Fucked Up makes music under the sign of more. Within its prolific output, the Toronto band has made hardcore both denser—piling on tightly orchestrated guitar overdubs—and more distended, stretching out their ideas over baroque, hour-plus albums and a sprawling EP series based on the Chinese zodiac. In recent years, though, the band has been experimenting with less. In 2023, they challenged themselves to make an album—aptly titled One Day—where each member wrote and recorded their parts in just 24 hours. (In August 2024 they took this concept further, livestreaming a daylong album sprint and making the final product available on Bandcamp for another 24 hours. The impulse toward more dies hard.) The result was a tightly focused blast from a band whose releases can tend toward the baggy.
As its title suggests, Another Day continues to mine many of One Day’s thematic concerns: making peace with human finitude, taking stock of a damaged world. But instead of short bursts of energy, Fucked Up’s latest release feels like the product of careful sculpting and molding, with a focus on the connective tissue between songs. More than half of the tracks open with a crush of droning fuzz guitars, each shrunk down to occupy a tiny notch of frequencies. It is a new trick for Fucked Up, but it is a logical extension of the role the guitar has long served in the band: not a blunt instrument of aggression, but a diffuser of texture and melody. Here, when the full band kicks in, they aren’t shattering the mirror-pond calm of these guitar soundscapes but skimming on top of them, building on their energy.
Part of the excitement of listening to Fucked Up is in hearing how melody emerges from the interplay of layered parts, including Damian Abraham’s orc-bellow vocals, and Another Day features some of the finest and most intricate melodies in the band’s catalog. After the synth-guitar haze dissipates, “Tell Yourself You Will” crashes in with Abraham roaring in sync with a high-string guitar riff, before a gnomic call-and-response (“Oracle!” “New gods!”) introduces a crowd of other voices. The result is a multi-instrument superhook—and an especially glossy, refined version of the kind of hardcore-motivational anthem the band has been writing for years. The thundering “Divining Gods” even sees Abraham taking on the weight of the song’s melody right from its opening salvo: “I can’t escape this feeling/This ain’t a secular society.”
“Divining Gods” takes on the classic punk concern of idolatry—the false gods we worship, from billionaires to rockstars to billionaire rockstars—and inverts it. “We’ll make our gods where we can find them,” Abraham chokes out, making it sound less like an indictment and more like a matter of survival. Another Day makes this move repeatedly: It insists on seeing simply making it through as a cause for celebration. On “Stimming,” Abraham describes playing music with his friends as a protective ward against collapse: “My stim protects/From the ways I could get/If there wasn’t a way to just play and forget,” he yowls, making the words sound like an exaltation.
Another Day falters when it gets too ethereal and singy—as on the Haliechuk-led “Follow Fine Feeling,” which doesn’t have the melodic juice of his excellent song “Cicada” on One Day—or too straight-up and untextured, as on the plodding closer “House Lights.” But at its best, Another Day showcases Fucked Up as masters of transformation. In their hands a guitar can become a synth, a razor-gargling voice can carry a melody, hardcore can become widescreen indie rock, and white-knuckling through the day can become an act of joyful defiance.
