Fust Unveils New Southern-Themed Album 'Big Ugly'

Fust have released their new record Big Ugly, out now via Dear Life Records. The band 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.

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. 

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: Graham Tolbert