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 captures the band at their most exposed—caught between breakthrough ideas and beautiful mistakes. Drawn 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. Here, though, the interference feels closer, the voltage more dangerous, the edges deliberately left jagged. In a move that feels almost radical, each format—CD, cassette, vinyl, and digital—features a completely different tracklisting, turning every edition into its own fractured narrative. No single version offers the “complete” album; instead, each becomes a distinct window into the archive.
Across these recordings, you can trace the evolution of a restless creative mind: riffs warped by malfunctioning pedals, songs born from gear pushed past its breaking point, fragile melodies swallowed by walls of feedback until only their ghosts remain. Some tracks feel like early blueprints for future eruptions, seeds that would later bloom on proper studio releases. Others are volatile dead ends—too strange, too intimate, too unstable to survive outside the shadows. Taken together, they form a secret history of the band, a parallel universe of possibilities that existed just beyond the spotlight. More documentary than compilation, Rare and Deadly captures sound in its most precarious state—before it settles, before it hardens—thriving in that liminal space where control and collapse, melody and noise, beauty and distortion constantly collide.
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