Upcoming Releases
Toronto band Fucked Up announce details of their new album 'Another Day', out August 9th on the band’s own imprint Fucked Up Records.
When you’re alive, every day is exactly the same but also completely different.
One day you’re hibernating inside. On another, you can’t wait to get outside. “Let’s goooo!”
One day your heart’s shattered. On another, it’s full of love and blissful hope. “Do you maybe want to hang out some time?”
One day the body and mind you received from your parents start to fail, and you feel grounded or trapped. On another, it recovers and is strong, flying you and your inventions around the world. “I am free. Finally.”
One day, you’re down but optimistic. On another, you feel the same but altered.
What a difference a day makes.
Like springtime in the Canadian prairies, ‘Another Day’ is fleeting but buzzes with activity—it’s Fucked Up’s shortest album ever and arrives the most quickly after a previous album by the band. ‘One Day’ emerged in the winter of 2023. Each band member separately recorded all their respective parts in a single, presumably rather cold day. It’s a powerful document of a band known for elaborate, dense albums and (over-?) thinking everything through, instead letting go and trusting that they’d made the most of the time they assigned themselves to work with and against.
Today’s single “Stimming” is a 3-minute joyous Fucked Up-style hymn to letting music carry you through those rough days and into the next. “In making the video for stimming we tried to depict the transcendence of music from within our bodies outward to physical action” the band explain. “Stimming is self-soothing behaviour through repetition, and in the context of music and our band, we overcome, calm, and manifest the best of ourselves through these specific, finely tuned physical movements which create a freeing joyous place from which to bring new ideas into the world.”
Over the course of 25 years, the Toronto band Fucked Up have altered our time and space through an unlikely combination of having many, many great ideas, and a persistence that sees them through. Damian Abraham writes lyrics and sings, Mike Haliechuk writes lyrics, sings, and plays guitar (primarily), Jonah Falco plays drums, guitar, and sings, Sandy Miranda plays bass and sings, and, though it’s been a decade since he’s been on a record, Josh Zucker has returned to play guitar in a studio (he sings sometimes too). Haliechuk produces the records.
If ‘One Day’ bore any traces of icy unfamiliarity, they’ve thawed for the upbeat, energised and optimistic ‘Another Day’, whose songs were recorded in the spring of 2023. If you compare the track listings and listen to what is being sung, you realise that in sequence and in a thematic sense lyrically, the two albums are absolutely connected in a purposefully contextual and rather brilliant narrative alignment. So, like any parts of a bold series, they’re not the same, but they’re not completely different.
The band learned a lot from making ‘One Day; the way that they did, with an impulsive urgency and accepting elements of chance that a time constraint calls for. If the concept was foreign, it’s now familiar and the fact that the songs are meant to speak to each other between albums gives the players more direction and context and the music, increased coherence. The arrangements and production also feel inclusive and joyful, while the songs maintain the band’s penchant for multi-layered introspection and external contemplation.
Haliechuk has been using an octave pedal more of late, which has impacted his guitar playing; he can conjure more noise by hitting one string at a time. On occasion, his and Zucker’s guitars sound like outside—ambiently humming or signalling like sirens ringing out from beyond your neighbourhood but carrying through the breeze blowing through the bedroom windows you’ve opened after a long winter.
On drums, Falco’s playing and choices imbue the songs with a certain danceable cheeriness, and he’s really coming into his own as a vocal arranger, using his voice as a multi-layered instrument in the background, as Abraham roars like nobody else. Miranda’s bass interlocks with Falco remarkably given the remote recording process and, while the songs are relatively down tempo, they’re still super charged and, like a lot of recent Fucked Up stuff, explore grooves in uniquely intricate (and punk) ways. Overall, the record explores growth and love and family and life’s subtle and overt transitions.
‘Another Day’ was made in many different studios in Toronto and one in London, England (where Falco resides), but it was primarily engineered and mixed by Alex Gamble and produced by Haliechuk. Guest vocalists include Sam Bielanski, Pretty Matty, Charlie Manning Walker, Holden Abraham, D. Franklan, and Danko Jones.
In a sense, the record’s a meta microcosm of how life tends to function—a series of things happen because we dared to try them, and then they’re done and gone. The sun goes down and is less present for months, and then comes back up, and stays with us longer. This impacts us in profound ways that can be hard to talk about. When we can, we try new and different things, every single day that don’t always go as planned. And this is fine; life isn’t always about accomplishing something, it’s about attempting to accomplish it in the first place.
One day follows another and, if we’re lucky, there will be more days to come…
Another Day track listing:
- Face
- Stimming
- Tell Yourself You Will
- Another Day
- Paternal Instinct
- Divining Gods
- The One To Break It
- More
- Follow Fine Feeling
- House Lights
