New-York based A Place To Bury Strangers announced its seventh album, Synthesizer (Dedstrange), out October 4th, 2024, and presents the lead single/video, “Disgust.” Synthesizer is the title of the album, but it is also a physical entity, a synthesizer made specifically for A Place to Bury Strangers’ seventh album (a synthesizer that you too, can own (in part), if you buy the record on vinyl). The album cover itself doubles as a circuit board and functional synth for curious and enterprising fans. “It’s pretty messed up, chaotic. But it feels really human,” says frontman Oliver Ackermann, who demonstrates how to play the circuit board and functional synth album cover here. 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.

“Disgust” is 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, weaving 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 song is accompanied by a video directed by BODEGA’s Ben Hozie and filmed by Joe Wakeman. It frames the band next to and within distorted images on TV 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.”