Pre-Order: Fust – Evil Joy

Fust-the Durham, North Carolina-based band-will release a newly remastered edition of it’s debut album Evil Joy on vinyl for the first time on May 28, 2026 via Dear Life Records, marking the record’s five-year anniversary. The re-release isn’t a victory lap so much as a way of keeping the band’s earliest vision of ragged, lyric-forward country-rock in active rotation-putting their point of origin back in circulation even as their new music keeps widening. It follows last year’s Big Ugly and 2023’s Genevieve, which introduced new listeners to Fust’s blend of “small-town poetry” (Mojo) and a familiar yet probing “country-tinged folk-rock” (KEXP) that made it “one of the most fun rock records of the year” (Pitchfork). With Big Ugly, that sensibility didn’t pivot so much as open up: the band plays louder and looser, while the songs feel even more close-up and lived-in, as Aaron Dowdy’s writing sharpens it’s eye for the detail that suddenly explains a whol