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Feb 15, 2023Their unwillingness to resort to cheap pop gestures stands out in an era where few acts even bother to cloak their crass commercialism. But above all stands the music, and All Fiction—the title of which is a reference to our culture’s increasingly fractured ideas of what constitutes truth—marks yet another extraordinary entry in the band’s discography.
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Feb 15, 2023All Fiction is the mark of a new era for Pile. It's one that might take some listeners time to get used to, but it's an altogether richer and more mature sound that opens new avenues of sound for the band going forward.
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Feb 15, 2023Two fistfuls of songs that are at once as tight and as expansive as the band has ever been. The trio isn’t unrecognizable in their compositions, but it’s the way they use space that appears to have shifted. The result is formidable for fans and an easy entry point for those just joining the journey.
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Feb 17, 2023That’s what makes the sonic pivot on All Fiction feel so special; the band changed because they wanted to, not because they had to.
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Feb 16, 2023You have to bristle and tug at it to get past the barbed wire around these recordings, but once you do, you’re immersed in a surprisingly detailed and evocative world, just beyond the limits of rock.
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Mar 2, 2023The tension they harbor throughout can sometimes feel a little too detached for its own good, but that doesn't take away from an otherwise nonlinear experience that has the potential to grow over time.
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Feb 21, 2023Overinflated and squealing: it is not more than the sum of its parts. One hundred thousand good ideas, it turns out, are not enough to make an album.
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Feb 15, 2023It’s all washed over with a layer of fuzz, the distorted sound making it impossible to discern precisely what’s going on - which is, one would imagine, precisely the point.
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Feb 15, 2023Though its exploration sometimes lacks cohesion, it succeeds in pushing the group’s sound to levels of experimentation.