The Flenser

Printed on Gildan Hammer (H000) T-Shirt

203g/㎡
100% Combed Ring Spun US Cotton
Heavyweight soft ring spun fabric
Modern classic fit tubular body
2.22cm rib collar
Double-needle sleeve and bottom hems
Grey pearlized tear away label
Taped neck and shoulders

Printed on Gildan Hammer (H000) T-Shirt

203g/㎡
100% Combed Ring Spun US Cotton
Heavyweight soft ring spun fabric
Modern classic fit tubular body
2.22cm rib collar
Double-needle sleeve and bottom hems
Grey pearlized tear away label
Taped neck and shoulders

Printed on Gildan Hammer (H000) T-Shirt

203g/㎡
100% Combed Ring Spun US Cotton
Heavyweight soft ring spun fabric
Modern classic fit tubular body
2.22cm rib collar
Double-needle sleeve and bottom hems
Grey pearlized tear away label
Taped neck and shoulders

Printed on Gildan Hammer (H000) T-Shirt

203g/㎡
100% Combed Ring Spun US Cotton
Heavyweight soft ring spun fabric
Modern classic fit tubular body
2.22cm rib collar
Double-needle sleeve and bottom hems
Grey pearlized tear away label
Taped neck and shoulders

Printed on Gildan Hammer (H000) T-Shirt

203g/㎡
100% Combed Ring Spun US Cotton
Heavyweight soft ring spun fabric
Modern classic fit tubular body
2.22cm rib collar
Double-needle sleeve and bottom hems
Grey pearlized tear away label
Taped neck and shoulders

This is a pre-order item with a release date of May 30. Anything else purchased in the same order will not be shipping until this is in stock.

Planning for Burial is the solo project of Thom Wasluck, emerging from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. It’s Closeness, It’s Easy, his fourth album, arrives on May 30th via The Flenser.

It’s Closeness, It’s Easy is the long-awaited follow-up to 2017’s Below the House.

If Below the House was about returning home, following in the footsteps of your father and joining a union, and leaving behind youth’s wild days, It’s Closeness, It’s Easy embraces what comes next—the weight of all years, the quiet shifts, the reckoning with what remains. This record is many things. It captures the slow drift of time, the unnoticed shifts in a loved one—the creeping changes in mental health, the quiet pull of addiction, the kind of grief that settles in the bones rather than announces itself.

At its core, It’s Closeness, It’s Easy is about stepping into middle age and taking stock. It confronts the reality of living with the hand that’s been dealt and searching for meaning in what remains. It speaks to loss—the crushing weight of saying goodbye to a beloved 17 year old cat, the slow-motion grief of watching friends self-destruct, the inescapable passage of time as it bears down on aging parents and the self. But it also reflects the warmth of reconnection, the kind of love that never burns out but instead deepens. The feeling of picking up where things left off, untouched by the years in between.

While written over the course of two years, the recording process reflects a sense of immediacy. Rather than assembling songs piece by piece over time, the album took shape in singular, immersive sessions—less an act of construction, more an unveiling of something already waiting to take shape.

Rooted in a staunch DIY ethos, Wasluck handles every aspect of the Planning For Burial project himself—recording the music, designing the artwork, and performing live as a one-man band. He books his own tours, ever an independent creative. This hands-on approach has led Planning for Burial to play hundreds of shows solidifying his place in the underground music scene. A defining moment came in 2018 when he performed at the Meltdown Festival in London, curated by Robert Smith of The Cure.

As of 2025 Planning For Burial has existed for 20 years. Wasluck’s debut full-length, Leaving (2009), was released on Enemies List Home Recordings, the in-house label of Have a Nice Life. In 2014, he joined The Flenser with Desideratum, becoming a cornerstone for the label’s connection to community and ethos. The follow-up, Below the House (2017), was met with widespread acclaim, further establishing Planning for Burial as a voice that's singular and unique.

Track Listing:

1. You Think
2. Movement Two
3. (blueberry pop)
4. A Flowing Field Of Green
5. With Your Sunglasses On Like A Ghoul
6. Grivo
7. Twenty-Seventh of February
8. Fresh Flowers For All Time
9. Farm Cat, Watching

In 2008, Have A Nice Life released their now cult classic Deathconsciousness LP to a whimper and critical non-interest. Six years after its release the band followed up with 2014′s stunner The Unnatural World, and by then Deathconsciousness had become a force of influence and fanatic obsession. Seamlessly blending shoegaze, post punk, new wave, industrial and noise with unparalleled depth and weight, the album was originally released by Enemies List Home Recordings founded by HANL members Dan and Tim. Now, longtime HANL collaborator The Flenser will re-issue Deathconsciousness with deluxe packaging, including the lengthy accompanying zine and colored vinyl. Have A Nice Life commented, “Working with Flenser lets us keep things comfortable on our end, while also pressing enough copies to actually meet the need and not creating an artificially-inflated collector’s market, as happened with some of our past releases.”

The Flenser’s reissue of Deathconsciousness will be accompanied by a 75-page booklet detailing the dark and forgotten history of the Antiochean cult. Blurring the lines between novella, liner notes, and academic text, the zine itself presents an engrossing narrative. The album is rhythmic, primal and expansive and is a gloomy-post-punk masterpiece; a mediation on death, loss and unrequited love. Deathconsciousness feels more fresh and engaging with every listen and has held up as a remarkable piece of art. Fans of Have A Nice Life exhibit both cultic thought and action for good reason. It is perhaps a fanbase as dark and mysterious as the Antiochean’s, the album itself revolves around. Now The Flenser is honored to rerelease Deathconsciousness a gorgeous and disarming contribution to the modern lexicon for a larger audience.

Track Listing:

1. A Quick One Before The Eternal Worm Devours Connecticut
2. Bloodhail
3. The Big Gloom
4. Hunter
5. Telephony
6. Who Would Leave Their Son Out In The Sun?
7. There is No Food
8. Waiting For Black Metal Records To Come In The Mail
9. Holy Fucking Shit: 40,000
10. The Future
11. Deep, Deep
12. I Don't Love
13. Earthmover

Like the towering mounds of toxic waste from which it gets its namesake, the music of Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is a suffocating, grotesque embodiment of the existential anguish that has defined the 21st Century. It figures that a band with this abrasive, unrelenting, and outlandish of a sound has stuck as strong of a chord as it has. Dread has replaced the American dream, and Chat Pile’s music is a poignant reminder of that shift – a portrait of an American rock band molded by a society defined by its cold and cruel power systems.

Though very much on-brand with Chat Pile’s signature flavor of cacophonous, sludgy noise rock, the band’s shift to a global thematic focus on Cool World not only compliments the broader experimentations it employs with their songwriting but also how they dissect the album’s core theme of violence. Melded into the band’s twisted foundational sound are traces of other eclectic genre stylings, with examples of gazy, goth-tinged dirges to abrasive yet anthemic alt/indie-esque hooks and off-kilter metal grooves only scratching the surface of what can be heard in the album’s ten tracks.

Besides stylistically stretching the boundaries of the Chat Pile sound, Cool World is also the band’s first record to have someone else handle mixing duties, with Ben Greenberg (Uniform) capturing and further amplifying the quartet’s unmistakably outsider and folk-art edge.

While Chat Pile’s debut album was plenty disturbing with its B-movie-inspired interpretation of a “real American horror story”, what the band depicts on Cool World is unsettling not just from its visceral noise rock onslaught, but from depicting how all sorts of atrocities are pretty much standard parts of modern existence. In film terms, think something like a Criterion arthouse film by way of schlocky grindhouse splatterfest: undeniably gratuitous and thrilling in the moment but leaving a looming dread in the back of one’s mind for how close the horrors depicted mirror reality.

Track Listing:

1. I Am Dog Now
2. Shame
3. Frownland
4. Funny Man
5. Camcorder
6. Tape
7. The New World
8. Masc
9. Milk of Human Kindness
10. No Way Out

There’s a sick irony to how a country that extols rhetoric of individual freedom, in the same gasp, has no problem commodifying human life as if it were meat to feed the insatiable hunger of capitalism. If this is American nihilism taken to its absolute zenith, then God’s Country, the first full length record from Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is the aural embodiment of such a concept.

Having lived alongside the heaps of toxic refuse that the band derives its name from, the fatalism of daily life in the American Midwest permeates throughout the works of Chat Pile, and especially so on its debut LP. Exasperated by the pandemic, the hopelessness of climate change, the cattle shoot of global capitalism, and fueled by “...lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of THC,” God’s Country is as much of an acknowledgement of the Earth’s most assured demise as it is a snarling violent act of defiance against it. Within its over 40 minute runtime, God’s Country displays both Chat Pile’s most aggressively unhinged and contemplatively nuanced moments to date, drawing from its preceding two EPs and its score for the 2021 film, Tenkiller. In the band’s own words, the album is, at its heart, “Oklahoma’s specific brand of misery.” A misery intent on taking all down with it and its cacophonous chaos on its own terms as opposed to idly accepting its otherwise assured fall. This is what the end of the world sounds like. God’s Country is out via The Flenser.

In just a couple of years, Oklahoma City’s Chat Pile has made nothing short of a profound impression on the underground music discourse. Formed in the spring of 2019 by Raygun Busch (vocals), Luther Manhole (Guitar), Stin (Bass), and Captain Ron (Drums), the noise-rock quartet would release two EPs that same year, titled This Dungeon Earth and Remove Your Skin Please respectively. Spurred on by both a hearty run of live performances and a swiftly growing online fanbase, Chat Pile became a staple name among its genre contemporaries thanks to its hellish synthesis of noise rock, sludge, industrial, and mid 90’s nu-metal. In 2020, the band would sign with San Francisco underground music label, The Flenser, to put out its upcoming full length debut. That following year, Chat Pile kept its roll going, with accolades including composing the score for the indie film, Tenkiller, as well as releasing a 7” split with portrayal of guilt in the summer. Despite its creation only a couple of years ago, Chat Pile has already played alongside a number of acclaimed underground acts, including Street Sects, portrayal of guilt, Psychic Graveyard and Distorted Pony .

Track Listing:

1. Slaughterhouse
2. Why
3. Pamela
4. Wicked Puppet Dance
5. Anywhere
6. Tropical Beaches, Inc.
7. The Mask
8. I Don't Care If I Burn
9. grimace_smoking_weed.jpeg

In an artistic landscape fueled by gamified promotional tactics, spasmodic virality, and manufactured controversy, the amount of noise that independent artists must cut through can seem overwhelming. Yet, it’s the most genuine statements — often those expecting no audience at all — that overcome. The Origin of My Depression, the 2019 album from Australian experimentalist Uboa, proves just that; presenting such a deeply affecting mix of dark ambient, noise, and extreme metal, it all but demanded its unplanned but unsurprising cult following.

With several tracks that began as live improvisations recorded in the living-room-turned-bedroom of a dilapidated queer sharehouse, and others recorded from live sets in venues, The Origin of My Depression exhibits the spontaneity and ineffability of extreme emotions. Xandra Metcalfe, the mind behind Uboa, offers sonic representations of her anxieties, depressive thoughts, and lived experiences throughout the record’s seven songs, even if the origins of these feelings escape her. The result, intensely and authentically personal, undeniably resonates, as The Origin of My Depression spread through online communities through sheer word of mouth upon its initial release. Now, four years later, the record stands as a defining statement of late 2010s underground music, and it takes just one listen to see why.

Uboa has spent the better part of a decade dipping into every corner of heavy music. From harsh noise to dark ambient, glitch to doom metal, Metcalfe’s output, though sonically varied, remains consistent in her use of such styles to express her mental state at the time of writing. Whether it's her live performances (described as a panic attack presented on stage) or her recorded material, her eclectic approach to dark music has led Uboa to become an unlikely but deserving cult figure in online music.

Track Listing:

1. Detransitioning
2. The Origin Of My Depression
3. Lay Down and Rot
4. Epilation Joy
5. Please Don't Leave Me
6. An Angel of Great and Terrible Light
7. Misspent Youth

Uboa’s fifth album Impossible Light almost never made it out of the dark. From its initial conception in 2018, this record went to hell and back, dragging its immensity and too-big-to-hold emotion through the torturous process of translation to sound and returned triumphantly as a full-bodied record in a distinct new style.
 
Impossible Light begins where Uboa's 2019 breakout album The Origin of My Depression left off — and ends somewhere entirely different. The Origin stunned with its methodical use of doom, harsh noise, ambient soundscapes while documenting a raw, unhindered account of Xandra Metcalfe’s experiences with her transition and her struggles with mental health. Over time The Origin steadily grew a cult-like following which developed into a full-fledged internet community focused around noise, neurodiversity and transness. While Uboa’s signature style of highly polished, cinematic ‘hypernoise' is front and center in Impossible Light, there is also a daring departure into the genres of industrial metal/rock, setting it apart from any other Uboa release thus far and distinguishing it from other contemporary noise records.
 
Metcalfe kept the lyrical content of this record as a time capsule of the catastrophic ups and downs and rapidly changing environments within herself and in the world from 2018-2023. Key collaborators include Blood of a Pomegranate, Otay:onii, Charlie Looker and Haela Hunt-Hendrix of Liturgy. Impossible Light dives fearlessly into queer sexuality, trans embodiment, grief for those who couldn't make it, solidarity for those facing unimaginable discrimination, the toxic spread of transphobic hatred and misinformation, and the ultimate hope of recovery from trauma and mental anguish. This is a record about the light at the end of the tunnel and the power it takes to keep moving towards it.

Track Listing:

1. Phthalates
2. Endocrine Disruptor
3. A Puzzle
4. Gordian Worm (ft. Blood of a Pomegranate)
5. Pattern Screamers
6. Jawline
7. Weaponised Dysphoria
8. Sleep Hygiene
9. Impossible Light / Golden Flower (ft. Otay::onii)

Oklahoma’s Chat Pile have had an exciting 2022; they released their album God’s Country, toured the midwest and east coast in support of the album, announced their appearance at Roadburn Festival 2023, and while the band is working on LP2, they're revealing details for their score for the indie film Tenkiller.

While not a proper full-length album, the Tenkiller score was written and recorded in the winter of 2020, and it waxes and wanes from the signature Chat Pile sound but also ventures into new ones— including arena country music.

The band comments, “The music we made for Tenkiller is quite a bit different than what you may come to expect from us. We were given the freedom to really experiment and explore territories that we’ve never done before.” They continue, “It’s not going to be for everyone, but we hope some of you connect with what we set out to do.

Track Listing:

1. TAH
2. Badman
3. Dad’s Drunk
4. The Fabulous Shitheads
5. LE
6. The Return of Badman
7. Lake Time (Mr. Rodan)
8. Kids
9. QUAH
10. Badman 3: Die Badman Die
11. B4dm4n
12. Punishment Box
13. Beck’s Theme
14. OK
15. Badman V: A New Beginning
16. Bleeding Out
17. Tenkiller

“I can stay up late whenever I want... but other than that, it’s nothing like I thought. I guess I thought I’d know what I’m doing by now... but I know nothing.”

Have A Nice Life was formed in a time of Dan’s and Tim’s lives that reflected concerns with depression and suicidal ideation. As the following for the project has grown, and Dan and Tim have aged and faced new life challenges with family and careers, their new album Sea of Worry reflects just that.  Dread is the primary theme that is woven throughout Sea of Worry - the dread of aging, children growing up, and an increasingly uncertain future. However, Sea of Worry is Have A Nice Life at the peak of their powers; Dan and Tim’s unmistakable chemistry coupled with a propulsive backing band catapults them into the stratosphere.  These 7 tracks ebb and flow with noise and melody, and are so well-crafted it’s near impossible to get them out of your head.  More concise and perhaps more straightforward than their past releases, Have A Nice Life has found new focus and discipline on Sea of Worry and the album is a triumphant addition to their ever-evolving discography.

Track Listing:

1. Sea Of Worry
2. Dracula Bells
3. Science Beat
4. Trespassers W
5. Everything We Forget
6. Lords Of Tresserhorn
7. Destinos