Fucked Up on One Day

“When we were young and didn’t have any money, making a record in a day was a necessity.”

Early 2021 marked two decades since Toronto’s premier hardcore outfit played their first shows. At the time, their creative mastermind, Mike Haliechuk, was locked down along with the rest of the world, and while the themes that would inform the sixth Fucked Up full-length were still something he was ruminating on, he already had the songs in his back pocket.

There was a sense, maybe, that Fucked Up as a project had become too big, too sprawling, almost unmanageable. With every release, they’ve demonstrated ambition and a burning want to do something new, but the sheer scope of the band had meant that by the time they completed a world tour in 2019 behind the previous year’s Dose Your Dreams, they were continuing to spin a host of different plates. Their Zodiac series of epic one-off tracks released on 12-inch was still going strong, live albums were in the works, and instantly recognisable frontman Damian Abraham was harnessing the charisma that makes him such a force of nature onstage in new sidelines as a documentarian and podcast host.

Haliechuk began to yearn for a reset, and thought back to the group’s early days. “We would turn out 7-inches literally overnight, because that was when studios were empty and we could use them cheaply,” he recalls on a transatlantic call from Toronto. “I remember doing the Generation 12-inch in 2003 through the night, and then driving ten hours back from Philadelphia because people had to be back at their day jobs on Monday morning.”

Over the years, he says, gradually bigger budgets meant slowly relaxing into looser timeframes, until, by the time they put out Year of the Horse in 2021, it was the product of “five or six years of fucking around”; Dose Your Dreams, meanwhile, resulted from “two years of constant fuckery, tinkering away until it was perfect.” Once he was off the road in 2019, Haliechuk was ready for a hairpin turn.

Without telling his bandmates, he went into the studio with engineer Alex Gamble for three eight-hour sessions across three days – for 24 hours in total. The goal was to make a record in a day. One Day is the remarkable fruit of those sessions. “I was quite strict about it,” he explains. “It really was 24 hours maximum with a guitar in my hand. At the end, I had ten songs, I had them sequenced, I knew what the B-sides were going to be, and I knew I didn’t need to come back for overdubs. And then, you know, I had to go to the rest of the band and hope they were cool with the idea. And, thankfully, they were.”

The results are beguiling; musically, One Day is scored through with the kind of broiling urgency that inevitably falls by the wayside when you spend years agonising over every detail of an album, as Haliechuk acknowledges. “I knew I wanted to be more straightforward; to be harder and more aggressive. Plans and preconceptions about what you’re going to do on an album are one thing, but once you’re in the room with an instrument in your hand, whatever is going to come out, comes out. I just made sure I put pylons up over the off-ramps; I did everything I could to make sure I didn’t veer off into some other zone with what I was doing.”

Lyrically, though, One Day is highly considered, with Abraham drafted back into the writing process for the first time since 2014 and both he and Haliechuk using an extended period of reflection to brood over the subtleties of recent changes in their lives, especially across the pandemic period. Cicada is a deeply thoughtful lament to those they lost over the past three years, while lead single Found turns gripes about the gentrification of Toronto on their head.

“The city has been changing a lot, structurally, over the past ten years,” says Haliechuk. “It seems like the only things being built are these massive condo buildings that everybody despises, and places we loved – venues, our practice space – are being destroyed to make way for them. But, on Found, I was thinking about the bigger picture on issues of change, and thinking that it’s easy to forget that you’re that person for somebody who came before you. Instead of being an angry old guy complaining that my favourite store closed down, I was thinking, what culture was erased so that my ancestors could come to live here? That seems like a more appropriate way to think about change.”

Transformation, of course, is something written into the very DNA of Fucked Up, with One Day representing their latest shedding of old skin. “If there’s been a tension in our band over the past 20 years,” Haliechuk reflects, “it’s that we’ve picked up new audiences and alienated old ones as we’ve gone along.

“But I’ve always just thought that it’s so easy for punk bands to become a part of history, for genre bands to be sucked into the past and just play songs from 40 years ago over and over again. Things change over the years – you might start a family, you might have different jobs or interests – but, to me, I’ve never wanted to do anything other than write music. That’s why I’ve always tried to keep us moving forward, towards whatever the new thing is. I think it’s served us well.”