Fust Announce New Album Big Ugly, Share U.S. Tour Dates

Around this time last year, Fust unloaded all of their old demos via Songs of the Rail, the very good. 90-minute, 28-song release that combined all of Aaron Dowdy’s best and rawest sketches. Months before that, the Durham, North Carolina band released Genevieve, which we named the 53rd-best album of the 2020s so far. Today, Dowdy and his band (drummer Avery Sullivan, pianist Frank Meadows, guitarist John Wallace, multi-instrumentalist Justin Morris, fiddlist Libby Rodenbough and bassist Oliver Child-Lanning) have announced their third record, Big Ugly, which will arrive March 7 via Dear Life Records. They’ve also announced a string of spring tour dates in America.

Big Ugly was produced by the legendary Alex Farrar (Wednesday, MJ Lenderman, Squirrel Flower), and the album’s 11 tracks feature contributions from a host of talents, including Merce Lemon, the Deslondes’ John James Tourville and the War on Drugs‘ Dave Hartley. The songs are stories of the South, full of grit and glory and following in a Faulknerian tradition where Dowdy’s stories can linger in the blur between past and present. Big Ugly‘s first single, “Spangled, ” is a gritty country-rocker with woozy pedal steel riffs coiling through its core. Dowdy’s main character is traveling along a Virginian highway, surveying a desolate terrain and what ghosts wander nearby.

“I don’t think you can really hear the word ‘spangled’ without thinking about America and its national anthem,” Dowdy said in a press release. “I wanted to write a personal, pained kind of national anthem made up of esoteric and American themes like trauma and time out of joint, self-destruction and intoxication, frailty and hubris. It’s an American ghost story, where hurts linger in places long after the buildings and bridges they happened in have disappeared.”

Last week, as a part of our “favorite albums of the 2020s so far” essay series, Paste music editor Matt Mitchell wrote of Fust: “Dowdy is a craftsman, a once-in-a-lifetime storyteller hailing from the tar-covered racetracks of Bristol, Virginia’s coal country foothills, where the Carter Family used to play. Dowdy has been writing songs since 2003, when he was an 11-year-old kid going to see Gillian Welch and David Rawlings play. Now, he is a Ph.D student in literature at Duke making music with Frank Meadows, John Wallace, Avery Sullivan and Justin Morris, the player behind the Winston-Salem-based band Sluice. His protagonists [on Genevieve] are constantly in quiet crisis, extending measures of compassion and reassurance. They’re people I know, people you know, sung about in etches of humility, embarrassment, loss and difficulty—pageantry, kinetic language and volume-jumping rock ‘n’ roll.”