The activist-minded Oklahoma City alt-metal quartet grapples with the discontents of modern life

Oklahoma noise band Chat Pile mix more melody into their bleak message on another powerful, unsettling collection, Who Loves the Sun

Chat Pile’s sludgy take on metal and post-hardcore is full of clang and roil, and it suits the themes exactly, making Who Loves the Sun the perfect soundtrack for the apocalypse as it approaches in that classic Hemingway fashion: slowly, and then all at once

The vocals are more inhuman, the rhythms more enforced, the guitar riffs more complex and alien. Yet within all this darkness, beauty still resides: you want to sing along to every track of this journey towards eternal human autumn

With more of what existing devotees demand, plus a few degrees of increasing accessibility, Who Loves The Sun suggests that as the climate around them heats up, so do Chat Pile. At least the latter is a very good thing

We’re watching the world fall apart in real time. Ever wondered what that sounded like? On Who Loves the Sun, Chat Pile expose the contradictions and controversies at the heart of the compendium of chaos with searing lyricism and exciting instrumentation

The Oklahoma band use hooky vocals to help their lyrics on desensitisation slip down easy, though their third album lacks the distinction of earlier releases

The Oklahoma sludge-metal band has never spoken in subtleties, but its third album is its most pointed statement yet: a merciless depiction of a world in decline

The Oklahoma City sludge-metal band’s third album takes capitalism to task with blood-curdling screams, disgusting basslines, and pulverizing drums fit for a bloody horror film

It captures the specific, suffocating feeling of living through collapse better than almost anything else I’ve heard this year

Leave it to Chat Pile to turn a compendium of horrors into something exquisite

An extraordinary record; a layered portrait of a world sleepwalking into disaster that is somehow gripping and even fun, in a mosh-the-pain-away manner

It's messier, more draining and the clearest version yet of what Chat Pile do best: making unbearable music for an unbearable world hurtling toward the sun