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Mar 07, 2025 Web Exclusive By Mark Moody Photography by Charlie Boss and Graham Tolbert

Take a map of the Eastern U.S. (the paper kind) and draw lines from Washington, D.C., Cincinnati, Nashville, Pittsburgh, Charlotte into the heart of West Virginia and one of those lines may put you close to Big Ugly. At least 200 miles from any of those cities (Cincy is the closest), the Big Ugly community metaphorically and literally sits in the middle of nowhere. Big Ugly Creek empties into the Guyandotte River and it’s in this rural region that Fust’s Aaron Dowdy’s grandmother grew up. And it’s from Big Ugly and their humble Community Center that the denizens of Dowdy’s latest album spring forth. The album’s cover art is pulled from the Community Center itself.

“Big Ugly is named that way because it’s not A.I. generated. There [was] a big, ugly dude that lived there,” Dowdy says. “My grandmother was from Pineville, which is outside of Beckley, but still the southern end of the Guyandotte. I just became fascinated with it. I grew up going there with my family, but in recent years as I’ve gotten older and taken songwriting seriously I’ve taken trips there with my grandmother and the location became very important to me.”

Speaking over Zoom from his home in Durham, North Carolina, Dowdy shares that in the depths of a wintry blast of weather, his heater is broken. A first world problem perhaps, but over the course of Big Ugly’s 11 songs, seven named characters (and many unnamed ones) deal with their own sets of problems. On “Gateleg,” the subject of the song walks to work since his car is up on blocks at “Jerry’s lot.” “He can’t put it back together, but boy can he take it apart,” go the lyrics in reference to the mechanic. While the protagonist of the song hauls a gate leg table down the mountain given the lack of transport.

A consummate storyteller, Dowdy’s older school alt-country songs are filled with the fictional folk of Big Ugly. “The main thing I want to do with a song is not talk about myself. Things leak in obviously, but I want to string together images that mean something to me. Like stirring a drink with a finger or a road sign. If you chain them together then I have the context for what looks like a narrative,” Dowdy says.

“Character is one way to route a problem or a feeling through [a song]. It makes the lyrics a bit literary. Character is a way [a listener] can identify with [a song]. It’s also a microcosm of the [writer]. So it’s a thing that holds ideas and problems, hopes and desires. I’m not putting real people in my songs, but I’m putting people I know in the sense that I love my friends and I love the people in my life and that’s who I learn what people do from. [The character on ‘Gateleg’] is carrying a table down a mountain because his car is broken and being worked on by a mechanic who doesn’t know how to fix cars. There’s a kind of absurdity which also feels real,” Dowdy explains.

Steeped in the tried and true rhythms of the late ’80s/early ’90s alt-country blitz, Big Ugly is an album with no skips but also with plenty of standout moments. The fuzzed out guitar intro of “Spangled” kicks the album into gear. Fust has been playing “Spangled” live going on a year now and as Dowdy explains it’s just one of those songs that immediately felt good in the live setting. “Spangled is very clearly a political word,” says Dowdy. “The Star-Spangled Banner is something we say all the time and maybe people don’t even know what spangled means. It’s kind of this ubiquitous but never used word. The heart of that song is about feeling a kind of hubris or American resilience. Getting drunk and feeling like you’re invincible or putting yourself in danger. I was thinking about the nation as this collection of ghosts that are everywhere, but people are still here and driving those same roads recklessly.”

Big Ugly is Fust’s second “proper” album, following 2023’s Genevieve, although other home recorded and demo albums are out there. Big Ugly certainly sounds like a breakthrough and that’s due in part to working with the same producer and artists as the prior album while supplementing the band’s sound with some newcomers. Libby Rodenbough (Mipso) plays fiddle and sings harmonies on the album. Her contribution on the gorgeous “Doghole” stands out. “We started hanging out and she became interested in playing. The fiddle is such a unique sounding thing. She’s so good at it and careful and has an attention to melody that’s so small. She can lean into it, but also has such [an ear for] detail. I love little cadences and small voices, so it’s like bringing an entirely new voice and expanding the palette,” Dowdy says.

Returning members such as Justin Morris (Sluice), Oliver Child-Lanning (Weirs), and Avery Sullivan (Sluice), along with producer Alex Farrar (Wednesday, Squirrel Flower), bring a comfortable familiarity but also a bigger sound this time out. “We only had two days with Genevieve, so with this album we could do so much more. I really wanted each musician to have the opportunity to settle in and develop their voice. And have Alex pull out of us what he thinks we were capable of. When I listen to the record now it feels so much bigger to me. Not because we have more instruments or that things are more compressed, but because more people had ideas about it,” Dowdy concludes. “Everyone got to think about it more and you can hear that.”

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