Resound Presents: Pile & Stuck in Austin, Texas at Parish on October 7th 2023. Pile: “I want to do what makes me feel like a kid: experimenting, having fun, and trying to discover new things about this work,” says Pile’s Rick Maguire about All Fiction. It’s his band’s eighth record, and one that finds the ambitious group assembling its most texturally complex material yet—despite the fraught inspiration underscoring its restive lyrics. Alongside the blistering drums and scorched-earth riffs that first galvanized Pile’s dedicated fanbase, the band has incorporated elegiac strings, mystifying vocal corrosions, and haunting synths. From the creeping fear of cinematic opener “It Comes Closer” to the euphorically ascending keys on ego-shattering closer “Neon Gray,” All Fiction is an ornate, carefully paced study on the subjectivity of perception, the data-shaping despotism of big tech, and the connections between anxiety and death. In its most vital moments, it’s also a resolute recommitment to the restorative significance of art and imagination. For fifteen years, Pile’s evolving take on rock has earned the group one oft-repeated superlative: “your favorite band’s favorite band.” Ceaseless touring took its members from Boston’s basement circuit to international festivals, hitting loftier technical apexes with each new record. Maguire—the fastidious composer, evocative guitarist, and potent voice behind the solo-turned-punk project—gives musical body to his interior world in scream-along-able lyrics that skew surreal. Drummer Kris Kuss’s time-defying performances, layered over gnarled basslines, have garnered widespread acclaim. 2019’s Green and Gray took Pile’s thunderous noise to more intricate realms, thanks to new recruit Alex Molini’s work on bass and keyboards, and Chappy Hull’s dextrous interplay on second guitar. That record drew praise for its political directness and instrumental ferocity, but Pile’s seventh album was almost a wholly different endeavor—one on which Maguire would favor piano. “I’ve been trying to get out of what I think is ‘the rock band format,’ and I was also tired of what I saw as our identity as a band,” explains Maguire, citing the profound impact he’s drawn from Mt. Eerie’s unusual timbres, Kate Bush’s ambitious singularity, and Aphex Twin’s irreplicable soundscapes. “The confusion about identity combined with existential anxiety led to exploring my imagination as a means of escape.” As far back as 2017, Maguire’s songwriting gravitated toward more obtuse influences, with a Prophet X synthesizer eventually replacing guitar as his primary composing tool. But when Pile’s lineup changed after his move to Nashville, Maguire was hesitant to stray far from the band’s established heavy sound, lest his newer bandmates take critical heat. Squirreling away that material for a later record afforded him time to explore deliberately. “I’ve been more drawn to recordings where it’s difficult to identify what’s happening,” offers Maguire of the albums that impacted All Fiction; the list is vast, touching on adventuresome heavy-hitters like Portishead, Broadcast, Penderecki and Tinariwen. “I also wanted to use different instruments and recording techniques to highlight the songs, rather than creating the visual of a band performing them,” he says. All Fiction—a reference to “the lack of any objective reality,” and the worries that accompany parsing truth from tale—is a record Maguire views in some ways as Pile’s most vulnerable, despite his embrace of symbolic lyricism. In 2019, Maguire and Molini began demoing All Fiction in Nashville; Molini, an established producer, brought appreciated focus to the process. As the pandemic interrupted Pile’s planned touring, Maguire leveled up at production to accommodate his fascination with electronic textures. On 2021’s Songs Known Together, Alone, he rearranged Pile’s back catalog for solo performance. Later that year, improvisational record In the Corners of a Sphere-Filled Room empowered the group to push deeper into orchestrated strangeness. In September 2021, Molini and Maguire were joined by Kuss—who was living eighteen hours away in Boston—for a month-long rehearsal of the twenty songs in contention. Kuss’s versatility gave him insight into synth patterns and atypical percussion choices like rhythmic breathing. The band, now a three-piece after the departure of Hull, recorded at home until they’d gotten All Fiction right, then they headed into the studio proper to try it all again. Recording once more with engineer Kevin McMahon (Real Estate, Titus Andronicus) at Marcata Recording in upstate New York, Pile tracked fifteen songs for over a month—the project’s longest studio stint by far. A “mammoth period” of synths, resonant vocal re-processing, and nightly full band overdubs yielded layers like doubled drums, warped classical guitars, and triggered samples of air ducts. Finally, Pile was joined by a string quartet, adding magical last touches. It marked a triumphant chapter for Maguire: “Part of it felt like pulling out all the stops,” he says. “I never really treated a Pile record that way.” For a record intended to abdicate rock’s throne, several of the ten tracks finally chosen for All Fiction number among Pile’s rockingest. “Loops” finds Maguire questioning his motives as a songwriter, scrutinizing the border between his lived experiences and the stressors he sings about. Concerns about self-awareness, substance use, and music’s environmental impact infected “Poisons,” which takes cues from the loud-quiet splendor of PJ Harvey. A trip to Big Bend in Texas inspired the Lynchian “Nude with a Suitcase”; “I really like Kris’ breaths, and what Alex did on the Rhodes and Omnichord. It added textures that give this song a lot of life,” Maguire effuses. While global perspectives and personal moments shaped the record’s narrative arc—climate injustice, the addiction crisis, American cultism, and capitalistic overwork, to name a few subjects—Maguire says he’s more confident than ever in letting poignant images speak for themselves: “If this combination of words does it for me, it doesn’t need to make sense to somebody else.” After completing past records, Pile’s had goals bubbling on the backburner. Maguire poured all of those and then some into All Fiction, and this purity of intention unlocked a refreshed sense of joy and fulfillment in Pile’s music. “I like thinking art has the capacity to change things and the way people function. But the means to get that art out there and get people to connect to it can be draining—and I overcommitted, in a lot of cases, to trying to be an island,” Maguire admits. All Fiction was sparked by a beguiling sonic palette, but it’s also infused with love from the years of trust between Kuss, Molini, and Maguire. Proof’s in the aftermath: though they spent five years as a long distance project, post-All Fiction, all three members of Pile are once again living in the Northeast. Stuck: Working at a mixing board one night, a catchphrase popped into Greg Obis’ head: “freak frequency.” He was ringing out feedback during his job as a sound engineer, and started to picture the parallels between acoustic physics and political trends. “If you think about a waveform, as the frequency rises, the space between the sine waves gets less and less,” Obis explains. “With that downward trend comes constant heightening, stress and tension.” He came to see freak frequency as an apt metaphor for the decline of Western empire, an inverse relationship between the (positive) deterioration of American hegemony and the (negative) worsening of daily life under that fall. It was a fitting title for the new material Obis was planning for Stuck, the frenetic and twisted post-punk outfit he formed in 2018. Inspired by the doomy social economics of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, the bleak worldbuilding of horror games Demon’s Souls and Bloodborne, and the bombastic yet arty satire of Devo, Obis channeled his audio analogy into Freak Frequency, an album ringing out with explosive sounds and ideas. Though its songs tackle the violence of wealth, the nightmares of technocracy, and the rise of the conspiratorial layman, Freak Frequency is Stuck’s quirkiest record to date—compositionally challenging and equipped with menace, yet dotted with vibrant fun. “Being in a brooding post-punk band isn’t that appealing to me,” jokes Obis. “When things are bad, all you can really do is laugh.” Stuck formed after Obis’ previous projects, Yeesh and Clearance, called it quits in short proximity. Obis is on guitar and vocals, which span from booming theatrics to ecstatic yelps. The project’s rhythm section is completed by shoegaze guitarist-turned-chugging bassist David Algrim and tightly wound drummer Tim Green—also a graphic designer, and the artist responsible for Stuck’s distinctively unified visual aesthetic. Original co-guitarist Donny Walsh contributed freely inventive lines for the first few years of the project, including on Freak Frequency; Ezra Saulnier of Red Tunic, the newest member of the band, now brings calculated contrapuntal riffs to match Obis’ parts. The building blocks of Stuck include the egg punk eccentricities of Uranium Club and The Coneheads filtered through noise rock power, à la Jesus Lizard or Slint; that melange is glittered with the precision microtones of Unwound and Women. “I want the feeling of immersion and chaos and tension, with a big guitar amp playing a big chord,” says Obis of his inspirations, citing friends and peers Cloud Nothings and Preoccupations. “But I want it delivered by having a lot of smaller points of light poking through.” At first, the new project had meager goals—it would be an excuse to open for friends’ bands when they toured through Chicago. 2020 debut Change Is Bad was released by Born Yesterday, the beloved Chicago indie co-run by Obis and Deeper’s Kevin Fairbairn. It was recorded at Jamdek Studio, and though it earned Stuck national press and tours with kindred post-rockers Pile and Blessed, Obis claims his band’s ambitions were low. “It’s a real meat-and-potatoes post-punk record,” he says. Content That Makes You Feel Good, a followup EP that saw Obis move into the role of recording engineer, introduced new textures, including ornamental synths; it was released in 2021 on Brooklyn’s Exploding in Sound. “We tried to be more ambitious with production on the EP, and Freak Frequency is a continuation of that,” Obis notes. In fact, writing for Freak Frequency began while Content’s recording was still underway—beginning with “Scared,” which features acoustic layers under feedback squalls. “Time Out,” with motoric guitars in the sputtering lineage of Wire, was also composed in late 2019. Obis wrote it about the cycles of compulsion and shame woven into social media use, and the way negativity drives algorithmic engagement. It became an exciting exercise for the group in ramping up speed; “I thought I knew how far I could push Tim’s tempos,” Obis recalls. “But Tim kept insisting we do it 20 bpm faster than what I had. He is an absolute monster for playing that.” Album opener “The Punisher,” a spiral staircase of disembodied guitars and rhythmic slams over a 2/4 beat, came in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection. It felt immediately emblematic to Freak Frequency, and Obis describes it as his favorite Stuck track: one he wishes he could write again and again. “It hits all the boxes that Stuck can do: it’s goofy, but there’s a lot of intricate guitar interplay, and at the end, there’s a big payoff,” he explains. The last song written was “Do Not Reply,” a pre-album single that came to Obis after engineering for Melkbelly and channeling their earworm melodies. Algrim wouldn’t let it on the record unless Melkbelly’s front person Miranda Winters dueted on vocals; she was happy to oblige, and the gritty epic closes Freak Frequency. With Obis resuming engineering duties, recording took place over eleven days at Chicago’s Palisade Studios. Additional flourishes included saxophone, with skronky riffs provided by Sarah Clausen (Algrim’s bandmate in Gentle Heat), and synthesizers, which Obis studied during the pandemic. Eventually, the songs were handed off to mixer Graham Walsh, hired for his sure hand on Metz’s recordings. “We wanted somebody who could take the tracks I recorded and fuck them up and bring the life out of them,” explains Obis, who added final touches to Freak Frequency at Chicago Mastering Service, where he dayjobs. Stuck has also returned to Born Yesterday to release Freak Frequency. “I’m stoked to be in good company with Landowner, Caution, Cafe Racer, and all our bands,” says Obis of his roster. With slippery snark, percussive heft, and funhouse mirrors of sludge, Freak Frequency delivers its needed screeds with gratifying nuance. If Stuck’s interpretation of this messed-up world goes down like a bitter pill, it’s only because its sugar coating is too delicious to keep from eating. TICKET / EVENT INFORMATION: - CASHLESS VENUE - This event is All Ages - All sales final, NO refunds or exchanges, events are rain or shine. - Door times are subject to change without notice. - Tickets purchased at box office will be inclusive of fees. - Once you’ve purchased, you will receive an order confirmation email from See Tickets on behalf of ‘Resound Presents’ with your eTicket(s) attached. - IMPORTANT: If you do not see your order confirmation in your inbox, make sure to check your junk/spam folder. If you still do not see your order confirmation or have any other technical ticketing-related issues with your order, click here to access the See Tickets help center.