When I was nine years old, I had my first anxiety attack while watching the nightly news with my mom. It wasn’t a Dateline episode or a breaking news alert, but a segment on artificial knee replacements that triggered a tsunami of racing thoughts on mortality. I wanted to scream. I wanted to run. From what though? Even at nine, I knew how absurd it seemed — running out of my living room because X-rays on TV embedded in me the finality of death. I rarely think back to this moment — thankfully, I have a pretty good hold on my anxiety and panic attacks — that is until I heard Sunshine And Balance Beams, the latest album from Boston DIY stalwarts Pile.
Why do we keep pushing on? Where do we run to when all of this feels heavy? Life is incredible and also full of immense suffering — what’s the point of any of it? Those same questions, which were running through my head the moment the nightly news ignited a fight-or-flight response, are in Sunshine And Balance Beams’ bloodstream. Pile’s ninth studio album, out this Friday, is a Sisyphean concept album — their Semiotext(e) opus, a rigorous odyssey.
Sunshine And Balance Beams is lyrically built around plunging us into a dense forest with the hope we’ll reach relief and replenishing light after we make it out. “Beyond the trees that lean toward the sun/ Things’ll open up/ There we all can rest and then be made anew,” project spearheader Rick Maguire asserts. But something is off. The guitars growl and hunch low to the ground, while, in the background, ominous synths linger as if foreshadowing the anti-christ. Maguire’s voice powers forward urgently — the answer is coming; something will save us; peace isn’t far. It’s a familiar feeling: that restless existentialism, that might quiet over time, but never goes away.
As the immensely shifting and shapeless Pile, Rick Maguire has been having a conversation about creative existentialism for nearly two decades. In 2006, Maguire began Pile as a way to explore personal creative freedom outside of Hel Toro, another band he was in at the time. Throughout the decades, his prolific project has been an outlet for conversing with the unknown — the infinite limits of his unique creative spirit, the indescribable emotions that bubble upside, the unfathomable beauty and suffering that we’re granted to exist on this planet.
It seems like he approaches each album as a tabula rasa, with flexibility between alternating bandmembers and the pendulum swing between intimate acoustic reflections or a heavy, emboldened boom. Pile have always been an outlet to chip away at the mystery of creativity — that art is always finished and never finished.
“I’m just trying to figure out where I’m at with the whole thing,” Maguire said in 2019. “Living like this never ceases to be strange. I’m doing exactly what I want to do and I love it very much, that’s stayed there for me, but I’m just watching things change around me as I go.” Pile had reached a point of consistent album output, having just released their seventh studio album Green And Gray. But no amount of art quells the weirdness of existence. “I put a lot of energy into making these things that are about, on some level, how I feel, but the feelings themselves are like riddles, so the songs are the best answers I can come up with. I put a lot of myself into it. I think it’s a good honest piece of work.” For years, Maguire continued to be a DIY fixture, doing the work in spite of unchanging industry obstacles.
As a series of catastrophic world events might do, things changed. Was the work enough? Or will creative liberation always be suffocated by monetary pursuit?
The impenetrable anxiety that rips through this album is like lightning hitting sand. We’re left with its crystalline structures that branch out into menacing guitar tirades and mid-transformation Jekyll-Hyde vocal takes, only to be followed by seafoam synth hums and prosperous orchestral strings. The multi-instrumentalist crew Maguire’s acquired here — guitarist Matt Connery, drummer Kris Kuss, bassist Alex Molini, cellist Eden Rayz, and co-producer Miranda Serra — take this Pile release to another level. This is an album that needs to let it consume you. This isn’t an album to half-listen to while doing dishes. You will miss all the beautiful production flourishes and grass-ripping bass on “Deep Clay,” before being sucked into the song’s annihilating outro. Sunshine And Balance Beams isn’t easy listening, but that’s what makes rewards feel so earned.
This is pivotal moment for Pile, creating an epic that centers around creative existentialism. There’s panic that comes with any kind of success through art; it’s not financially equitable for all of us to chase after the unknown in this society. The outlet of liberation becomes a leash. Material success masquerades as intrinsic satisfaction. “I’ve had to do a lot of unlearning when it comes to the ego-trap of capitalism,” Maguire said of this project. “Money and recognition are helpful tools, but the pursuit of those things for their own sake is somebody else’s idea.”
On “An Opening,” Maguire starts as an impassioned romantic, seeking art as a way out of endless darkness. As he carries on, he soon realizes it’s not a straight, virtuous path. “Reciting Satan’s prayer as a party trick to entertain them conmen/ Curry favor, and gain trust/ Then arm in arm we walk down the left-hand path,” he seethes as guitars rain fire around him on “A Loosened Knot.” Even with good initial intentions, it’s easy to get lost and be manipulated. Once that realization sinks in, so does despair (“Bouncing In Blue”), doubt (“Uneasy”), and cynicism (“Born At Night”). On “Meanwhile Outside,” he recognizes that any crapshoot of fame is shadowed by vultures seeking to exploit others that lust after it for their own personal gain.
Mortality is universal, but some choices in life feel like their own small deaths. The creative pursuit is a lifelong scratch — one that doesn’t go away with accolades. As long as we have skin, the itch still itches.
Sunshine And Balance Beams is out 8/15 via Sooper.
Other albums of note out this week:
• KAYTRANADA’s AIN’T NO DAMN WAY!
• Maroon 5’s Love Is Like
• OneRepublic’s The Collection
• Chance The Rapper’s Star Line
• Cass McCombs’ Interior Live Oak
• That Mexican OT’s Recess
• Shaki Tavi’s Minor Slip
• Pool Kids’ Easier Said Than Done
• Dijon’s Baby
• Black Honey’s Soak
• d4vd’s WITHERED DELUXE: MARCESCENCE
• Jordan Davis’ Learn The Hard Way
• Alison Goldfrapp’s Flux
• Recoechi’s Flavaz
• Racing Mount Pleasant’s Racing Mount Pleasant
• R.J.F.’s Cleaning Out the Empty Administration Building
• Cassandra Jenkins’ My Light, My Massage Parlor
• Insane Clown Posse’s The Naught
• San Gabriel’s Nights And Weekends
• Marissa Nadler’s New Radiations
• Molly Tuttle’s So Long Little Miss Sunshine
• Conan Gray’s Wishbone
• Autoheart’s Heartlands
• Rise Against’s Ricochet
• Chevelle’s Bright As Blasphemy
• Doc Pomus’ You Can’t Hip A Square: The Doc Pomus Songwriting Demos Box Set
• Steve Gunn’s Music For Writers
• Tuxis Giant’s You Won’t Remember This
• Bret McKenzie’s Freak Out City
• Georgia Harmer’s Eye Of The Storm
• Angelsaur’s The Girls Are Stressed
• Chemical’s Chemical
• NBA YoungBoy & DJ Khaled’s DESHAWN Mixtape
• Panopticon’s Laurentian Blue & Songs Of Hiraeth
• Fletcher Tucker’s Kin
• JER’s Death Of The Heart
• Chicago Underground Duo’s Hyperglyph
• Kerosene Heights’ Blame It On The Weather
• PLAIINS’ Happy Faces
• Joseph Decosimo’s Fiery Gizzard
• Evidence’s Unlearning Vol. 2
• Tres Leches’ The Smooth Sounds Of Tres Leches, LHCC Mart Vol. 1
• The Aces’ Gold Star Baby
• Stephen Bishop’s THIMK
• Street Sects’ Dry Drunk
• Street Sex Full Color Eclipse
• Woody Guthrie’s Woody At Home – Volume 1 & 2
• Joey Valence & Brae’s HYPERYOUTH
• Foot Ox’s A Lighthouse With Silver Dog Eyes
• Frown Line’s What’s Leftover
• SE SO NEON’s Now
• Various Artists’ Sitting On The Moon
• Rio Da Yung OG’s F.L.I.N.T.
• Preservation & Gabe ‘Nandez’s Sortilège
• Big Noble’s It’s Later Than You Think
• Kal Banx’s Rhoda
• Babyface Ray’s Codeine Cowboy
• Rich Brian’s WHERE IS MY HEAD?
• Various Artists’ JUST IN TIME (Original Broadway Cast Recording)
• Aly & AJ’s 20 Years Of Into The Rush (Live)
• Rockabye Baby!’s Lullaby Renditions Of Billie Eilish
• Various Artists’ HIGHEST 2 LOWEST Soundtrack
• Van Halen’s Balance (Expanded Edition)
• Nerves’ Iarmhaireacht EP
• she’s green’s Chrysalis EP
• ROREY’s Dysphoria EP
• ADÉLA’s The Provocateur EP
• The Youth Play’s someday, forever EP
• Emily James’ Summer Nostalgia EP
• PINKNOISE’s HUMAN=KIND EP
• SURFACED’s Where Angels Fear To Tread EP
