Pile – Sunshine and Balance Beams
Pile songs are marvels of songwriting architecture—solid and bottom heavy, yet engineered into strange and spectacular shapes, often dizzying roller coasters of power and melody. But with the release of 2023’s All Fiction and its companion EP Hot Air Balloon, the Boston post-hardcore group increasingly shifted the focus to texture, color and hue, exploring the nuances in between their noise rock rippers’ support structures. On a standout moment like “Loops,” the intensity of their approach remained intact, yet with the noise dialed back and new, subtler effects given the spotlight, Pile took their sound beyond throttling punk roar (or folk-tinged melodies) toward dreamier, more psychedelic climes.
As “Balance Beams,” the minute-long opener of Pile’s eighth album and first for Sooper after a long tenure on Exploding In Sound, ushers in an elegant array of strings and mellotron, they project an immediate upgrade toward an even more pronounced embrace of elegance. It’s also something of a fake-out, as the transition into “An Opening” proves somewhat jarring, Rick Maguire’s voice and guitar tearing through the fabric of space with the same jagged abrasion that’s defined their music since the beginning. But it also isn’t a fake-out in the slightest; certainly, “An Opening” roars with piercing distortion and the muscle of a road-tested band who can bash away with the best of them. Yet the song achieves a sense of delicate grandeur even while dialing up the din, a tense escalation of strings returning just as the climax is about to catch fire.
Where All Fiction presented a guitar-based band experimenting with how to make a guitar-based record that doesn’t sound like one, Sunshine and Balance Beams finds Pile further exploring the textural spaces and depth of their arrangements while making no bones about the fact that this is very much a guitar album. “Deep Clay” is one such moment, as much a straightforward post-hardcore rocker as anything they’ve ever recorded, but with eerie backing vocals filling in the negative space and an explosion of distortion and a ferocious scream from Maguire in its final minute that seems to not just flesh out the nuances of Pile’s noisy, angular punk, but actually makes it louder. It’s not a guitar but a synthesizer that throbs in the restrained introduction of “Bouncing in Blue,” but that too proves only a temporary means toward building up anticipation for a proper deluge of fuzz—drummer Kris Kuss, guitarist Matt Connery and bassist Alex Molini all providing maximum sonic overload as Maguire belts a climactic verse good and proper: “All surrender to the flood/If you lie down, make sure face up.”
Even amid some of the most raucous material from Pile since 2019’s Green & Gray, Sunshine and Balance Beams offers some of its most poignant moments at slightly lower volumes. “Uneasy” still has a taut energy driving it, but the group eases back just enough to highlight Maguire’s reflection on the sinking feeling of knowing everything’s about to collapse: “If the bottom’s already given out once/What’s stopping it from giving again?” And the majestic sound of delicate guitar arpeggios with a hefty back end offers a stunning balance of power and grace on “Holds.” But when the strings come back in “Born at Night,” they do so in the service of a thunderous showcase of maximalism that finds Maguire pushed to his breaking point, face-to-face with a pretty intimidating bird: “If there’s no room for cowards now/Then who the fuck are you?” Pile know when to hold back and when to give their songs space to breathe, but even after all this time, they’re still at their best when they give us everything they’ve got.
Label: Sooper
Year: 2025
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Pile : Sunshine and Balance Beams
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