Fucked Up

Today Toronto band Fucked Up have shared the title track from their forthcoming album 'Another Day', out August 9^th on the band’s own imprint Fucked Up Records. 

Previous single "Stimming" introduced the new album with a joyous optimism - a celebration of the ever-present possibility of a new day, and the power of music to carry you through the rough times. Today, they share the album's title track, setting out a more serious conversation. The video for "Another Day" gives a brief look at the history of human cannabis use and calls for an end to drug prohibition.

Fucked Up frontman Damian Abraham explains: “Evolving side by side for millennia, there is no other plant on earth that we have had a deeper and more fraught relationship with. It has provided us food, clothing, fuel, sails, rope, paper, building material, recreational entertainment and a medicine to treat countless ailments. 

My relationship with cannabis began by turning to it as a medicine. While I had briefly experimented with smoking it in my early teen years, it wasn’t until the side effects from anti-anxiety medication became too much that I considered cannabis anything other than some hippie bullshit. It would wind complete changing my life and opened eyes to my ignorance.

I began trying to learn as much as a could about the plant and the good it can offer. This video is the product of that journey. But behind all the potential good cannabis has to offer is a fraught and tragic history. One of the chief crops of colonialism, its labor intensive production being a large driver behind the enslaved African peoples and later Indian people in indentured servitude to the Americas. Later consumption of it would be used to justify the racist vilification and ultimately criminalization of whole populations of people. 

The last few decades have seen immense changes begin to take place. Years of activism would bring about “medical marijuana” programs. Medical cannabis would act as a thin end of the wedge for recreational legalization efforts. The new legal markets, in turn, have brought a wave of corporatization. While the lyrics of the song continue the story that started in “Lords of Kensington”, they’re also meant to be a metaphor for what’s happened to cannabis post legalization in Canada. A regulatory framework, with eyes on profits over justice and righting past wrongs, saw an industry handed over to prohibitionists and the people that enforced it over the victims of it. This song is about the death of that faze of cannabis and a hope for whatever rising in its place being better.

The first joint of legalization is smoked when all cannabis prisoners are free.

 RIP to Tracy, Horatio and all the activists and pioneers that aren’t here to see that day. 

 End all drug prohibition! 

 Research assistance by Matt Riot. Thank you to Colin and Jonah for making the vision real.”

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, 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.
 
‘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.