Chat Pile and Hayden Pedigo Discuss the ‘Poison’ of Mainstream Metal and Why We’re Living in the ‘Golden Era of Heavy Music’

In the book Silence of the Lambs, author Thomas Harris opens by describing the Behavioral Science department of Quantico — where the FBI studies serial murder — as being on the bottom floor of the building, “half-buried in the earth.” Symbolically, it establishes that the darkest behaviors of the human psyche are explored almost in a subterranean bunker, as if the floor is a pipeline to the underworld itself.

This imagery is what partially inspired In The Earth Again, the haunting collaborative album between Oklahoma City metal band Chat Pile and Texas guitarist Hayden Pedigo that dropped on Halloween. The album is bound by this post-apocalyptic vision of the earth slowly decaying into cancerous piles of waste (which thematically makes sense considering the origin of Chat Pile‘s name), wh