Fucked Up’s 2022 EP Oberon found the Canadian hardcore band considerably paring down their sprawling rock-opera approach, and to middling results. By contrast, the quintet’s sixth studio album, One Day, doesn’t quite harken back to their early days, but rather reprises the hard-edged alt-punk of their underappreciated 2014 effort Glass Boys.
One Day opens with a burst of dissonant guitars and pummeling punk drums on “Found.” The track’s nervy first verse flows into an anthemic chorus that finds vocalist Damian Abraham grappling with Canada’s long history of colonialism. “I stood on the shore of a story we don’t tell anymore,” he belts with white-hot fury. “All the names were erased/Buried under a land that my people stole.”
The grandiose “Lords of Kensington” similarly makes use of a burial metaphor, this time in the context of a rapidly gentrifying Toronto neighborhood. There, the cops who used to shake down kids for smoking weed now own cannabis stores, and the all-ages venues got buried under luxury condos. The members of Fucked Up don’t let themselves off the hook, though, as the lyrics of the song gesture toward some level of culpability on their part: “When you crack the façade, you can see the truth/We lived out lives like they were only ours to lose.”
In spite, or perhaps because of, their first-thought-best-thought process, Fucked Up manages to fit a surprising amount of stylistic variety into their shortest album to date. “I Think I Might Be Weird” bounces with noodly glam-rock guitars and extravagant string staccatos, while “Broken Little Boys” blares like the artsy indie punk of Titus Andronicus. And “Nothing’s Immortal” channels Cheap Trick’s infectious power pop to reflect on growing up within and out of the punk lifestyle: “I keep hearing that same old punk song…I wish I could get it to sound the same.”
One Day is rife with the pain of moving on, its thunderous refrains often carrying somber undertones. “Cicada” is a particularly sorrowful look at loss: Sung by lead guitarist Mike Haliechuk, the track marks both the album’s most melancholic and melodic moment, with Haliechuk’s contemplative, Low Barlow-esque vocals offering a welcome contrast to Abraham’s raucous hardcore yelps. “So say goodnight but not goodbye…I’ll spend my life behind/With you inside me,” Haliechuk sings wistfully, and by the song’s end, he finds new meaning and beauty in the very music that Abraham thinks he might be outgrowing.
Album closer “Roar” rather reflectively winds things down, with Abraham’s stentorian voice pondering fatherhood anxieties—“How’s this asshole gonna raise a kid?”—and the inevitability of passing on trauma to the next generation. Although it has some thematic overlap with Glass Boys, One Day amalgamates its disparate lyrical and musical ideas, as well as the confidence of its performances and compositions, into a novel, thrilling 40 minutes.
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Dose, not Does. And they released Year of the Horse in 2021.