A Place to Bury Strangers : Rare and Deadly
When’s the right time for a band to take a breather and do some housecleaning in the form of sweeping cutting-room floor songs into a tidy pile? Nearly a quarter-century sounds about right, especially for a prolific band like A Place to Bury Strangers, who count seven studio albums and 14 EPs—yes, you read that right—to their name. Add the fact that their unrelentingly hyperactive, ageless frontman (Oliver Ackermann) has captained his noise-rock crew through approximately 1,000 concert performances, and the time is nigh for him to take stock of their lesser-known inventory.
Making an even more compelling case for Rare and Deadly is A Place to Bury Strangers’ formidable consistency of high-quality songs since day one. Granted, Ackermann—who is something of a perfectionist, even though he wouldn’t admit it—cherrypicked songs from 2015 to 2025 only. But in doing so, the vocalist, guitarist, bassist and drummer kept his eccentricities at bay and focused on the Brooklyn trio’s strongest years. (It’s worth noting that his current bandmates joined the fold only five years ago, and A Place to Bury Strangers had already cycled through five other musicians years before 2015 rolled around.)
Reliable as the band’s creative output continues to be, when Ackermann is onstage, it’s no holds barred for the multi-talented musician who suffers from hearing damage as a result of exhausting and deafening performances. But the care and selectivity he devoted to choosing a mere dozen songs for what could’ve metastasized into a box set of obscure tunes is evidenced from start to finish on Rare and Deadly. Released on the Dedstrange record label he launched five years ago, this compilation snags the brass ring elusive to so many others: Despite the songs originating over a decade, his smart sequencing succeeds in telling a story, so much so that the uninitiated might mistake the record for A Place to Bury Strangers’ eighth studio album.
But here’s the catch: Always inclined to surprise fans and push boundaries that most didn’t even know existed, Rare and Deadly doesn’t tell just one narrative. The tracklists featured on the vinyl, digital, cassette and CD editions are presented in a different order, rendering the project a sort of Choose Your Own Adventure-style musical experience that epitomizes A Place to Bury Strangers’ greatest strength: an insatiable lust for exploration that permeates the band’s entire oeuvre.
For that reason, it’s rather futile to source the origins of each song contained on the four editions of Rare and Deadly. Some are demos, others are B-sides— nd, in contrast to Ackermann’s control-freakish sensibility, he even includes incomplete tunes and sketches of songs that he maybe could’ve realized but never did. What’s more important is that Rare and Deadly—unlike haphazardly assembled comps that are often released to fulfill an artist’s contractual obligation—captures the spirit of A Place to Bury Strangers in a way that is ingenious as the band itself. It’s the rarest of rarities collections that could be played in concert from start to finish—and the four differing tracklists would give Ackermann yet another bite at the apple of unpredictability.
Label: Dedstrange
Year: 2026
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