Obi Strip
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 reveals the band at their most unfiltered—caught between breakthrough ideas and beautiful mistakes. Pulled 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, but here the interference is closer, the electricity more dangerous, the edges left jagged on purpose. Across these recordings, you can hear the evolution of Ackermann’s restless mind: riffs mutated by malfunctioning pedals; songs born from gear pushed past its limits; delicate melodies overwhelmed by walls of feedback until only their ghosts remain. Some pieces feel like prototypes for future chaos, seeds that later bloomed on studio albums. Others are dead ends—ideas too volatile, too strange, or too personal to ever fit the frame of a proper release. But together they form a secret history of the band, a parallel world of possibilities that existed just outside the spotlight. Rare and Deadly is less a compilation and more a documentary—an aural snapshot of how sound takes shape before it hardens into something finished. You hear the room, the accidents, the restless experimentation, the immediacy of a moment being captured before it disappears. It’s a reminder that A Place To Bury Strangers has always thrived in this in-between space: the tension between control and collapse, melody and noise, beauty and distortion[info sheet from distr.]