Fucked Up

With their North American tour now in full swing, Toronto band Fucked Up have shared the third and final pre-release single 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. It was followed by the album's title track, "Another Day", setting out a more serious conversation and giving a brief look at the history of human cannabis use and calls for an end to drug prohibition.

Today they share raucous third single "Divining Gods", which questions the human desire to look upto someone. Vocalist Damian Abraham comments: “As with all the songs on Another Day having some sort of relationship with their counterpoint on One Day, Diving Gods is the continuance of the conversation started with “Nothing's Immortal”. While the first song dealt with loss in belief in an idol, Diving Gods is questions the need to make idols in the first place. 

As religion has become less of a factor in our society, this spiritual void has been filled with the fanatical unquestioning worship of idols. And this isn’t just on the grandiose levels of cultural superstars, even in punk there is a tendency to build up our musical heroes to superhuman levels of grandeur. But humans putting others humans on pedestals rarely works out well. 

People are going to fail us, as we are going to fail people. It is the human condition to not live up to expectations. Where does this leave the godless worshipers? New gods will be found and new churches built to them, only to one day be burnt again. The void is continually emptied and filled. It almost seems like there is a natural cyclical nature to things.”

"Divining Gods" on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bfLqPS20h8
‘Another Day’ pre-order/pre-save links: https://linktr.ee/fuckedupad

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. 
 
One day follows another and, if we’re lucky, there will be more days to come…