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.”