Joe Sutkowski aka Dirt Buyer has announced his forthcoming album Dirt Buyer II out October 20 via Bayonet Records. Along with the album announce, he shares his second single “Fentanyl” paired with a music video shot at Baby’s All Right.

What it means to be alive also means coming to terms with mortality itself, and Sutkowski wrote album centerpiece “Fentanyl” about an experience walking to his day job one day and being confronted by a fatal overdose he had to call an ambulance for, before reporting to work and having to carry on with his day. Throughout the album he attempts to wrap his head around the idea of fate and how you can brush up against other people and then leave them behind. The songs themselves play with this concept of light and dark intertwined. Oscillating between urgency and cathartic release and more stripped-back elegies, Sutkowski faces the reality that while the people he’d rather forget can still live on through music, he is able to move on at the same time.

The band’s new album, Dirt Buyer II, was recorded in February 2020, and represents a foray into heavier material that marks a deeper shift for the band. Now working as a trio, Sutkowski is flanked by Tristan Allen on bass and Mike Costa on drums, a fellow Berklee grad who cut his teeth playing in bands across Boston including past collaborations with Sutkowski. Half-recorded while the band was on tour with Surf Curse, the record finds Sutkowski reaching out for places, people and beliefs to ground him.

Sutkowksi grapples with loss throughout the record, often mourning relationships that have yet to come to pass (“Sand”) and questioning the fragility of time. “How the leaves have changed,” he intones, repeating the phrase throughout the album. Three years on, Dirt Buyer II is an artifact of a time that is still preserved through the headrush of peak memory; the magnitude of high highs and low lows that are both addictive and transformative. “If heavy’s what you wanted / heavy’s what you’re gettin’ / heavy’s what you needed, believe me now / if change is what you wanted / change is what you’re gettin,” he sings on “Heavy,” ironically one of the catchiest tracks on Dirt Buyer II. But with that comes the opportunity to see life for what it’s worth: “I’m fortunate to have a thing that’s an outlet but also an escape.”

Half-recorded in his mother and uncle’s upstate house where he turned the living room into a studio, he contemplates the beauty and disaster around him—all refracted through visceral visual imagery of how the physical earth meets the unknown to converge in something greater than ourselves. “This is all a living chronicle of all I want to do, which is feel good and be happy,” he admits. “I’m a completely different person now – a better version of myself.” Processing the past, Sutkowksi has emerged with newfound belief, fully intact and with a new path forward to the future.

Pre-order Dirt Buyer II HERE.