warped : original photo by Ebru Yildiz
The bending frayed post punk nerves of "Dead Inside", by Brooklyn based A Place To Bury Strangers, creates dark tensions constructed out of tense nail biting grooves and twisted metallic sounds. I am loving the dissonant sonics, at once like distorted tubular bells, artfully harsh and unrelenting, a post punk / alt rock car crash that you cannot overt your gaze from. The throttling of it all is magnetic, the kind of sound that at some non-descript venue would pull you in from a distance and draw you to the stage. I mentioned on previous reviews of A Place To Bury Strangers that the sound is dangerous and it most certainly is but in an A24 cinematic way.
"Point being, the throttling bass and drum assault, the hyper punk guitar lines, dinge of ambient echoing sonics that suggest danger ahead at the end of a one way tunnel and frontman Oliver Ackermann's howling vocals, hollow and angsty, dark and dangerous makes for an atmosphere that feels equal parts subversive and cool."
"Dead Inside" is from the bands latest peak behind the curtain "Rare and Deadly", an exciting collection of tracks of demos and I love this idea, love everything about it. See LINER NOTES below:
LINER NOTES (excerpted / bracketed):
["Rare and Deadly cracks open a decade-long vault of raw nerve and sonic chaos from A Place To Bury Strangers. Spanning 2015–2025, this collection of demos, B-sides, abandoned experiments, and forgotten fragments reveals the band at their most unfiltered—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, these tracks pulse with the unruly energy that has always defined APTBS, but here the interference is closer, the electricity more dangerous, the edges left jagged on purpose.]
[What makes Rare and Deadly truly unprecedented is that every format tells a different story. The CD, cassette, vinyl, and digital editions each feature their own unique tracklisting, a fractured release strategy that is almost unheard of. No single version contains the “complete” album. Instead, each format becomes its own window into the archive, revealing alternate paths, missing links, and parallel versions of the band’s inner life. It’s a deliberately unstable document: the album shifts depending on how you choose to hear it, mirroring the chaos of its creation.]
Again, I love the idea of this kind of release. I mean hearing the outer edges of a less alternative, less noisy affair like Death Cab for Cutie or R.E.M or (you pick) is one thing but delving into the even more experimental side of A Place To Bury Strangers, seems to me, to portend stepping into unhinged places indeed.
Cool.
-Robb Donker Curtius
+ + + +
THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM
https://soundcloud.com/aplacetoburystrangers
https://aplacetoburystrangers.bandcamp.com/
https://www.instagram.com/aptbs
https://www.facebook.com/aplacetoburystrangers
https://x.com/APTBS
Rare and Deadly cracks open a decade-long vault of raw nerve and sonic chaos from A Place To Bury Strangers. Spanning 2015–2025, this collection of demos, B-sides, abandoned experiments, and forgotten fragments reveals the band at their most unfiltered—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, these tracks pulse with the unruly energy that has always defined APTBS, but here the interference is closer, the electricity more dangerous, the edges left jagged on purpose.
What makes Rare and Deadly truly unprecedented is that every format tells a different story. The CD, cassette, vinyl, and digital editions each feature their own unique tracklisting, a fractured release strategy that is almost unheard of. No single version contains the “complete” album. Instead, each format becomes its own window into the archive, revealing alternate paths, missing links, and parallel versions of the band’s inner life. It’s a deliberately unstable document: the album shifts depending on how you choose to hear it, mirroring the chaos of its creation.
Across these recordings, you can hear the evolution of Ackermann’s restless mind: riffs mutated by malfunctioning pedals; songs born from gear pushed past its limits; delicate melodies overwhelmed by walls of feedback until only their ghosts remain. 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. But together they form a secret history of the band, a parallel world of possibilities that existed just outside the spotlight.
Rare and Deadly is less a compilation and more a documentary—an aural snapshot of how sound takes shape before it hardens into something finished. You hear the room, the accidents, the restless experimentation, the immediacy of a moment being captured before it disappears. It’s a reminder that A Place To Bury Strangers has always thrived in this in-between space: the tension between control and collapse, melody and noise, beauty and distortion.
A Place To Bury Strangers, post punk, alt rock, indie rock, 90's music atmospheres, punk, romance wave, Brooklyn New York, "Dead Inside", new album "Rare and Deadly", frontman Oliver Ackermann, demos / B-sides,
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