, a new heavy music festival at Glasgow’s Maryhill Community Central Halls and The Hug And Pint bar. It’s interesting to hear that somewhere in the abyss of the group’s creative psyche (which spans depths of existential angst, self-inflicted tragedy, and societal breakdown) is a little puritan mission-building in the Scottish Highlands. The band has, after all, spent four years channelling the cultural id of its own hyper-Protestant region of the world.

‘You and I talked for years about making what we called American nightmare music,’ Stin recalls to Busch, across separate Zoom connections. ‘Music from the perspective of monsters who walk amongst us,’ the vocalist adds. Musically, the influences underpinning this idea extend well beyond the standard metal/industrial/noise pantheon (The Jesus Lizard, Swans, Godflesh). ‘I listen to metal, like, never,’ says Busch. ‘Pere Ubu, PiL: that’s more what I’m trying to do,’ he goes on, alluding to a particular strain of funky, jagged, Dada-ish post-punk.

The band are big cinema buffs, too, and their lyrics often come across like the set-up for some claustrophobic psychological thriller, or edge-lord slasher flick. In ‘Dallas Beltway,’ the narrator (in a typically addled speak-shout) implores us: ‘listen, I’m normally a reasonable guy’, before continuing in a traumatised burble: ‘you wanna see what ordinary hands can do to something fragile?/there’s no forgiveness for parents who take their children’s lives.’

The band’s debut album God’s Country (2022) alights on all-American themes such as addiction, gun violence and cannabis psychosis (‘purple man get out of my room
 . . . I’m trying to kill myself if you don’t mind,’ [from the track ‘grimace_smoking_weed.jpeg’]). It might seem a bit hammy if it weren’t for the searing urgency of delivery and the thread of pitch-black comedy that runs throughout, in the vein of, say, Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads or Big Black’s Atomizer (both key influences). 

Much like Cave, Busch is always ‘telling stories, getting into character’. Often the aim is to channel a social conscience, to get inside stories the group haven’t directly experienced. ‘As far as the vision for God’s Country goes, we had a lot of things in mind,’ Stin remembers. ‘We wrote it at the height of the pandemic and height of racial tensions in America; not to mention the local politics we deal with as Oklahomans.’

The band’s most overtly political song, ‘Why?’ finds the singer asking in a crazed bellow: ‘why do people have to live outside, in brutal heat, or when it’s below freezing/when there are buildings all around us with heat on and no one inside?’ This question might seem crass if its directness didn’t simply reflect the mind-bogglingly unnecessary nature of the USA’s homelessness crisis.

‘I thought, if we never make another album, I’m going to get that off my chest,’ Busch recalls. ‘We have so many people that clearly have serious mental-health issues just walking around Oklahoma City. And then we have all these fucking churches everywhere. We’ve got a god-damn statue of Jesus with his head in his hands downtown. And you just think: fuck you guys.’

The band’s star has been on the rise recently, with major touring plans announced and work underway for a second album. Earlier this year, they played international metal festival Roadburn in the Netherlands. But success aside, the music will likely remain strongly rooted in friendship and an open-ended approach to genre. ‘I can’t say we’ll make another song like “Why?” but at the same time don’t rule it out,’ Stin says. ‘We’re just going to see what happens and let each record evolve out of the last.’

Chat Pile play Core, Maryhill Community Central Halls, Glasgow, Saturday 19 August.