FUCKED UP

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. 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. If One Day bore any traces of icy unfamiliarity, they’ve thawed for the upbeat, energized 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 realize 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.