Fust detail forthcoming album, Big Ugly

“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.”

Following a trip to 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-honoured remnant memorialised 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 honour for the squalor of today can become the promise of a future.

Tracklist:

1. Spangled
2. Gateleg
3. Doghole
4. Mountain Language
5. Sister
6. Bleached
7. Goat House Blues
8. What’s-His-Name
9. Jody
10. Big Ugly
11. Heart Song