Let’s get the plain out of the way in which first: One Day is a decent report. It’s Fucked Up’s shortest full-length to this point, a major milestone for a band that has made the occasional compact assertion however is usually identified for repeatedly increasing its horizons. Although they’ve saved busy prior to now few years – embracing daring ideas and elaborate theatrics on 2021’s 12 months of the Horse earlier than scaling issues again with final 12 months’s Oberon EP – sufficient time has handed since their final correct LP, 2018’s Does Your Goals, to make you marvel the place this group’s ambitions now lie. Fucked Up’s authentic declare to fame was revitalizing hardcore, and now {that a} new crop of bands has blown the style open in a few completely different instructions, what’s the following transfer going to be? Would they push for one more conceptual double album or take a back-to-basics strategy as a reminder of their roots? On condition that one in all their current releases was a reissue of early recordings, you’d assume they may lean towards the latter.
However Fucked Up aren’t the type of band to take the plain route, so that they’ve give you a unique experiment. The title of One Day is kind of literal: When it got here to writing and recording the album, vocalist Damian Abraham, guitarist Mike Haliechuk, bassist Sandy Miranda, and drummer Jonah Falco confined themselves to a 24-hour timeframe. Haliechuk laid the groundwork throughout three periods spanning eight hours every, and the remainder of the band needed to full their elements remotely whereas sticking to the one-day rule. When your music is outlined not by a selected sound however by its lack of boundaries, why not see what occurs while you strive setting a severe one? That they’ve managed to tug it off is a feat in itself, although the actual thrill isn’t a lot the way it streamlines their sound (which nonetheless comes off as dense and layered as ever), however the perspective it ended up forcing up upon the lyrics, a form of seize-the-day angle that raises the stakes and induces added urgency with out feeling manufactured.
When there’s trying again, it’s to confront laborious truths and spill them out. Most of One Day is searingly private, however opener ‘Discovered’ begins by adopting a lens of collective duty to deal with Canada’s historical past of colonization: “I stood on the shore of a narrative we don’t inform anymore/ All of the names have been erased/ Buried beneath a land that my folks stole.” Although Abraham contributed lyrics for the primary time since 2014’s Glass Boys – he and Haliechuk wrote 5 songs every – a whole lot of the emotions clearly overlap. Take the Abraham-penned ‘Lords of Kensington’, which equally grapples with the results of a shared previous lived in negligence: “If you crack the façade, you may see the reality/ We lived out lives like they have been solely ours to lose.”
Abraham applies the identical nervy depth because the framing narrows and widens once more, his bellowing voice typically accompanied by softly anthemic backing vocals that intensify the sheer joyousness it could actually typically disguise. On spotlight ‘Big New Her’, they’re not even wanted: incendiary guitars pierce by a pummeling rhythm part like rays from the sky, vivid sufficient to promote a line about “the Delphi in your self.” It matches proper alongside the glam-rock strut of ‘I Assume I May Be Bizarre’, a curiously titled story of putting up with stormy seas that serves as an fascinating distinction to ‘Discovered’. Some tales on One Day are rather less allegorical, and naturally, the band typically has to sacrifice nuance for directness. However that doesn’t imply they abandon their maximalist tendencies, permitting themselves to at the least stretch many of the songs previous the 3-minute mark or belt the refrain out one additional time to hammer the purpose residence.
Impressively, the conclusions they arrive at on One Day are just a little extra resonant than you’d anticipate given the self-imposed restrictions. ‘Damaged Little Boys’ would possibly seem to be it’s recycling the identical concepts about taking accountability, till the track takes a intelligent flip: “God was corrupt and the entire world is fucked/ And a query’s struck/ Is God a damaged boy?/ God’s only a damaged little boy!” It’s fairly foolish, certain, but it surely’s the type of irreverent punchline that will have in any other case in all probability been tossed away in favour of both simplicity or sophistication, and it’s enjoyable to listen to them run with it. That’s not the place the profundity lies, although: Fucked Up are smart to finish the album with a trio of heartfelt songs about loss and love, the belongings you wish to keep in mind and maintain on to when time appears to be operating out. “On the finish of all historical past let only one factor be left of me,” Abraham pleads on the title monitor. “What might you do in simply sooner or later?/ Fall in love, spend your time away.” Haliechuk wrote these lyrics, but it surely’s no marvel Abraham echoes them within the album’s closing line: “In the long run, that’s all we want.”
