Album Bio

Laced through these early, broken decades of the new millennium – these years of endless war and world-shuttering disease and the sense that something about the normal workings of our planet has come irreversibly undone – is a strange kind of grieving. It is a communal thing, this grieving, and though it might manifest in wildly different ways, it may be the one act that joins us all. From the refugee driven into exile by war and climate calamity, to the protestors out on the streets in the wealthiest parts of the world, to the stewing recluse watching it all, convinced the world has become frighteningly unrecognizable. Are we bound by the depths of our grieving, if the worlds we grieve look nothing alike?

This, in many ways, is the unspoken question running through Fucked Up’s stunning, visceral new album, Someday. Over the course of ten of the most lyrically intimate tracks the band has ever written, Someday charts the many flavors of grief that have come to define these last few cataclysmic years. Without flinching, without hiding behind contrivance or bland equivocation, one of the most innovative hardcore bands of the century has come to tackle this moment we’re living through, this season of derangement.

Recorded at Candle Studios and Union Sound in Toronto, and Fuzzbrain Studio in London (UK), and mixed by Alex Gamble and Mike Haliechuk, the album opens with an uppercut: “City Boy,” a song from the point of view of an aggrieved, frightened man, to whom the sanctity of Western civilization is never not under relentless attack:

I keep my windows locked

Out there, they’ve got blinders on

They wanna be something they’ll never be

They turned a church into a mosque

They’re just ashamed of who they really are

It doesn’t take long to realize that there’s a version of Someday that could have opted for far less choppy waters. Almost every track on the album lives in close first-person. But the lives these songs chart are very, very different. It’s not simply a matter of chronicling the psychological machinery of both good people and bad, but rather the brokenness, the ways in which the world has altered their lives beyond anything they once had planned.

In “Feed Me Your Feathers,” a mother wonders why her daughter has to go out and risk her safety at protests, why she can’t just let things be. “Man Without Qualities,” an old-school punk detonation of a song, follows the life of a child whose father comes home from war permanently changed, permanently afraid. There’s an effortless quality to Someday’s production, readily evident on tracks such as “I Took My Mom to Sleep” and “In The Company of Sisters.” The former features vocals by Tuka Mohammed, with whom the band previously worked on the EP Year of the Horse – Act Two. Mohammed is an exceptionally versatile vocalist, and manages to infuse a delicate, melodic pleading into a song centered on what it means to survive atrocity. On “In The Company of Sisters,” guest vocalist Julianna Riolino is incendiary, matching the intensity of one of the album’s most beautifully layered tracks.

Perhaps the most quietly impressive aspect of Someday’s construction is the way it maintains a sense of searching. Behind the electrifying arrangements and lyrical indictments, there is something deeply uncertain, indicative of an internal struggle to find one’s place in a world that’s spun off its axis. It’s an uncertainty that pops up in one way or another all over the record. In this light, the album’s title becomes a meditation of sorts – as when Riolino sings, “I looked down, I could see my body. Someday it will belong to me.”

Beginning with 2023’s One Day, and then Another Day, Someday is the third in a planned four-part project, as ambitious in scope as the Polaris Prize-winning The Chemistry of Common Life or 2014’s criminally underrated Glass Boys. With a fluidity that can only come from a quarter-century of work, the songs on these loosely related albums move between the unbearable intimacy of simply existing in the world, and the grand, sometimes ruinous currents of that world. On Someday, Fucked Up have found a delicate balance, zeroing in on the inner workings of people to whom life has either been terribly unkind, or far too kind for far too long, at some invisible other’s expense. Given the myriad ways in which the band have upended expectations over the years, it’s perhaps not all that surprising that one of their finest records in recent years should have at its core this concerted effort to make sense of whatever it is we are becoming – and, finding no easy answers, to sit instead with the album’s closing, title track, and its quiet casting ahead into a future that may or may not ever arrive:

Someday it’ll all make sense

Some day it’ll all make sense

I’ll find a place where I belong

And stay until it's time to come home