With anthemic hardcore hooks and unabashed lyrics about the power of love, the Toronto band’s latest album radiates fired-up joy.
Since their 2006 debut, Fucked Up have fearlessly merged the ferocity of hardcore punk and the grandiosity of prog-rock. Anchoring their ever-evolving sound is Damian Abraham’s throat-rending bark, barreling through immaculately layered rock riffage laden with anthemic hooks and symphonic arrangements. Their outsized ambition gave us the 2011 rock opera David Comes to Life, its maximalist 2018 sequel Dose Your Dreams, and the long-running experimental Zodiac series, which follows their most outré flights of fancy into drone, ambient, and psychedelic territory. The Toronto band’s new album, One Day, is another in a long line of beautiful contradictions, a quick and self-consciously small record that still feels like a towering statement.
After the conceptual and stylistic indulgence of Dose Your Dreams and last year’s Year of the Horse—two sprawling, willfully eclectic double albums with byzantine narratives involving wizards and interdimensional odysseys—One Day narrows both sound and scope. Like 2014’s Glass Boys, it’s a compact, relatively straightforward rock record that’s very much about the real world. The pendulum has again swung from the arty tendencies of guitarist Mike Haliechuk and drummer Jonah Falco toward frontman Abraham’s more earthly concerns: While the band’s growler-in-chief took a backseat on Dose Your Dreams, ceding creative control to Haliechuk and Falco and questioning his future in the band, Abraham is back for blood on One Day, singing on almost every track and contributing his own lyrics for the first time since Glass Boys.
Even at their simplest Fucked Up can’t turn down a good conceptual framework. Each band member wrote and recorded their contributions to One Day within a 24-hour window, and the ticking clock extends to the lyrics as Abraham and Haliechuk question their place as aging punks in a rapidly changing world. “My song is of time and memory/What we forget when we change the story,” Abraham sings on the Haliechuk-penned opener “Found,” laying out the album’s primary preoccupation: what we remember, or don’t, as history marches forward. The band’s old DIY haunts in Toronto have been replaced by condos and pot shops. Indigenous people have been displaced and killed to make room for highways and “temples of police and landlords to worship money.” “The whole world is fucked,” Abraham shouts on “Broken Little Boys,” a song lamenting generational cycles of toxic masculinity. Everyone, from Fucked Up to God himself—the original broken little boy, they theorize—is culpable.
For all of the justified hand-wringing over the State of Things, Fucked Up aren’t pessimists at heart. There’s still comfort to be found in the present, little moments that stretch out into infinity. “When suddenly you look at me/You opened up eternity,” Abraham sings on the effervescently power-poppy title track. “What could you do in just one day?/Fall in love, spend your time away.” On “Cicada,” an ode to fallen friends, a humble insect’s song becomes a lasting symbol of remembrance. And on the album closer “Roar,” written by Abraham, his trademark roar presides over another paean to the time-stopping power of love that’s admirably unafraid to sound cheesy: “When it gets too tough/And when you need to shut off/I’m still there standing with you and in the end that’s all we need.”
The only respite is to live in the present, and fortunately One Day kicks plenty of ass on a moment-to-moment level. The album’s biggest and brightest melodies hit with the urgency of Fucked Up’s early days as a hardcore band: “Found” begins with a scream from Abraham and immediately launches into a hard-charging guitar riff, dissolving into wordless vocal melody as the song draws to a close. “Lords of Kensington” introduces Abraham’s inimitable yell to ’90s alt-rock and transcendently chiming post-rock guitars, while the Haliechuk-sung “Cicada” sounds uncannily like Fucked Up covering Sugar. You wouldn’t guess that hooks this huge were written and recorded in the span of one day, but whether it was a conscious decision or a result of self-imposed constraints, One Day sounds eminently direct. Unlike Dose Your Dreams, there are no spoken-word interludes or psychedelic zone-outs. Every second radiates fired-up joy.
While it might seem like a minor entry in the band’s catalog, One Day also represents Fucked Up’s attempt to liberate themselves from long and laborious recording sessions and the existential weight of making a new Fucked Up album. By this point, lofty concepts and genre experimentation are integral parts of the band’s DNA. But there’s also value in immediacy, simplicity, and spontaneity, and on One Day, Fucked Up sound freer and more purely happy to be making music together than they have in years.
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