A band's rarities comp is usually where the evidence goes to be quietly buried, not where the best song on the tracklist turns up.
The Serfs, a three-piece from Cincinnati, know as well as anyone what a bit of studio wreckage is worth. Dakota Carlyle, Andie Luman and Dylan McCartney formed the group in the late 2010s with no fixed division of labour: all three sing, all three work the electronics, and the band has never settled into the usual singer-guitarist-drummer arrangement other groups default to. Their earliest recordings, gathered on 2019's Sounds of Serfdom for the Berlin label Detriti, were minimal-wave sketches built almost entirely from synths and drum machines, closer to a bedroom experiment than a band with a stage act.
That changed by increments.
2022's Primal Matter, released through the label Dream, thickened the sound without abandoning its coldwave chassis, and 2023's Half Eaten by Dogs, their first record for the Chicago label Trouble in Mind, brought in live drums and turned the project into something closer to a functioning rock band, albeit one still indebted to Suicide's primitive pulse, Cabaret Voltaire's cut-and-paste menace, and Throbbing Gristle's grimmer instincts.
Rarities, Vol. 2, out via Dedstrange, the label A Place to Bury Strangers set up to support bands working in roughly their own noisy lineage, collects thirteen tracks recorded across that transition, between 2021 and 2023, unearthed during what the band has described as a data clean-up rather than a planned archival project. That casualness matters: nothing here sounds tidied up for release. Swans Die Singing is the clearest evidence of why the excavation was worth it. The drums lock into a stiff, motorik pulse under a half-buried vocal chant, synth lines bending in and out of tune like a signal drifting off a weak transmitter, the whole thing building less like a pop song than like something working itself into a trance.
None of it reads as gothic in the theatrical, cape-and-eyeliner sense. What The Serfs share with the early-80s bands who first got filed under that word is the underlying method rather than the costume: existential, half-spiritual lyrics set against music that insists on moving your body regardless, dread turned into something you can dance to rather than something that stops you dancing.
The record's real value isn't nostalgia. It is proof that the band's supposedly tidy arc from synth-only bedroom project to full-band unit was messier and more interesting in the room than it reads on the discography page, three years of false starts and good accidents that happened to end up on the cutting-room floor at the same time.
