Evil Joy

Description

Fust, from Durham, North Carolina, is releasing a remastered edition of their debut album, Evil Joy, on vinyl for the first time on May 28, 2026 via Dear Life Records, to mark the album's fifth anniversary. This reissue is less a triumphant celebration than a way to keep the band's original vision alive—a raw, introspective country-rock—bringing their roots back to the forefront as their music continues to explore new horizons. It follows last year's Big Ugly and 2023's Genevieve. The songs on Evil Joy explore the slowness and strange atmosphere of a relationship nearing its end, when time both accelerates and intensifies. Days blur together, then suddenly reappear as sharp landmarks: the last days, the day you left, the day you returned, the good days, the days to come. What the album traces is not so much a linear narrative as a lived experience: abandonment and withdrawal, a flickering tenderness, irreversible mistakes, and a relief tinged with ambivalence, mixed with grief. And that is the key to the title, Evil Joy: two words that are not just a slogan, but point to a contradiction that words cannot resolve—the strange feeling of lightness at the very moment something shared is fading. If the phrase seems a bit excessive, that is also what makes it authentic: the way a difficult period is told in real time, where an ordinary hardship can feel insurmountable, and where the name given to it is both an overreaction and a testament to its intensity.