A Place To Bury Strangers at The White Hotel

When A Place to Bury Strangers first came on the scene in 2002, bloggers and critics dubbed them “the loudest band in New York” – a tag which, despite ending up stickered across the debut album’s cover, the band never much liked. Drawing on post punk and shoegaze, their self-titled debut coated lovesick indie pop in layers of static and distortion that, live, earned them a cult following among decibel fetishists. But loudness was never really the point. It was mainly a by-product of Oliver Ackermann’s other obsession.

Ackermann, the band’s frontman, is also the founder of Death by Audio, a beloved line of custom guitar pedals. At that narrative beat, things begin to fall into place. “Never underestimate the power of the perfect guitar effects unit”, begins Pitchfork’s 2017 review of that debut album, whose inventive sonic contortions are best described by the names of the pedals that Ackermann designed for the record: Interstellar Overdriver, Supersonic Fuzz Gun, Total Sonic Annihilation.

But it was album number two that really saw the band take off. They had a noble aim for this LP: “To create the craziest, most fucked-up recording ever”. In thrall to shoegaze icons like Jesus & Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine, the feedback-frazzled Exploding Head lived up to its title, perfectly balancing Ackermann and co’s industrial aggression with their more melodic instincts. Songs like ‘Keep Slipping Away’ and ‘Everything Always Goes Wrong’ remain some of the trio’s strongest.

Two noise and electronic experiments followed – 2015’s Transfixiation and 2018’s Pinned – before 2022’s See Through You placed the band’s heroic doses of effects in the context of god’s honest songwriting, and 2024’s AI-averse Synthesizer celebrated all things human, DIY and spontaneous.

A few months ago, Rare and Deadly pulled a decade of demos, B-sides and abandoned experiments out of Oliver Ackermann’s personal archive. It’s a rarities collection with a difference: each format – CD, vinyl, cassette and digital – carries a different tracklisting, so there’s no one definitive record. A neat idea, and one true to the material itself: inherently unfinished, uneven, fragmentary.

At The White Hotel, support comes from Berlin synth punks Die Anstalt, fresh off signing to City Slang. Formed in 2023, the trio self-released their debut album on a limited run of 300 vinyl copies that sold out almost immediately; City Slang’s deluxe reissue, out 25 September, adds a new track. Their sound splices early EBM and post-punk with occasional flashes of surf guitar, channelling the tension of 1980s industrial subcultures – Malaria!, DAF – into something theatrical and confrontational rather than nostalgic.