Acid Bath / Chat Pile / Khemmis
The Criterion (OKC)
May 16, 2026
It’s the beginning of summer. I’m in a car with a backwards Raiders cap and a pair of JNCOs, speeding down the turnpike to catch sludge legends Acid Bath in OKC.
This isn’t 1997, but the year of our Anti-Clanker Pope 2026. And on this particular drive, the cap and JNCOs weren’t on me but on my longtime guitar student and now high school graduate August, who is exactly like me around Y2K, but way cooler.
The evolution of his music taste since middle school is shockingly similar to mine, though thanks to the internet he was able to condense my 27-year accumulation into six. So it felt like some kind of transdimensional reverberation that August’s favorite band, OKC noise sludge titans Chat Pile, would be opening for Acid Bath, a band I idolized in middle school and had always hoped to see. More evidence for this ethereal time loop meddling lies in Chat Pile’s outspoken love for Korn, terminally uncool now but unimaginably massive in my youth, a band that Gen Z has already melted down and recast as post-ironic sacred canon.
Acid Bath are sacred in their own way, a very unique band with a mystique that, nearly 30 years after they disbanded in the wake of personal tragedy, had people lined completely around the Criterion block hours before to see them last month. They are Louisiana sludge for sure, riding the ‘90s swamp jetsam wake that Eyehategod and Buzzoven surf atop. But there is a twisting rhythmic foundation to their sound, rooted in the burgeoning death and black metal scenes of their time, that grants them their own barge in the seas of sludge misery. And then there is their enigmatic frontman, Dax Riggs, whose vocals oscillate between glass-lacerated gurgling screams and Velvet Jesus crooning.
This band’s reverberations echo down the generations. Acid Bath was one of the first bands I discovered through Napster on my family’s poor dial-up computer. I loved them so much I emailed their label, Rotten Records, asking them to sign my first “band.” It was my buddy Erik on guitar and me on drums covering “Sunshine of Your Love,” and we were called TWISTED ILLUSION.
August also found Acid Bath around the musically gnostic age of 11. His 22-year-old coworker, Pete [editor's note: Hi Pete, it's Mom], found the band in adolescence as well, telling me they were “probably the first good metal band I was ever really into.” Pete discovered them right after the COVID pandemic hit and “immediately went and listened to their entire (admittedly short) discography front to back … and then immediately [listened] to it one more time over after that.” To him, Acid Bath perfectly encapsulated all of the angst that could be expected from a fifteen-year-old “who didn’t have anything else to do except listen to music.”
Like August and me, Pete cited Acid Bath as a gateway into more extreme, boundary-pushing, genre-blurring music. They are indeed a special band, one that every band on that early summer evening’s bill found sonic kinship with to some degree.
I’d always assumed that the openers, Khemmis, were beard metal, the kind of “progressive sludge” pioneered by Mastodon and enjoyed by IPA-drinking Door Guys, just with a little more Frank Frazetta flair. I assumed wrong. Their soaring harmonies and mid-tempo gallop, with its sort of “leisure thrash” vibe, made for the perfect show opener.
Chat Pile stalked the 4,000-capacity venue’s stage with a hunger only hometown conquerors can exude. Frontman Raygun Busch performed trademarkedly shirtless with a classic Kubrick stare as the band pummeled the crowd with all subtlety of Marvin Heemeyer. Their nu-metal-indebted noise rock is a post-post-hardcore Jesus Lizard downtuned enough to split atoms, with influences as disparate and gorgeous as Cocteau Twins. At one particularly heavy point I told August this was their “Korniest song,” to which he raised a fist before retracting the threat and yelling “Oh! Not with a ‘C,’ you mean a ‘K!’”
Acid Bath walked onstage to the song “Black Sabbath” by Black Sabbath off the album Black Sabbath, which is considered ground zero not only for heavy metal but also for its crushing subgenre of Doom, from which the sludge microgenre’s tendrils hang.
People of all generations in Acid Bath merch looked enraptured as the band took the stage. I saw several people Facetiming acquaintances who gazed through phone screens in bewilderment as a reunion materialized that many, myself included, thought impossible. Pete, August, and I had discussed all day what we thought they’d open with, and when I heard the wah-pedal firefly-twirling lick of “Tranquilized,” I summarily lost my shit.
Acid Bath playing "The Blue" at the Criterion, May 16, 2026 | video by Pete Chesser
The band tore through their debut album classic, then moved into the plodding brood of “Bleed Me an Ocean,” a funeral march for Dax to do his lysergic Roy Orbison impression over. And then “Venus Blue,” which was even slower, for Dax to do the same. Then the acoustic “Bones of Baby Dolls,” for more of Dax’s … well, by this point I was angrily referring to the setlist as “Dax’s Shitty Dracula Opera,” so you get it.
These songs have always been touchstones on Acid Bath's albums, providing a respite between their levee-breaking crust, death, and doom flood waters. But in this set, they became the rule and not the exception, and I wasn’t the only eager attendee visibly disappointed. The older dude in a Pogo the Clown wraparound tank who'd been screaming “Doctor Seuss is Dead!” (a classic Acid Bath track) earlier in line had a look of particular bamboozlement upon his countenance. August summed it up best in mid-show text to me: “This is bunda. Flop Bath.” They did play “Paegan Love Song,” a second album rocker that NARCAN’d the crowd, and they closed with the legendary album opener “The Blue,” which meant I lost a bet with August and Pete, who’d assured me it would be the finale.
Acid Bath’s set might not have been the sonic catharsis we were hoping for, but it still meant the world to many in the crowd, and brought so many disparate age groups and friendships under one roof. As the band ripped into that epic closer, I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned around to see my friends JJ and Calvin Compton, two people I met through Starship Records who are now influencing new generations at Monad Records, which Calvin owns. Calvin flashed me his signature “I’m so glad to be here” smile, and JJ proceeded to scream every punishing lyric into my face with pure rage in the name of decades-long camaraderie.
On the car ride home, August played his favorite tunes, from Flo & Eddie to Chris & Cosey, from Iggy Pop to Prince. It might sound silly to some, and “bears no mention” obvious to others, but the sounds we heard onstage that night could be traced back to and through these seemingly unrelated echoes from the past. Music is a language and a cultural currency that bridges gaps generationally, and even with the ubiquity of slop on the internet, kids like August and Pete (who recognized my Xiu Xiu tattoo; he has elite ball knowledge) find the rhythms and chords of honesty.
Transdimensional reverberations, indeed. Even if we all thought Acid Bath kinda sucked.
