Fust and Merce Lemon with Sarah Weddle

Fust — the Durham, North Carolina-based band — announce their new album, Big Ugly, out
March 7th via Dear Life Records. Big Ugly arrives after the release of 2024’s Songs of the
Rail––“one of the best alt-country compilations…in a long, long time” (Paste) –– and 2023’s
standout Genevieve, which unassumingly introduced new listeners to Fust’s unmistakable blend
of “small-town poetry” (Mojo) with a familiar yet probing “country-tinged folk-rock” (KEXP) that
made it “one of the most fun rock records of the year” (Pitchfork).

 

“I could not be alive alone,” a longtime family friend says with a smile. “None of us could be alive alone.”

Within the quiet, cascading corners of Pittsburgh lies a community – nothing short of one large family – that spans zip codes, histories, occupations, and generations, always tumbling inwardly into itself, propped up by steadfast pillars of conviction toward spiritual and emotional mutual aid. The kind of earnest community scaffolding that gets bandied about, wielded as conjecture, particularly in an age of increasing fracture through digital sublimation, is alive and quite well within the universe surrounding Merce Lemon.

When asked how the city has inspired her creative practice, she responds with a characteristic joke wrapped in an earthen warmth – “There are big hills, three rivers, and more bridges than anywhere in the whole world.” Growing up in a family of art and music in a city with a small, but vigorously supportive scene, Merce has been going to shows here her whole life, even playing them with the “grown up” friends of her parents – as recently as a few years ago, her band was comprised of her own father and his peers in the Pittsburgh music community.

Sarah Weddle