Photo by Bayley Hanes

Not since Explosions In the Sky’s Friday Night Lights soundtrack have many artists been able to fully capture so specifically a beautifully broken Americana in one sprawling, captivating soundscape. We’re just over 20 years removed from that point in the timeline, but if there is to be a worthy attempt at giving us a sequel deserving for these end times here in the United States, then it will be coming from one state north of Texas when sons of Oklahoma City in apocalyptic noise-rockers Chat Pile and avant-garde fingerpicker Hayden Pedigo release their collaborative project, In The Earth Again.

Though the Venn diagram of their musical styles are converging toward the same fading scenery from opposite ends of the sonic spectrum, its clash in energy makes sense of how it gravitated toward one another on the album’s first preview, “Radioactive Dreams”. With Pedigo’s hand in theirs, Chat Pile are able to etch details ornate deep within the grimier heaviness of existentialism, wrought and sewed more so from when everything around you is slowly but surely dying. “And they say / The water will heal you / Blood of the earth / And I toast all my friends / All my friends in the dirt,” sings Raygun Busch with a hardened spirit. This pondering on our present day purpose makes taking a dirt nap seem like a welcome escape from whatever this life has become.

Directed by: Riley Stearns

Chat Pile & Hayden Pedigo’s In The Earth Again will be released October 31st on Computer Students.