New Video: JOVM Mainstays A Place to Bury Strangers Share Anthemic and Mosh Pit Friendly “Disgust”

New York-based JOVM mainstays A Place to Bury Strangers — currently Oliver Ackermann (vocals, guitar), John Fedowitz (bass) and Sandra Fedowitz (drums) — will be releasing their seventh album Synthesizer on October 4, 2024 through Dedstrange records.

While Synthesizer is the album’s title, it’s also a physical entity, a synthesizer specifically made for the album — and a synthesizer that you too, can own (in part), if you buy the record on vinyl. The album’s cover art doubles as a circuit board and functional synth for curious and enterprising fans. “It’s pretty messed up, chaotic. But it feels really human,” the band’s Oliver Ackermann says.

In an era of making music where so little is DIY and so much is left up to AI, never setting foot in a practice room or a home studio, making something that feels deliberately chaotic, messy, and human, is entirely the point. The album celebrates sounds that are spontaneous and natural, the kind of music that can only come from collaboration and community.

The writing sessions for Synthesizer started in the band’s Queens studio, shortly after the release of 2022’s See Through You. The new lineup which featured Ackermann and his friends John and Sandra Fedowitz was especially inspiring for Ackermann. “It felt like a fresh new thing,” he says. “I wanted to write songs everyone was excited about playing.”

The album captures the band at a place of reinvention, where they take a carefully honed sound and approach and crack it wide open to gut its then reimagine it. And of course, to ever so slightly reinvent one’s sound, one must also built a new instrument — the synthesizer at the core of the album’s overall sound.

Reportedly, Synthesizer is arguably one of the band’s most live-sounding albums to date, accurately capturing the rawness and explosiveness of the band in a live setting, which is a fitting for a band that is best in a live setting, where the material takes on a new energy in the presence of a crowd. “We’re artists,” Ackermann says, “Going to shows and bringing that imperfect and beautiful DIY ethos is important.”

Synthesizer’s first single “Disgust” is a bit of classic APTBS, an eardrum shattering aural assault, anchored around explosively wailing feedback and distortion pedaled guitar lines, and a relentless motorik groove featuring an arpeggiating bass line weaving in and out of the driving bass — but with subtle refinements, including some of the most rousingly anthemic, mosh pit friendly choruses and hooks I’ve heard from the band in some time.

“‘Disgust’ is a song I wrote that was inspired by the way I used to perform ‘Got That Feeling,’ a song by my old band Skywave,” Ackermann explains. “There was a long riding open note on the bass that enabled me to play the whole part with my fist in the air.  I wrote this song just on open strings so it could be played with just one hand: dumb and fun.” 

Directed by BODEGA’S Ben Hozie and filmed by Joe Wakeman, the accompanying video for “Disgust” features frames within frames within frames, and frames the band next to and within distorted images on TVs to “achieve a certain style of cine-cubism where the band members can be seen from multiple angles at once in the same frame,” BODEGA’s Hozie says, He adds, “This sense of dissociative texture is exactly what A Place to Bury Strangers music feels like to me,” Hozie says, “I was trying to create a visual accompaniment to the disorienting buzzy speed of the band’s grooves and bliss of their distorted overtones.”

APTBS are famously a road warrior band, and they will be embarking on a lengthy bit of international touring that includes an August 10, 2024 stop at Amsterdam‘s The Paradiso, one of the world’s great rooms to catch a show. The tour includes some stops across the global festival circuit and concludes with a North American leg that features a set at Seattle’s Freakout Festival. All tour dates are below.

A Place To Bury Strangers Tour Dates:

Fri July 27 Guimarães, PT @ Lagosto Festival 

Sun July 28 –  Binic-Etables-sur-Mer, FR @ Binic Festival 

Wed July 31 – Hamburg, DE @ Hafenklang

Thu. Aug. 1 – Dresden, DE @ Chemiefabrik

Fri. Aug. 2 –  Beelen, DE @ Krach Am Bach

Sun Aug. 4 –  Transylvania, RO @  Rockstadt Extreme Fest

Mon. Aug. 5 – Budapest, HUN @ A38 $

Tue. Aug. 6 –  Bratislava, SK @ Pink Whale $

Wed. Aug. 7 –  Munich, @ Milla Club $

Thu. Aug. 8 –  Aschaffenburg, @ Colos-Saal $

Sat. Aug. 10 –  Amsterdam, NL @ Paradiso $

Sat. Sep. 21 – Groningen, NL @ – Vicefest 

Mon. Sep. 23 – London, UK @ The Shacklewell Arms

Tue. Sep. 24 – Wed. Sep. 25 – London, UK @ No90 Live Hackney Wick

Thu. Sep. 26 – Manchester, UK @ Deaf Institute %

Fri. Sep. 27 – Dublin, IE @ The Grand Social %

Sat. Sep. 28 – Belfast, IE @ Oh Yeah %

Sun. Sep. 29 – Glasgow, UK @ Stereo %

Mon. Sep. 30 – Bedford UK @ Esquire %

Thu. Oct. 3 – Berlin, DE @ Berlin Metropol [Record Release Show] %

Fri. Oct. 4 – Copenhagen, DK @ Loppen %

Sat. Oct. 5 – Oslo, NO @ Goldie %

Sun. Oct. 6 – Gothenburg, SE @ Fangelset %

Mon. Oct. 7 – Stockholm, SE @ Slaktkyrkan %

Wed. Oct 9 – Wroclaw, PL @ Lacznik %

Thu. Oct. 10 – Warsaw, PL @ Hybrydy %

Fri. Oct. 11 – Poznan, PL @ 2progi %

Sat. Oct. 12 – Bmo, CZ @ Kabinet Muz %

Sun. Oct 13 – Jena, DE KuBa Jena %

Fri. Oct. 25 – Washington, DC @ Black Cat &

Sat. Oct. 26 – Raleigh, NC @ Kings &

Sun. Oct. 27 – Asheville, NC @ Grey Eagle &

Mon. Oct. 28 – Atlanta, GA @ The Earl &

Wed. Oct. 30 – Houston, TX @ White Oak &

Thu. Oct. 31 – Austin, TX @ Levitation &

Sat. Nov. 2 – Phoenix, AZ @ Valley Bar #

Sun. Nov. 3 – Los Angeles, CA @ Teragram Ballroom #

Mon. Nov. 4 – San Francisco, CA @ GAMH Psyched Fest #

Thu. Nov. 7 – Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios #

Fr. Nov. 8 – Seattle, WA @ Freakout Festival ^

Sat. Nov. 9 – Vancouver, BC @ The Pearl

$ w/ Skelesys

% w/ Stella Rose

& w/ YHWH Nailgun

# w/ Pop Music Fever Dream

^ w/ The Black Angels, Martin Rev, The Black Lips & Shabazz Palaces