Chat Pile’s 2022 debut album God’s Country was monstrously, miraculously fully formed. The Oklahoma sludge-metal quartet’s oily guitars and grunting mid-tempo percussion conjured their namesake, mining toxic waste mounds, while Raygun Busch’s throat-shredding vocals drew from the city’s real-world violence. But their releases since, from album-offcut tape experiments Blood at Night to In the Earth Again’s team-up with finger-picker Hayden Pedigo have promised another evolutionary stage.

The brighter alt-rock of Who Loves the Sun is a partial rebrand, foregrounding a love of XTC teased in the jangly riff of 2024’s Funny Man. Compared to previous albums-proper God’s Country and 2024’s Cool World, the structures are more dynamic, the guitars twangier and the vocals hookier, while Busch’s lyrics zoom out from American violence to the abstract horrors of desensitisation: “Scrolling past the screaming,” he seethes on Influence.

Chat Pile smartly tie this concept to the album’s approachability. Intruder’s sprightly groove, melodic chorus and rubbery guitar solo let Busch sneak in his most frightening allegory for systemic violence, a home-intruder cutting someone in their sleep. There’s also a pleasing eclecticism, between the trip-hoppy Same Rules and Shrine’s swingy post-rock leanings.

But the overall direction, a straightforward softening of their early ugliness, disappoints. Other roads were open: film score Tenkiller signalled their avant garde potential, sometimes channelling Scott Walker’s Bish Bosch, while In the Earth Again’s melancholic singer-songwriter tracks promised untapped emotional depths. Chat Pile remain stuck between their debut and something equally distinctive, but there’s enough here to renew faith they’ll get there.