There’s noise, and then there’s noise. A Place To Bury Strangers have always lived in that second category — the kind that rattles your chest and leaves a ringing in your ears that you’re honestly kind of okay with. Their latest single Acid Rain is no different, and somehow, it feels more urgent than ever.
The New York-based wall-of-sound merchants just released the track as the second single from their upcoming rarities album, ‘Rare And Deadly,’ dropping April 3rd via Dedstrange. And if lead single Everyone’s The Same primed the pump, Acid Rain absolutely blows the fuse box.
Born From the First Trump Era, Relevant Right Now
Frontman Oliver Ackermann wrote Acid Rain during the first Trump presidency, and the track carries that weight — the rage, the grief, the disbelief of watching cruelty become casual. “Cruelty felt not just normalized, but weaponized,” Ackermann says, describing the world that shaped the song. The opening lines say it plainly: “Cover your eyes / Cover your face / Walk in line / Don’t embrace.”
What hits even harder? The chanting woven into the opening was recorded live during the George Floyd protests in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Real voices. Real streets. Real history folded into six minutes of controlled sonic destruction. Ackermann doesn’t mince words: “‘Acid Rain’ is rage, grief, and disbelief all colliding at once — the sound of watching history repeat itself while knowing exactly how wrong it is.”
The Video Is Pure New York Chaos (In the Best Way)
Shot guerrilla-style on January 16th, 2026, the video features the band literally taking over a New York City subway car and performing the track live as the train crosses the Williamsburg Bridge into the Lower East Side. No choreography. No script. Just feedback, industrial pulse, screeching tracks, and a car full of unsuspecting passengers who showed up to witness something they definitely did not expect. It’s visceral, it’s raw, and it’s exactly the kind of thing that makes you fall in love with live music all over again.
The Album Is a Genre-Bending Vault Crack
‘Rare And Deadly’ spans a full decade — 2015 to 2025 — of demos, B-sides, abandoned experiments, and late-night recordings that never quite made the cut. Think of it as the secret history of the band: riffs mutated by malfunctioning pedals, delicate melodies swallowed whole by feedback, ideas too strange or too personal to ever fit neatly into a proper release.
Here’s where it gets really interesting: every format tells a different story. The CD, cassette, vinyl, and digital editions each have their own unique tracklist. No single version is the “complete” album — by design. It’s a fractured, deliberately unstable document that mirrors the chaos of its own creation. In an era of algorithm-friendly streaming, that’s a genuinely radical move.
Catch Them Live This Spring
APTBS are hitting Europe hard this April and May, with stops across Germany, Czech Republic, Italy, Greece, and beyond — wrapping up at Fuzz Club Festival in Eindhoven on May 1st. If you’re anywhere near the continent, do not sleep on this one.
‘Rare And Deadly’ is out April 3rd via Dedstrange. Pre-order it now, and go watch the Acid Rain video immediately — preferably loud.
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