Fust & Merce Lemon w/ Thomas Dollbaum

 

Fust — the Durham, North Carolina-based band — announce their new album, Big Ugly, out March 7th via Dear Life Records. Big Ugly arrives after the release of 2024’s Songs of the Rail––“one of the best alt-country compilations…in a long, long time” (Paste) –– and 2023’s standout Genevieve, which unassumingly introduced new listeners to Fust’s unmistakable blend of “small-town poetry” (Mojo) with a familiar yet probing “country-tinged folk-rock” (KEXP) that made it “one of the most fun rock records of the year” (Pitchfork).

Big Ugly finds Fust taking its “gutsy, blue-collar Americana” (New Commute) further than it has before. Songwriter Aaron Dowdy pushes his obsessions with country-storytelling to more mystifying places, telling stories of Southern life teeming with utopian possibility that arises uniquely from the contradictions for which the south is infamously known. In this way, it is a record that could easily be filed on the record shelf alongside lyric-forward indie or Southern rock, as well as on the bookshelf amongst the throngs of Southern literature hellbent on proving the elegance of grittiness. Big Ugly is also Fust––above all a group of close friends––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.

While perhaps “few voices can write a song quite like Aaron Dowdy” (Paste), it is clear upon listening that Big Ugly is an album of fully recognizable voices. One hears in the music the years of interplay between Avery Sullivan (Sluice) on Drums, Justin Morris (Sluice, Weirs) on guitar and vocals, Oliver Child-Lanning (Sluice, Weirs) on bass and vocals, Frank Meadows on piano, John Wallace (Colamo) on guitar and vocals, and Libby Rodenbough (Mipso) on fiddle and vocals. Big Ugly is also the second collaboration with the Asheville-based engineer Alex Farrar, recorded together throughout the summer of 2024 at Drop of Sun Studio. And with the help of many friends including Merce Lemon, Dave Hartley (The War on Drugs), and John James Tourville (The Deslondes), Big Ugly is exactly what one feels it to be: a huge group of people gathered together, stumbling upon songs amidst long days and even longer nights.

 

“I could not be alive alone,” a longtime family friend says with a smile. “None of us could be alive alone.”

Within the quiet, cascading corners of Pittsburgh lies a community – nothing short of one large family – that spans zip codes, histories, occupations, and generations, always tumbling inwardly into itself, propped up by steadfast pillars of conviction toward spiritual and emotional mutual aid. The kind of earnest community scaffolding that gets bandied about, wielded as conjecture, particularly in an age of increasing fracture through digital sublimation, is alive and quite well within the universe surrounding Merce Lemon.

THOMAS DOLLBAUM