FUST Release New Album 'Big Ugly' Prod. by Alex Farrar (Wednesday, MJ Lenderman, Squirrel Flower)

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FUST Release New Album 'Big Ugly' Prod. by Alex Farrar (Wednesday, MJ Lenderman, Squirrel Flower)

FUST

RELEASE NEW ALBUM BIG UGLY

OUT NOW VIA DEAR LIFE RECORDS

EAST COAST TOUR KICKS OFF THIS MONTH

Fust Press Photo by Graham Tolbert

Praise for Fust:

“Thoughtful and casual, detail-driven and refined, spinning little turns of phrases into fully fleshed-out scenes” — Pitchfork

"a real-deal AOTY contender.. Fust are now a crucial part of the contemporary music lexicon”

— Paste

“Good old-fashioned sad-eyed twang with widescreen splendor and literary flair.. Fust filter heavy-hearted roots rock through an indie-rock lens with winsome, sometimes spectacular results”

— Stereogum

“both deeply personal and universally resonant” — The Line of Best Fit

"Sure to catch the ear of fans of some of the household names that Farrar has already produced, Big Ugly is the real deal and is sure to be a constant companion for a myriad of backroad rambles and highway drive" — Under The Radar

“spills over with warm, weary country-rock songs.. Aaron Dowdy has a way of painting pictures of people, places, and sentiments that feel just out of focus but reassuringly familiar” — Bandcamp

“a well-crafted set of country-tinged folk-rock..warm harmonies, wistful melodies and lyrics of love, loss and renewal” — KEXP

“Sawdust-flaked alt-country perfection… Few bands have the skills and intuition to interpret decades of influences and write tracks that still feel vital and compelling… Fust has both in spades” — Premier Guitar

"wrings beauty out of the most unexpected places, honing in the band’s knack for making small feelings appear monumental" — Our Culture

"A hauntingly beautiful journey through memory and place—Fust’s Big Ugly is a modern Southern classic in the making" — The Fire Note

"a big, riffy record full of Southern observations, and it may just end up being this year’s best album" — Americana Highways

“Intense, range-worn, blue-collar country music, with an elegiac warm and everyday beauty.. Dowdy has a melancholy small-town poetry all his own ” — Mojo

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, out today via Dear Life Records. 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.”

On the album’s release, principal songwriter Aaron Dowdy shares "Big Ugly is a little world you can live inside of for a while—a town crowded with images, just enough beauty, plenty of squalor, and history in every crevice. Most days are dull, but funniness and heart are the secret to its staying power. It may be about little things, but it’s a big record for us that we’re excited to share.”

The album is preceded by singles “Spangled,” a smoldering country rock anthem about the history imbued in a place, the gorgeous ballad “Bleached,” and the big riff and harmony laced “Mountain Language.”

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.

NPR quickly named Big Ugly one of their most anticipated releases for 2025, with Paste proclaiming the record “a real-deal AOTY contender.” Stereogum praised “Spangled” as "a vivid portrait of American alienation, full of booze, religious turmoil, and a sense of doom" and Rolling Stone named both songs a Song You Need To Know. Aaron Dowdy spoke at length about the record to Paste Magazine for their Best of What’s Next profile.

WATCH OFFICIAL VIDEOS FOR SINGLES “SPANGLED,” “BLEACHED” & “MOUNTAIN LANGUAGE”

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.

This month, Fust will embark on a run of East Coast tour dates with support from Dead Gowns, Merce Lemon and Styrofoam Winos. Tickets on-sale HERE.