What does it mean to be from the South today? To try to reconcile the struggles and possibilities of Southern experience through songs, through words? Is it worth it? Are there secrets still worth revealing? Fust––the lyrical powerhouse Southern rock band from Durham, North Carolina––have made these questions the heart of their work and, more than ever before, it is the drama at play on their new record Big Ugly. Fust 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.” 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. Big Ugly is the third album by Fust on their longtime label home of Dear Life Records, who gained notoriety with MJ Lendermans’ Boat Songs, and have become a haven for contemporary songwriters. Their studio debut, 2023’s Genevieve, was recorded with producer Alex Farrar (Manning Fireworks, Rat Saw God, Tomorrow’s Fire) in Asheville, North Carolina, and received rave reviews from Pitchfork, Stereogum, Paste and more. Recorded with Farrar over ten days in June of 2024, 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. The songs on Big Ugly are hearteningly varied, moving from beer-fisted radio country to elegiac drones and deconstructed ballads. Between big chords and Dowdy’s instantly recognizable voice, opener “Spangled” begins as any 21st century American ballad might: “they tore down the hospital/ Out on route eleven,” and snowballs into a drunk ghost’s reverie: “I’m feeling like heaven/ I’m feeling like a sparkler/ That’s been thrown off a roof/ And I’m left floating off VA-305.” Dowdy’s lyrics superimpose the obtuse and the palatable, kitchen-table images from a spotty memory, beater cars mystically lifted. Characters come and go like old friends as in “Bleached”: “The last I heard of Corey/ He was living on the national dirtway/ I’m thinking of his summer blonding / In those days I was barely happening.” The album’s themes culminate in the sing-along anthem “Mountain Language,” which laments the poverties of Southern life at the same time that it celebrates 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.” This rural hermeticism and dime-store everyday are the two sides of every insignificant thing in the town of Big Ugly. The record cross-stitches fact and fiction, following tough-skinned characters who inhabit its titular town. These stories are Dowdy spinning yarn from his unique trove of Southern experience, as both insider and outsider to its deeply contradictory charms: raised Jewish in an often antagonistically born-again region, encouraged to write early on despite ridicule, and inspired to leave for northern cities only to return with a newly realized and committed fury. But despite the fictions Dowdy personally winds his way through, “Big Ugly” is also a very real place: a small, unincorporated area in southern West Virginia around where Dowdy’s family has deep roots. The album cover—a mural from the Big Ugly Community Center depicting the area around Big Ugly Creek––was painted by locals for a 2004 play performed by the children that interpreted their elders’ stories. On Big Ugly, Fust reimagine the life depicted in the mural between its bars, gas stations, general stores, and double-wides, its inhabitants finding history and meaning in the banal theater of their own private jerkwater. Like Dowdy’s grandmother watching the cinema of her childhood atop the now tumbledown river valleys of her youth, Big Ugly makes you feel like there are still memories worth making and stories worth telling in the most unlikely of places.