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.