A Place To Bury Strangers – new single/ video ‘Where Are We Now’ out now

A Place To Bury Strangers release “Where Are We Now,” the third single/video from their new rarities album, Rare And Deadly, out 3rd April via Dedstrange.

Following the “full-on sonic attack” (Consequence) of “Acid Rain,” on which “frontman Oliver Ackermann delivers deadpan, near-chanted lyrics about systemic cruelty,” (Consequence)  “Where Are We Now” finds A Place To Bury Strangers reflecting on the past: “Where are we now // Is it too late // Should I reach out // Where we are now // caught in our lives //did our dreams fade.”

Ackermann says the song is about “looking back at friends you lost touch with. Wondering where they ended up. Remembering when everything felt possible.” The accompanying video was put together by Ackermann with footage from the Library of Congress National Archives. Ackermann says he made the video because “I think we need to look at people more and see the value and wonder of life so we can be compassionate towards others.”

Rare and Deadly cracks open a decade-long vault of raw nerve and sonic chaos from A Place To Bury Strangers. Spanning 2015–2025, the collection gathers demos, B-sides, abandoned experiments, and forgotten fragments pulled from Ackermann’s personal archive of late-night recordings, blown-out tapes, and half-finished sessions. These tracks capture the band at their most unfiltered—caught between breakthrough ideas and beautiful mistakes, with the edges left jagged on purpose. Pre-order available now. 

What makes ‘Rare and Deadly’ truly unprecedented is that every format tells a different story. The CD, cassette, vinyl, and digital editions each feature their own unique tracklisting, a fractured release strategy that is almost unheard of. No single version contains the “complete” album. Instead, each format becomes its own window into the archive, revealing alternate paths, missing links, and parallel versions of the band’s inner life. It’s a deliberately unstable document: the album shifts depending on how you choose to hear it, mirroring the chaos of its creation.   

Across these recordings, you can hear the evolution of Ackermann’s restless mind. 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. The tracks contain riffs mutated by malfunctioning pedals, songs born from gear pushed past its limits, or delicate melodies overwhelmed by walls of feedback until only their ghosts remain. 

‘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. 

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Photo credit: Holger Nitschke