Raise Your Voice: Fucked Up on Dose Your Dreams

We speak to Mike Haliechuk, guitarist and lead songwriter for Canadian prog-punks Fucked Up about their most ambitious record yet, Dose Your Dreams

Feature by Adam Turner-Heffer | 04 Oct 2018

For over a decade, there has been no one else like Fucked Up. The Toronto-based punks, comprising of vocalist Damian Abraham, guitarists Mike Haliechuk, Josh Zucker and later Ben Cook, bassist Sandy Miranda and drummer Jonah Falco, have, since their inception in 2001, pushed the idea not just of what being a punk band is but what a music group of any capacity and genre can be. Though they had humble beginnings as a straight-up, run-of-the-mill hardcore punk band in Canada's most well-known scene at the turn of the century, there was a mischievousness and inventiveness that can be heard even in their earliest days, on the Black Flag-aping hit Police or the first sign of their real ambition, Baiting the Public.

The latter would go on to form the centre-point of their debut full-length record, 2006's Hidden World. It remains an underrated landmark of the punk genre, an album where Fucked Up announced themselves as the ambitious act they would become famous for in the decade that followed with long, experimental tracks that perhaps have more in common with Düsseldorf in the early 70s than what would traditionally be found in the sweaty basements the band and their peers often frequented. Jump ahead to 2009 and Fucked Up inexplicably won the Polaris Prize (Canada's equivalent to the Mercury Prize or SAY Award) for their follow-up The Chemistry of Common Life, breaking them into mainstream consciousness (as far as such an abrasive name and sound as theirs would allow).

Never resting on their laurels, Fucked Up used the vote of confidence given to them on their award win, and newfound critical plaudits, and wrote an ode to The Who's Tommy with their 2011 rock opera David Comes to Life. Telling the story of the titular David, who experiences love, loss, heartbreak and metaphysical wisdom over a thrilling just-short-of-80-minute epic, it somehow manages to sustain itself under its massively weighty subjects and remains considered one of the best records of this current decade. But if David Comes to Life is Fucked Up's Tommy, then their latest album, Dose Your Dreams, is their Quadrophenia.

In a seemingly impossible feat, Fucked Up – led primarily by Haliechuk in a similar manner that Quadrophenia was almost entirely created by Pete Townshend – have managed to create a record that goes even further than David Comes to Life by creating an equally epic, but much more diverse sounding and wide-reaching record, again without succumbing to the weight of its own ideas. Dose Your Dreams picks up the story of David once more, this time as he goes on a psychedelic journey from losing his monotonous office job to opening his mind to another, higher way of living with the help of sorceress Joyce Tops, which ultimately leads to him finding peace in love with himself, as well as in a romantic and physical sense. At least that's what seems to be the case as, unlike David Comes to Life, Dose Your Dreams has a much looser narrative, fitting with the album's eclectic sound but also due to how it was written and recorded.

"The record magically enough took exactly two years to create," Haliechuk explains. "We started writing and recording in the studio on 15 June 2016 and completed it on the exact same date two years later. It was probably the most fun we've had creating a record, but it was scattered due to Jonah living in London, England. As I don't like the process of sending bits and pieces online, I had plenty of time to think about the lyrics and how the music would accompany it, and then record with Jonah when he was in Toronto, which probably explains why it doesn't sound as streamlined as our previous records."

However, Dose Your Dreams does manage to sound streamlined, despite jumping from genre to genre on a track-by-track basis. The band's secret ace in the hole, Owen Pallet (Final Fantasy, Arcade Fire), who has been contributing string parts for the band since Hidden World, has described Fucked Up's latest as "their Screamadelica." On a couple of tracks, such as the title track (which Pallet plays on) and Talking Pictures, it certainly seems like a fair comparison.

Haliechuk is quick to distance himself from any obvious reference points however, suggesting "the idea was more about asking ourselves, 'What haven't we done before?' Our last Zodiac single, Year of the Snake was one of the longest tracks we've ever written, so I feel we got that desire out our system so we could just concentrate on writing as many straight-up anthems as possible. There was lots of equipment in the studio we hadn't used before such as synths, which drove much of the more electronic or danceable tracks on here simply because it seemed like a fun challenge."

It's not an understatement to say that Dose Your Dreams bangs. On tracks such as I Don't Wanna Live in This World Anymore for instance, the band have seemingly reworked LCD Soundsystem's Call the Police into a punk song and it's one of the most uplifting things you're likely to hear this year. Part of the album's diversity is that, for the first time, Abraham is no longer the singular lead voice on this record with both Haliechuk and Falco now taking on some lead roles, plus there's a whole host of guest vocalists.

"For the past ten years I've been the only member of the band without a microphone in front of me when we play live, so it was largely me thinking 'Fuck it, it's time I stepped up,'" Haliechuk admits. "I was putting down guide vocals on the title track and The One I Want Will Come for Me and pretty much made the snap decision there that I was going to turn them into real takes, even though I don't consider myself a frontperson at all, so I'm a little nervous about performing them live," he laughs. While this is the first time in which Abraham had no part in the writing process, Haliechuk does concede that it was his idea to "pick up David's story again on this, and to have a whole host of vocals on this one, though I think that was partly to cover the fact he's been away making a TV show about wrestling for VICE TV."

Whatever the reason, an important factor of Dose Your Dreams' success is the number of female vocalists who appear here. Sometimes in the lead role (Alice Hansen, Jennifer Castle, Miya Folick) or to complement Abraham's voice, in the case of Sauna Youth's Jen Calleja on Raise Your Voice Joyce and Tell Me What You See. "I gravitate towards female vocals quite naturally and I think they sound great next to Damian's so that was an obvious choice, plus it was nice to introduce our friends to a wider audience," Haliechuk considers. "Jen happened as a result of Jonah recording Sauna Youth's most recent album, which then inspired the accompanying Raise Your Voice Joyce compilation, which is entirely female-fronted and serves both as a backdrop to Joyce's character but also a celebration of important political female figures. We feel strongly about giving women an equal platform to perform, so we hope it's inspirational in some way."

In places, Dose Your Dreams features some of the band's densest work, harking back to their breakout album Hidden World, which they toured in celebration of its 10th anniversary while writing and recording their latest. While Haliechuk remembers that most of the album had been written by that point, there's a spiritual connection to their debut in that "our main ambition was to write something really confident and hard, which I feel happened with Hidden World as our statement of intent out of our origins. Our last record, Glass Boys, was not us at our most confident so it was important to shake that off here."

Lyrically too, Dose Your Dreams can be an exceedingly heavy piece of work, but the looseness of the central themes keep it grounded as something relatable and digestible, which as it turns out was always Haliechuk's main ambition. "I wanted to make a record that will help people and [that they will] find useful beyond music. It is about the revolution of everyday life, taking a look at [what] life is like now and reflecting on issues that affect all of us, such as being lonely and confused in a mass of people. We are just a group of normal people individually, but as a band we transcend that into something meaningful for others and this record is us reflecting upon that."


Dose Your Dreams is released on 5 Oct via Merge; Fucked Up play King Tut's, Glasgow, 22 Jan