The end isn’t the end for Chat Pile. If their debut full-length, God’s Country came on like a cleansing cataclysm, a picture of an industrial world in the middle of a total collapse, in Cool World, the Oklahoma City band stage the second act, the one where whoever is left picks through the rubble building a spire of leftover trash. 

A lean new terror is felt in the album, as if these clotted, angry songs have lost some of their burl and found new agility. When the rubbery bass leading off “Tape” punctures its way in, it sounds less Killdozer and more The Cure. The heavy-footed dead march of “Milk of Human Kindness” peels away most of the sludge to reveal a steely, wiry post-punk dirge. And the atmospheric undercurrent of “Masc” is a contracted muscle pulling itself wide open. All this isn’t to say that Chat Pile have lost their barbarian touch. Cool World still feels and sounds like you’re popping open a vial of arsenic. But by adding controlled shots of nuance and experimentation into their caustic onslaught, Chat Pile manage to top their debut at nearly every turn.

Whether in the field of noise punk, sludge metal, or elsewhere, there have been few recent releases that have better captured the knowing, niggling dread of everything we have become than Chat Pile churning their modernist wrath like so much contaminated mud.