Tag: Dedstrange Records

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: A Place to Bury Strangers Share Menacing “Everyone’s The Same”

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 a rarities album, Rare and Deadly through Dedstrange on April 3, 2026.

Following 2024’s Synthesizer, Rare and Deadly sees the band cracking open a decade-long vault of raw nerve and sonic chaos. Spanning 2015-2025, this collection of demos, B-sides, abandoned experiments and forgotten fragments reveals the band at their most unfiltered, frequently caught between breakthrough ideas and beautiful mistakes.

Pulled from Oliver Ackermann’s personal archive of late-night recordings, blown-out tapes and half-finished sessions, the collection’s tracks pulse with the unruly energy that ATPBS has long been known for, but more dangerous with more jagged edges — on purpose.

Countless bands have opened up their vaults to fans and others, but Rare and Deadly is truly unprecedented: Every format is different — and as a result, tells a different story. The CD, cassette, vinyl and digital editions each feature their own unique track listing. No single version features the “complete” album. Instead, each format is its own window into Ackermann’s archive, revealing alternate paths, missing links and parallel “what if” versions of the band’s inner life. It’s deliberately unstable with the album shifting depending on how you choose to hear it, mirroring the chaos of its creation.

Across the collection’s tracks, you can hear the evolution of Ackermann’s restlessly creative mind. Some pieces feel like prototypes for future chaos, seeds that later bloomed on studio albums. Others are dead ends — ideas too volatile, too strange or too personal to ever fit the frame of a proper release. The tracks feature riffs mutated by malfunctioning pedals, songs born from gear pushed past its limits, or delicate melodies overwhelmed by towering walls of feedback.

Rare and Deadly‘s first single “Everyone’s The Same” is anchored around a tense and menacing, motorik pulse and swirling, feedback-drenched guitar paired with Ackermann’s vocal, which manages to be simultaneously defiant, punchy and yearning.

“I had a dream where a man led me to a brook, peaceful and calm. When he turned his head slightly, I saw the most evil smile imaginable,” Ackermann says of the song. “But when I looked directly at him, it was just the back of his head again. Beauty and horror coexisting in the same space. It felt like hell leaking into something serene. Maybe that’s reality sometimes. And maybe pretending otherwise is a kind of survival.”

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Sunset Images Shares Sprawling and Brooding “El Tiempo Oscila y Muere al Incio (Tommy)”

With the release of their debut album, 2021’s Traumatismo Nacional and 2024’s NADA/CERO/INFINITO EP, Sunset Images, led by Mexico City-based singer/songwriter, musician and creative mastermind Samuel Osorio has firmly established a layered soundscape of dissonance, cathartic release and emotional depth that draws from krautrock, shoegaze and punk. Thematically Traumatismo Nacional was a scathing indictment on violence, racism and misogyny while NADA/CERO/INFINITO explored loneliness, anger and desperation, laying bare the emotional devastation of modern life.

The project has built a reputation for intense live performances while sharing stages with the likes of Mogwai, Godflesh, Boris, The Raveonettes, Acid Mothers Temple, Gnod, HIDE, RAKTA, Vinnum Sabbathi and more.

Eventually, they caught the attention of Dedstrange Records, who signed the Mexican project and will be releasing their highly anticipated sophomore album Oscilador on January 23, 2026. Reportedly, the album sonically is a reflection of the perpetual cycles that rules our world — birth, decay, chaos and resolution, fueled by the collision of fractured synths, pulsating vocals, primitive drum beats and feedback-drenched guitars. The result is a soundscape that’s hypnotic, disorientating and irresistible.

Oscilador‘s second and latest single “El Tiempo Oscila y Muere Al Incio (Tommy)” is a sprawling motorik dirge with a cinematic quality that’s one-part krautrock, one-part shoegaze, one-part noise featuring a throbbing, distortion pedaled bass line, bursts of swirling feedback-drenched guitar guitars, a relentless backbeat paired with Osorio’s hauntingly spectral vocal. The result is a song that’s intense yet with an almost fanatical attention to precision.

Sonically reminding me a bit of the likes of Yoo Doo Right JJUUJJUU and others, the song as Osorio explains explores “humanity’s self-destruction,” “conjuring visions of a world ravaged by toxic masculinity and patriarchy. This is a song about the abyss that awaits, how we cannot escape the passage of time & how it will ultimately consume us.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Happy 49th Birthday, Oliver Ackermann!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates A Place to Bury Strangers frontman Oliver Ackermann’s 49th birthday.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: A Place to Bury Strangers Shares Pulsating Synth Punk Ripper “Fear Of Transformation”

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 (digital) and October 25, 2024 (vinyl) through Dedstrange.

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.” 

In the lead-up to the album’s digital release on Friday, I’ve written about two of the album’s previously released singles:

  • “Disgust,” an eardrum shattering aural assault, anchored around explosive wailing feedback and distortion pedaled guitar lines paired with a relentles motorik groove featuring an arpeggiated bass line weaving in and out. But there’s 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.” 

  • “Bad Idea,” a track anchored around a simple yet hypnotically looping drum beat and woozily oscillating feedback-driven guitar lines. John Fedowitz’s plaintive yet punchy delivery weaves in and out of the stormy and soundscape, which helps to evoke the vacillating, almost nauseating unease of self-doubt. “Bad Idea” showcases the raw creativity of the band’s bassist John Fedowitz. “He came to the studio with a simple looping drum beat, thinking he didn’t have any good ideas — thus, this song was his ‘bad idea,’” the band’s frontman Oliver Ackermann says. “We each penned some lines on paper, and he sang the ones that resonated. After a few instrumental passes, the recording was complete. The result is an innovative track born from spontaneous collaboration and a touch of self-doubt, turned into something uniquely captivating.” 

Synthesizer‘s latest single “Fear Of Transformation” is a snarling and scuzzy New Wave/goth punk synth-driven ripper featuring layers of oscillating synths, a relentless motorik groove, explosive bursts of feedback paired with the band’s long-held penchant for rousingly anthemic, mosh pit friendly hooks and Ackermann’s punchy delivery.

Thematically, the track focuses and delves into the struggle of overcoming internal barriers. As the band’s frontman Oliver Ackermann explains, “Sometimes fear builds up and pins you in a cage. A conversation occurs in my head where I have to convince myself to just fucking do something to break out of it.” The song embodies that internal dialogue, capturing the battle between the compulsion to avoid fear and the push to confront it. And as a result, the song is a raw, uneasy and intense conversation with the devil within.

Created and directed by Chad Crawford Kinkle, the accompanying video for “Fear Of Transformation” follows a teenage boy, who sneaks out from his parents’ house to go to his first furry party — but he has a deep secret: he’s a werewolf. And he winds up going on a bloody rampage.