- 2025-01-14
-
MUSIC
-
Fust Announces New Album “Big Ugly”, Shares New Song “Spangled”
Durham-based alt-rock band Fust, consisting of Aaron Dowdy (vocals/guitar), Avery Sullivan (drums), Frank Meadows (piano), John Wallace (guitar), Justin Morris (guitar/pedal steel), Libby Rodenbough (fiddle), and Oliver Child-Lanning (bass), has announced their upcoming third studio album “Big Ugly” will be released on March 7, 2025 via Dear Life Records.
The album comprises 11 songs, which the band recorded with producer Alex Farrar at Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, NC, over ten days in June of 2024.
From the album, the band released a new song “Spangled” on January 9, 2025.
The track was written by Aaron Dowdy and produced by Alex Farrar. The accompanying music video was directed by John Winn.
The band lead singer Aaron Dowdy said of the song, “I don’t think you can really hear the word ‘spangled’ without thinking about America and its national anthem. 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.”- The new album cross-stitches fact and fiction, following tough-skinned characters who inhabit its titular town.
These stories are Aaron Dowdy spinning yarn from his unique trove of Southern experience, as both insider and outsider to its deeply contradictory charms.
But despite the fictions Aaron Dowdy personally winds his way through, “Big Ugly” is also a very real place: a small, unincorporated area in southern West Virginia around where Dowdy’s family has deep roots. -
Background photo by Rodney Boles - source : Apple Music
