Brooklyn, NY · noise rock · shoegaze

A Place to Bury Strangers

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NYC's loudest band — strobe-and-feedback annihilation through homemade pedals, carrying the Jesus and Mary Chain's torch straight into the noise floor.

A Place to Bury Strangers began in Brooklyn in 2002, founded by David Goffan and Tim Gregorio. Guitarist and singer Oliver Ackermann joined soon after, arriving from Rhode Island School of Design following the breakup of his band Skywave; he became the group's primary songwriter and also runs the effects-pedal company Death By Audio. The current lineup adds bassist John Fedowitz and drummer Sandra Fedowitz. The band played its first show at the Brooklyn venue Luxx in 2003.

The band's sound combines noise rock, shoegaze and post-punk: heavily processed guitar, motorik drumming, and deadpan vocals buried in reverb and layers of feedback, built around a heavy, atmospheric wall-of-sound approach to guitar noise.

In 2006 the group self-released three handmade EPs, each pressed with its own color scheme. A show that year at Webster Hall opening for the Brian Jonestown Massacre raised the band's profile, and it returned to the same venue in 2007 to play alongside one of its acknowledged influences, the Jesus and Mary Chain.

The self-titled debut album appeared in 2007 on the label Killer Pimp, its contract reportedly written on a napkin, and gained wider attention after a favorable Pitchfork review. Tours followed with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Nine Inch Nails, along with a booking at Primavera Sound in Barcelona. The band signed to Mute Records in 2009 and released its second album, Exploding Head, that October.

Live, the group is known for extreme volume, strobe lighting and a degree of physical abuse directed at the instruments, an approach that has earned them a reputation as one of the loudest bands working in New York. Their records draw obvious lines back to the Jesus and Mary Chain and early industrial-tinged British guitar music.

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noise rockshoegaze