Pile destroyed a sold-out Lost Lake on Monday night. Energized by a sweaty crowd packed dick-to-ass, the four-piece tore through a decade and a half of material with the ferocity of a punk band playing a basement show. I shouldn’t have expected anything less. “They are great live,” my friend Leo Gallery of Owosso said when I told him I was going. 

However, what impressed me most was their precision. Pile write knotty, offbeat post-hardcore with shifting time signatures and tempo changes. Although I think they do a good job making such difficult music accessible, I’ll be the first to admit that nothing about it is intuitive. And yet the band, most of whom have played together since the early 2010s, twist and turn and stop on a dime. Their songs slam to a close with the severity of a gunshot. It seems their members make up a hive mind, with singer/guitarist Rick Maguire as their queen.

Watching them slash through their set, I admit, I felt a little…jealous. 

Now I wasn’t jealous of the adoring fans throwing their bras at them (this may not have happened) on the very same stage that I’ve played to far fewer people with far less energy. (Honestly, if your musical dreams hinge on accruing a loving fanbase, you’ll never fill the hole in your heart.) No, I was jealous of Pile’s musical chemistry. They played like a championship basketball team who had their playbook down pat. Their years together have fused neural pathways and connected muscle and sinew in a way thrown-together studio hotshots could never. 

That type of chemistry doesn’t come overnight. It takes years of practice and stage time to dial in.

Heck Reckoners house our bass amp in an 4U rackmount case with “SWELLS” spray-painted on the side. Swells were a Denver punk band. When I bought the amp (and a pair of speaker cabinets that have since disappeared back into the used gear slipstream) from their guitarist in 2019, I asked him how long they were together as a band.

“Eight years.” 

“That’s a good run,” I said. “Actually that’s like two good runs back-to-back.”

“I guess so,” he said, somewhat resigned. 

Here’s the thing about buying used gear with a band’s name written all over it: that band has died. I chucked him on the shoulder. “Sorry for your loss.” 

It’s probably for the best that I never sprayed over “Swells” to write “Part Time Ghost,” because Part Time Ghost didn’t last half as long as Swells. As far as I’m concerned, that case belongs to Swells until the heat death of the universe. And, considering it’s a molded plastic Gator case, it’ll probably last that long. 

Bands die for all sorts of reasons – especially when they’re not making enough money to cover expenses – but lately, in Colorado, most of the bands I know that have blown up, have blown up because the cost of living is too damn high in the Centennial State.

Part Time Ghost died because Keiton couldn’t keep sinking new used car money every month on rent. One of Nic’s projects died because its bandleader wanted the ability to start a family. Artists typically forgo the luxuries in life for the ability to create art, but when they can’t afford the basics, the art is the first thing to go. 

Which means bands get fucked. 

I’ve been making music on and off for twenty years. When I first started playing, all I wanted to do was get good enough to play in front of an audience. After my first few open mics, all I wanted to do was get a band together and play a show. After my first few shows, all I wanted to do was record and release an album…. You get where I’m going. 

Now, I’m of the age and ambition where all I want to do is keep a band together for four, eight… twenty years, release a bunch of good records and play a bunch of cool shows. 

I don’t know if that’s going to happen. It’s also not like I have one goddamn ounce of control of whether it does or not. 

People make fun of guys like Knicks owner James Dolan for paying hot-shit studio musicians to back up his vanity blues band JD & the Straight Shot, but maybe being a billionaire and owning Madison Square Garden is one of the only ways to keep a group together for the long haul these days. 

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Unlike sports, where your body begins slowing down just as your mind figures out all the angles, music allows you to get better and better as you age. And if you’re able to grow and mature with the same fellow musicians, your music will just grow richer and more textured until the heat death of the universe (or arthritis takes over; musicians aren’t totally immune to bodily decrepitude). 

Listen to this week’s Heck Record, Pile’s newest Sunshine and Balance Beams, an example of aging guys killing it. If Sunshine is not their most immediately gripping (Dripping is the one that got me hooked), it’s certainly their best-sounding. This is the type of album a band could only created nine deep into their career. The addition of strings to their hardcore makes a track like the pummeling “Bouncing in Blue” rise into the atmosphere, and “Born at Night” (a new greatest hit) has the best dropped f-bomb in 2025. I’m looking forward to their next one, and the next time they come through town. 

Also, listen to (or buy) Swells’ very screamo Refraction//Incarnation. It’s proof that even though a band may be “dead,” as long as they’ve recorded, they’re never really.