Pile have announced their new album, All Fiction, will drop on February 17th via Exploding In Sound. Along with the news, the band have shared a video for its lead single “Loops”.

“Loops” finds Rick Maguire questioning his motives as a songwriter, scrutinizing the border between his lived experiences and the stressors he sings about. “Throughout most of Pile’s existence, I’ve used songwriting as a means to work through personal issues and to express uncomfortable feelings in what I’ve perceived to be a healthy form of processing emotions. While doing this I’ve also been working hard to create a career in writing music,” Maguire explains. “The song ‘Loops’ is about the confusion I’ve experienced in the place where those two roads meet, and reflecting on whether what I’m creating is for personal growth or for personal gain has ended up leading to more questions than answers.”

Pile 2023 Tour Dates

2/28 – Philadelphia, PA @ PhilaMOCA
3/1 – Ridgewood, NY @ TV Eye
3/3 – Somerville, MA @ Arts at the Armory

From Rick Maguire:

“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.”

Pile
All Fiction
Tracklist
Exploding in Sound

1. It Comes Closer
2. Loops
3. Gardening Hours
4. Link Arms
5. Blood
6. Lowered Rainbow
7. Forgetting
8. Poisons
9. Nude With A Suitcase
10. Neon Gray

pre-order All Fiction by Pile HERE