Fust Share Lead Single 'Spangled' From Newly Announced Album

Durham, NC band Fust have announced their highly anticipated new album Big Ugly, due out March 7th via Dear Life Records. Lead single “Spangled”, available now, combines big chords and band leader Aaron Dowdy’s instantly recognizable voice for a 21st century anthem about reckoning with the ghosts and trauma imbued in the history of a place.

“I don’t think you can really hear the word ‘spangled’ without thinking about America and its national anthem,” shares songwriter Aaron Dowdy. “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.

Off the back of their critically acclaimed sophomore album Genevieve, Big Ugly arrives on the band’s longtime label home of Dear Life Records, who gained notoriety with MJ Lendermans’ Boat Songs, and have become a haven for contemporary songwriters. Returning to the studio with producer Alex Farrar (Wednesday, MJ Lenderman, Squirrel Flower), Big Ugly is the explosive result of Fust uncovering a freedom within their sincere form of loose and fried guitar rock, emboldened to deliver both their most intimate songwriting and biggest sound to date. The members –– Aaron Dowdy, drummer Avery Sullivan, pianist Frank Meadows, guitarist John Wallace, multi-instrumentalist Justin Morris, fiddlist Libby Rodenbough, and bassist Oliver Child-Lanning––weave their voices alongside guests like Merce Lemon, Dave Hartley (The War on Drugs), and John James Tourville (The Deslondes) across music that sounds like a conversation between old friends, and is exactly that.

Alongside the album announcement, Fust have announced a run of East Coast tour dates kicking off this March with support from Dead Gowns, Merce Lemon and Styrofoam Winos. Tickets on-sale tomorrow, January 10th at 10am ET HERE.

What does it mean to be from the South today? To try to reconcile the struggles and possibilities of Southern experience through songs, through words? Is it worth it? Are there secrets still worth revealing?

Fust have made these questions the heart of their work and, more than ever before, it is the drama at play on their new record Big Ugly. Fust joins a long tradition of artists that have tried to present life in the dirty South, from the lived-in short stories of Breece and Ann Pancake to the traditional record-keeping of John Jacob Niles to the southern rock historicism of Drive-By Truckers. For these artists and for Fust, making sense of the South is a necessity because history is what hurts and in the words of Hemingway, our call is to “write hard and clear, about what hurts.” 

Big Ugly is an 11-song testament to doing just that, with band leader Aaron Dowdy pushing his obsessions with country-storytelling to more mystifying places, hellbent on proving the elegance of grittiness in Southern life. The seeds for Big Ugly began when Dowdy––a distant relative of Maybelle Carter and the infamous Hatfields who grew up in southwest Virginia at the foothills of coal country––started taking trips with his grandmother to southern West Virginia over the past few years. Walking around the places she grew up, he was moved by how those melodramas of holler life from over half a century ago were afire in her still. Those trips came pouring over him when he was in Europe in 2023, longing for home and beginning to trace the outlines of a new record. There, he saw a millenia-old gutter on the ground, a shoddy yet time-honored remnant memorialized with a placard off the streets of modern Athens. “I’ve spent countless hours hanging out by fallen gutters out back of rundown houses throughout the South” says Dowdy. “I never thought to think of them as monuments of the future.” These two interrelated themes were the first two entries in Dowdy’s miles-long notes app for what would become Big Ugly and illuminate its core themes: the blurrings of past and present, the once magnificent now in disrepair, and how a certain love and honor for the squalor of today can become the promise of a future.

TOUR DATES

Jan 11 – Raleigh, NC @ The Pour House

Mar 28 – Athens, GA @ Flicker Theatre

Mar 29 – Richmond, VA @ The Camel

Apr 01 – Silver Spring, MD @ Quarry House Tavern

Apr 02 – Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda's

Apr 03 – Medford, MA @ Deep Cuts ^

Apr 04 – Manchester, VT @ Billsville ^

Apr 05 – Brooklyn, NY @ Union Pool

Apr 06 – Hudson, NY @ The Half Moon ^

Apr 08 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Bottlerocket Social Hall

Apr 09 – Chicago, IL @ The Hideout *

Apr 10 – Minneapolis, MN @ 7th St. Entry *

Apr 11 – Northfield, MN @ Carleton College *

Apr 12 – Davenport, IA @ Raccoon Motel *

Apr 13 – Bloomington, IN @ The Bishop *

Apr 15 – St. Louis, MO @ The Sinkhole

Apr 16 – Louisville, KY @ Zanzabar #

Apr 17 – Nashville, TN @ The Blue Room at Third Man #

Apr 18 – Knoxville, TN @ The Pilot Light #

Apr 19 – Carrboro, NC @ Cat's Cradle - Back Room #

Apr 23 – Chattanooga, TN @ Cherry Street Tavern

Apr 24 – Greenwood, MS @ Hush Puppy Music Co-op

Apr 25 – Birmingham, AL @ Woodlawn Theatre

Apr 26 – Charlotte, NC @ Tipsy Burro

^ Dead Gowns

* Merce Lemon

# Styrofoam Winos

Photo credit: Charlie Boss

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