We extend the applicability of the popular interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin method discretizing advection-diffusion-reaction problems to meshes comprising extremely general, essentially arbitrarily-shaped element shapes. In particular, our analysis allows for curved element shapes, without the use of non-linear elemental maps. The feasibility of the method relies on the definition of a suitable choice of the discontinuity penalization, which turns out to be explicitly dependent on the particular element shape, but essentially independent on small shape variations. This is achieved upon proving extensions of classical trace and Markov-type inverse estimates to arbitrary element shapes. A further new
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-type inverse estimate on essentially arbitrary element shapes enables the proof of inf-sup stability of the method in a streamline-diffusion-like norm. These inverse estimates may be of independent interest. A priori error bounds for the resulting method are given under very mild structural assumptions restricting the magnitude of the local curvature of element boundaries. Numerical experiments are also presented, indicating the practicality of the proposed approach.