If their recorded history tells us anything, it’s that Pile couldn’t write an ordinary song if you put a gun to their heads. The Massachusetts collective, now nearly 20 years into their career, have built their catalogue on writing indie songs that feel like they’re tilting slightly off true north. That experimental trend has continued even as they left the underground and entered their glossy production era, and it shows no signs of slowing down. Neither 2017’s Hairshirt’s endlessly deviant chord progressions nor the plaintive post-modern songwriting and processed flourishes that formed the foundation of 2019’s Green and Gray and 2023’s All Fiction felt like the end of Pile’s well of ideas, or the band reaching for anything approaching a plateau. On their newest, Sunshine and Balance Beams, the restless Boston quartet again pens an LP of clustered gems, effortlessly switch-hitting between guitar sub-genres, mainstream tunings and dissonant divots, and improvisation and composition. 

Pile’s deft handling of all things punk continues to awe. The band sounds equally comfortable during the sharp-angled art punk kick-off of “Deep Clay” as they do on the track’s walloping post-hardcore run-out. Rick Maguire’s vocals again are front and centre, and his range and fearless variations are alive and well. He croons, cries, coos and caterwauls, often all in one song, and there are even a few moments when he dips into suspended grunge growls.

There are small touches of immaculate architecture and insolent brilliance scattered all over this album. Just take a moment to revel in “Bouncing in Blue” hitting its droning, emotive denouement in somehow the smoothest and clunkiest way at once. Or the crunchy coda that sweeps up the spacey emo of “A Loosened Knot.” Or the peculiar way the drums mimic the hanging tension of the string section on the bridges of closer “Carrion Song.” These little details keep coming, revealing more of themselves on repeat listens, the sum of a thousand small nuanced brush strokes making Sunshine and Balance Beams perhaps the band’s finest work over the past 15 years.

Now decades removed from their scrappy, freewheeling beginnings, Pile are no longer ersatz pop-writers with a deconstructive punkish slant. They are veteran deconstructionists making perfect pop.