New York-based A Place To Bury Strangers have just announced their seventh record! Called Synthesizer, it is not only a title for the record, but also a physical entity, a synth made specifically for it. The band have never been one to do things by halves, and they once again demonstrate that with the vinyl version of the album’s packaging, which is made up of a circuit board that fans can use to build the instrument. “It’s pretty messed up, chaotic,” says frontman Oliver Ackermann, “But it feels really human”. 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. Synthesizer is a record that 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 iteration of the band, completed with both John and Sandra Fedowitz, was inspiring for Ackermann, “It felt like a fresh new thing,” he says, “I wanted to write songs everyone was excited about playing.” Indeed, the sense of connectivity is everywhere on the record, as Synthesizer very much feels like a record of reinvention, of taking a carefully honed aesthetic and sound, and cracking it wide open, gutting it, reimagining it. And of course, to ever so slightly reinvent one’s sound, one must also build a new instrument, thus again the synth in question. The resulting record is one that is romantic, colourful, and loud as hell. Synthesizer stands as one of A Place to Bury Strangers’ most live-sounding records to date. This is a band that is meant to be witnessed in a live setting, where the songs take on a new energy in the presence of a crowd; that playful approach to making music and intentionality around live performance makes sense in the historical context of the band. Ackermann founded the storied DIY space (and now effects pedal factory) Death By Audio as a venue, with a collaborative, creative spirit of chaos and collectivity. That essence appears all over the band’s work. “We’re artists,” Ackermann says, “Going to shows and bringing that imperfect and beautiful DIY ethos is important.” Imperfect and beautiful — that’s a good way to sum up Synthesizer. It is a raw collection of songs, wild and loud and fucked up just like the instrument itself.
Accompanying the record’s announcement comes its first single, “Disgust”, a sonic assault on the senses. Fueled by frustration and raw emotion, the track features guitar lines punctuated by furious banging, creating a cacophony of sound. With a high-pitched, piercing intro designed to challenge listeners, it’s an unapologetically bold statement. The arpeggiating bass line weaves in and out of the driving bass. “‘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”. The single is accompanied by a video directed by BODEGA’s Ben Hozie and filmed by Joe Wakeman – you can watch it below this article. It 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”. “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.”
Synthesizer will be released on October 4th via Dedstrange. Pre-orders are now available here.
Photo credit: Ebru Yildiz
