One of them is a sludge-metal band, and the other is a fingerstyle guitarist. Anyone could tell you they sound nothing alike. But Chat Pile, the former, and Hayden Pedigo, the latter, have made a collaborative album that blends their disparate styles so effortlessly it’s as if an expert blacksmith had welded it. The album in question, In the Earth Again, retains the grime of Chat Pile’s records but augments their tunefulness. It preserves Pedigo’s filigreed intricacies but casts them in viscous low-end. On paper, it seems like the type of record that would necessitate punctilious dedication, a strained meticulousness to ensure an equilibrium between two artists’ sounds. But the core reason that it sounds so effortless is likely because its creation was the smoothest experience that either artist has had making music.
First, there are the logistics. Last summer, Pedigo and his wife relocated from Amarillo, Texas to Oklahoma City, the place Chat Pile have called home since their genesis. Coincidentally, they ended up buying a house just one block away from where Stin, Chat Pile’s pseudonymous bassist, lives. Looking to make some friends in his new home, Pedigo messaged Chat Pile’s Instagram account and asked if they’d want to hang out sometime. He wasn’t sure who would respond, but Stin invited him out to a local band’s show, and Pedigo met half of Chat Pile there. From that point, they all started regularly spending time together at Stin’s house. The proximity made collaboration incredibly straightforward. “[Pedigo] could literally come over on a minute’s notice,” Stin says over Zoom, his three bandmates closely huddled around him to fit within the laptop’s frame. “We all live in a mile radius, basically. So it’s advantageous for us for writing, to be able to just do it at our home studio here. I mean, that’s where we’re at right now.”
It was only a matter of time before the noise rockers brought the Oklahoma transplant into the musical fold. “After just a couple months of hanging out, they approached me with the idea of making a collaborative record, and I was immediately on board because it sounded like an exciting idea, along with being a challenge,” Pedigo says in a separate Zoom call from his home. He had just finished recording I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away, his masterful record that was released earlier this year. Meanwhile, Chat Pile had finished making Cool World, their 2024 sophomore LP. Their schedules lined up, and both artists felt the compulsion to make another record. That led Pedigo to ask a question: “Why not make it with each other?”
In December, they convened at Stin’s home studio to begin hashing out what would become In the Earth Again. “Everyone joked that it was the easiest album any of us have ever made, just because the ideas were flowing really well, and then it became very clear what the album was,” Pedigo says. Still, it took some time to reach that point of fluency. “We were all on guitars jamming, and it felt like pure chaos.” As “hell yeah” as that may sound, they needed to find some balance.
By the end of the first day recording together, they hammered out a methodology. Pedigo pulled out his acoustic 12-string, strummed a chord, and plucked three discrete notes. It laid the seed that blossomed into the foreboding funeral pyre that is “Never Say Die!” “From there, we figured out a system: no more jamming together trying to figure out songs,” Pedigo recalls. “Everyone needs to come up with an idea, like a riff, and then we build off of that one idea. So then the album transitioned within three hours. Everyone would show up day by day with a new riff, and we would build on it: riff, drums, bass, second guitar part, and then vocals were at the very end.” Despite the diligent structure the five musicians adhered to in terms of making the record, the actual sound of it radiates an extemporaneous urgency, thanks to the off-the-cuff inception of the project in the first place. Or, as Chat Pile frontman Raygun Busch tells it: “We’re really seasoned at fucking around, man.”
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The album gave everyone the bandwidth to try some instruments that they would normally never touch on their solo material. A joint one-off LP comes with lower stakes, so Pedigo and Chat Pile felt compelled to experiment. Surprisingly, Raygun, not Pedigo, takes the record’s sole instrumental guitar track, the wonderfully titled “I Got My Own Blunt to Smoke.” Chat Pile guitarist Luther Manhole played on his drumline in high school and was excited by the prospect of toying around with some percussion on “Radioactive Dreams.”
“I just like having excuses to try and play stuff other than guitar and prove to myself I’m able to do it,” he says. “I played glockenspiel on one song, which was fun. I’ve had the exact same bell kit since I was thirteen, and now I’m playing it on a song for some reason.” Drummer Cap’n Ron fills in for Luther to play some guitar and lap steel on tracks such as on the seven-and-a-half-minute epic “The Matador” and the eerie drone piece “Inside.” On the gauzy single “Radioactive Dreams,” Pedigo deploys an open tuning made famous by Joni Mitchell, but he plays through Chat Pile’s electric guitar rig, which underscores his performance with a muscular beefiness not usually found in his own recordings.
The end result is a recombinant work of its two creators. Humid and haunting, In the Earth Again is the perfect Halloween release. The unease of the album bleeds at the edges, the contours hazy like heat shimmering in the desert, a desolate scene where harsh aridity and natural beauty coexist. On a Chat Pile release, the horror would be more defined and explicit, pointed toward the predators that inhabit the wasteland and its lack of sustaining resources. On a Hayden Pedigo release, the Western milieu would gesture toward the hypnotism of the desert’s secluded beauty, the welcome respite of a refreshing oasis. Where those ideas converge is the way in which the LP straddles the diaphanous line between danger and possibility. It’s the sonic equivalent of the tone-setting ambiance in the introductory moments of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
As for what the future holds, another collaborative album might be in the cards (Stin: “We would definitely do it again”), even though both artists are uncertain about the feasibility of playing these songs together on a joint tour (Pedigo: “This album is not necessarily the most recreatable music for live performance”). Regardless of the prospects of a second album or a string of co-headlining shows, In the Earth Again has more than enough to appreciate on its own merit. It’s an amalgam of two singular artists, a compelling demonstration of the overlap between baleful and beautiful.
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Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist, and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City.
