{"title":"Fust","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"genevieve-4","title":"Genevieve","description":"\u003cp\u003eFust's first record \"Evil Joy\" was a bitter domestic drama obsessed with the kitchen-sink passage of time measured by moments of leaving and returning -  With \"Genevieve\", we find a different kind of leaving: leaving behind, leaving one's old ways, starting anew, a small life together, in \"Family Country.\" Thus, Genevieve: an historical name for both the saintly and the ordinary, the peasantry and the family, the community and the wife, extreme devotion and absolute forbearance. While sonically and instrumentally louder than Evil Joy, Genevieve is thematically more quiet about its pains--more settled in its ways. It is a collection of pathetic love stories written in dedication to \"small life,\" moving from gentle exceptions (\"I can take the late hours if you're with me\") to pitiful admissions (\"I'm never going to change when I leave...\"). What comes with a quiet life? The highest forms of beauty, but we also find here songs of unspeaking companions, the sublime dread of having children, the balance of humility and humiliation, playing the fool for the greater good, and... budget birthday parties. With these stories of possible growth, \"Genevieve\" can't help but also feature tried and true examples of crisis and repression: seeking a bygone lifestyle in an old friend who hasn't changed much over the years, pissing contests, search parties as the form of community for melancholics with no clue what they've lost, old flames you won't let go and dying flames you won't admit. \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \"Genevieve\" was recorded throughout 2021-2022 (mostly) at Drop of Sun studio in Asheville NC by Alex Farrar. The painting by Sasha Popovici is exactly right: a domestic scene yet unfinished. Many friends helped to make it much better than it was without them--Xandy Chelmis, Michael Cormier-O'Leary, Indigo De Souza, MJ Lenderman, Courtney Werner.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Dear Life","offers":[{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":50407992262987,"sku":"2166263","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/test_aba8e1b9_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726601609"},{"product_id":"big-ugly-2","title":"Big Ugly","description":"\u003cp\u003eFust - the lyrical powerhouse Southern rock band from Durham, North Carolina release their new album \u003ci\u003eBig Ugly\u003c\/i\u003e, on Dear Life Records, the record label that launched the careers of MJ Lenderman and Florry and that has become a haven for contemporary songwriters. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRecorded over ten days in June of 2024, \u003ci\u003eBig Ugly\u003c\/i\u003e is the explosive sound of Fust uncovering a freedom within their sincere form of loose and fried guitar rock, realizing more than ever before an intimacy within bigness. The members –– Aaron Dowdy, Avery Sullivan, Frank Meadows, John Wallace, Justin Morris, Libby Rodenbough, Oliver Child-Lanning––weave their voices alongside guests like Merce Lemon, Dave Hartley (The War on Drugs), and John James Tourville (The Deslondes) to form a music that sounds like a conversation between old friends. And that’s exactly what it is.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe songs on \u003ci\u003eBig Ugly\u003c\/i\u003e are hearteningly varied, moving from beer-fisted radio country to elegiac drones to deconstructed ballads. Songs like “Spangled” take up the theme of past traumas and present desensitizations colliding, of the small and cosmic coinciding in the life of a heedless protagonist. “Bleached” finds the soul-searching narrator recalling the feeling of inner vacancy in their childhood: thoughtless, speechless, herded around like cattle in backseats. And “Mountain Language” laments the poverties of Southern life at the same time that it promotes a higher poverty, a country utopia that’s just out of grasp, where we could live if we could only “make it up the mountain again.” The mystical hermeticism and the dime-store everyday are two sides of every insignificant thing in the town of\u003ci\u003e Big Ugly\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Dear Life","offers":[{"title":"Black LP","offer_id":51116511592779,"sku":"2240003","price":23.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":51116509561163,"sku":"2240002","price":11.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/Big_Ugly_25c52efc_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1737125159"},{"product_id":"evil-joy","title":"Evil Joy","description":"\u003cp\u003eFust—the Durham, North Carolina-based band— release a newly remastered edition of its debut album \u003cem\u003eEvil Joy\u003c\/em\u003e on vinyl for the first time via Dear Life Records, marking the record's five-year anniversary.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe re-release isn’t a victory lap so much as a way of keeping the band's earliest vision of ragged, lyric-forward country-rock in active rotation—putting their point of origin back in circulation even as their new music keeps widening. It follows last year's Big Ugly and 2023's Genevieve, which introduced new listeners to Fust’s blend of “small-town poetry” (Mojo) and a familiar yet probing “country-tinged folk-rock” (KEXP) that made it “one of the most fun rock records of the year” (Pitchfork). With Big Ugly, that sensibility didn’t pivot so much as open up: the band plays louder and looser, while the songs feel even more close-up and lived-in, as Aaron Dowdy’s writing sharpens its eye for the detail that suddenly explains a whole life—and the band moves like a circle of friends telling the same story from several angles at once. The record’s reach earned prominent year-end recognition from outlets like Time and Rolling Stone, with critic Steven Hyden calling it “the purest manifestation of the updated alt-country sensibility.” The Evil Joy reissue also continues a quiet through-line in Fust's catalog: a habit of returning to earlier material not as artifact, but as groundwork—recontextualizing the beginnings as the sound keeps moving. That instinct was already visible in 2024's Songs of the Rail, a set of early home recordings that Paste called “one of the best alt-country compilations...in a long, long time”—a reminder that Fust’s forward motion has always been built from an accumulating, shared history. Evil Joy was recorded sporadically between 2019 and 2021 in New York, eastern Pennsylvania, and Lake Gaston, but it was largely assembled in a shed in north Durham during the winter of 2020–21.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe songs on \u003cem\u003eEvil Joy \u003c\/em\u003eprobe the slow, strange weather of a relationship nearing its end, when time speeds up and thickens at once. Days blur, then suddenly reappear as hard markers: the last days, the day you left, the day you came back, the better days, the days to come. What the record traces isn't a neat narrative arc so much as a lived-through duration: surrender and withdrawal, tenderness that keeps flickering, mistakes you can't rewind, and the uneasy relief that arrives alongside grief. As Rosy Overdrive put it, the album is “gentle, deliberate, and clear Americana\/folk rock,” a breezy surface that nonetheless makes room for something darker beneath it. And that’s the hinge of the title, Evil Joy: two words that don't resolve into a slogan so much as name a contradiction you can't talk your way out of—the strange experience of feeling something like lightness at the moment something shared is dying. If the phrase sounds a little overheated, that’s part of its honesty too: the way a hard period gets narrated in real time, when ordinary difficulty can feel momentous, and the name you give it is both an overreaction and a record of how heavy it actually was.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Dear Life","offers":[{"title":"LP - Black","offer_id":57079883891019,"sku":"R3989-8621","price":24.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/Fust-EvilJoy.jpg?v=1776762617"}],"url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/fr\/collections\/fust.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}