Robust feelings of regret and determination build into an energetic free-for-all on One Day, the new album from the Canadian hardcore group Fucked Up. The invigorating record, which lands like dunking your head in a bucket of cold water, is a January 27 release from Merge Records.
Fucked Up confront some of our existentially destabilizing unrest on One Day, asking—well, shouting—grief-stricken questions about communities undone by gentrification, alongside other urgently presented pleas and observations of personal triumph that lyrically close the record.
Preserving what makes life human and so personal often isn’t a factor in deciding the contours of development or, well, a lot else—but that’s where Fucked Up train their focus. One Day aggressively reclaims the chaos of running straight into a wall because you want to—and it’s safe, since the wall is metaphorical.
The band offers something big—a light, a helping hand, someone reaching through the crowds and pulling listeners to safety, whatever that looks like for you. The music is monumentally forceful, but it doesn’t sound. The rhythms seem light, as though flowing skyward with every note or cajoling you into pumping your fist in unison. Instead of feeling just physically crushing, Fucked Up sound more open-ended, with expressive pace changes and hooks that keep One Day enriching. It’s packed with swinging guitars, resonant bass, and drums so smoothly intense it’s as if they’re lifting from the earth.
The tone is defiantly life-affirming, like an adrenaline rush of demolishing a house with your friends—something that really needed done and, with their support, you can accomplish. One Day is a towering beast in which Fucked Up sound like they’re shining an absolutely massive spotlight, and it’s now showtime.
Below, check out what guitarist Mike Haliechuk has to say about One Day, including cultivating contentment and working with the time crunch of what was literally just a single day for much of what you hear.
When you wrote the guitars on One Day in what was just a day back in 2019, do you recall it being a relatively smooth experience? Do you think at this point in your career it’s easier to get the process swiftly or smoothly going?
Yeah, that’s why I think I did it like this, just because I kind of had settled into a very specific way of doing things and getting records done: taking a long time, sort of using the same editing tricks, and all this. The last two records took years to make, and at the end of the day, we’re just making sort of simple guitar music, and I was like, “This doesn’t need to take five years to make. And so I just wanted to have a little bit of a new challenge. And the easiest thing to think of was a time challenge, and it was smooth making this record. I think that’s because there wasn’t some grand concept.
There wasn’t this big theme, a musical theme. I just sort of went into the studio with a fully clean slate and just a ticking clock and sort of set myself up to be happy with whatever I came out with, you know what I mean? There wasn’t really any pressure. We’d just come off a long tour. I was looking down like a year or two of not really doing anything anyways, so it was, yeah, it was pretty smooth, this one.
With all the time that’s passed since writing for this album, are there things you wish you did differently? Or do you generally just have an easier relationship with past stuff you’ve written?
I think we just sort of got a rep for making these highly stylized, involved, labyrinth records. And the concept of this one was just about what you can get done in a certain time period, right? The idea of the record isn’t to make a perfect document or make the best possible songs and the best possible mixing. It was just about live your life, and don’t try to live in a way where everything you do, every decision, has to be perfect. It’s more about making the decisions you can with the resources you have and then trying to be content with them. And so the record, it would be disingenuous to what the record is about to look back on it and wish that things could have been different, because it was more about doing, making the record I could under the circumstances and being happy with the result, whatever it was.
[…] I mean, the last bunch of records we did were really as far from straightforward as you can get. The last thing that came out was Year of the Horse, which has every instrument imaginable, and it’s almost two hours long. I think I just hit a wall with that kind of maximalist songwriting for a minute.
Bringing what you write to listeners, do you feel like performing live is important to how you think of the band’s identity?
I think it’s like one half—I kind of hate performing. I don’t take a lot of enjoyment out of being on stage necessarily. I like being in the studio. I like writing music and putting albums together. The live thing is kind of Damian’s (Abraham, vocalist) venue, which is a place where he excels in not only performing, but I think for a heavy band, we aren’t trying to cultivate a heavy, heavy, aggressive vibe at our shows. And I think that’s what Damian is good at, bringing people together in more of an accepting way. We used to be really standoffish and aggressive and weird, and I think over the last 10 or 15 years, he’s made an effort to have our live shows be a different thing than what you would expect maybe from listening to our records or looking at the covers. I think we have sort of two tracks going, where there’s more than one thing going on in the band if you’re listening to a record or you’re seeing a show.
So in that songwriting, does the emotional expression of the music become a pretty important factor for you at any point while things move along? As opposed to it being more about the musicality.
Yeah, I guess so. When I write, we write music way before we write the lyrics, but obviously punk and hardcore music sort of inherently carries its own emotional tone. But yeah, I don’t know. You’re not really thinking of that when you’re writing music is its own form of emotional expression, right? Like you’re putting your own stuff into the music when you’re writing it and recording it. It’s sort of an exchange of emotion, music, right? It’s not a calculated thing necessarily. A lot of music I find can be very emotionally manipulative. A lot of pop music is, you know—it sometimes can sound like taking a pill to convey a very specific feeling or emotion, with buildups and stuff.
With our music, the emotion for us is sort of in the subtext. And especially for me, writing it, I’m not thinking about what, how other people are going to react to it, because in the process of recording it, I’m concerned about my own emotional expression, and that’s where the music is coming from.
Naysayers pop up sometimes, but do you feel like there is a lot to be optimistic about in this corner of music as the years move forward, having been involved in things for quite a while yourself?
I think so. I don’t listen to a lot of heavy music. But I try to pay attention, and it seems like the thing for heavier bands now is to sort of be weirder. And I think that goes back to the roots of punk, right? As a very queer, weird expression, form of expression. And I think punk and hardcore especially has gone through very weirdly masculine orbits. I think that there’s a really defining aesthetic of heavy music now where it’s more focused on the underground, and it’s more focused on being weird. And I think that’s great.
What sorts of things have you been liking to listen to personally?
I really used to track down, like, every record and every song, but I hit a wall with a lot of stuff, and so now I kind of just have, like, 100 songs on my phone. And whenever I need to listen to music, I go to that. It became too exhausting to look at a genre and try to master it, you know what I mean? Like when you have that relationship with music, you either have to master a genre or just not even look at it, because it becomes too stressful to think of all the stuff that you’re not listening to. I listen to a lot of like Donato Dozzy songs. Lately, I’ve just been listening to millions of demos of all the stuff that we’re working on. I listened to that new Alex G record, I thought was good. I don’t listen to music that much. I kind of gave up, and now if a good song comes to me, I’ll just throw it on the phone, and it’ll stay there for, you know, the next 10 years.
One final question: A lot of things could weigh on what you could think of here, but how do you feel about the state of the band itself as a unit going forward, in terms of melding something so long running with your lives outside of it and stuff like that?
I think that we just settled on a way of working that works for us. Everyone is sort of at a different point in their life in the band. A couple people have families; people have varying degrees of real-world and not real-world responsibilities. Our drummer lives in England, and so the band is very sporadic and episodic. We’ll get together for a tour, and then we’ll be together for a week and a half, and then we won’t see each other for a couple months, kind of thing.
And the writing of it, the writing of the songs kind of has become my own thing, which this record is very emblematic of. But I think it’s sort of a push and pull between how much people want to be involved in the music, in the band, and how much they want to and need to be involved in their separate lives, which I think is just a natural thing. We’ve been a band for more than 20 years. But I think the pressure is off a little bit, which is nice. And yeah, I don’t know, I think we’re stubborn enough that this kind of setup means that there’ll probably be Fucked Up records for the next 20 years as well.
Photo by Alan Snodgrass
