This is the third full-length from FUCKED UP this year. Even vocalist Damian seems struck by this development. At least, that’s the feeling I get from listening to his introductions on his podcast, Turned Out a Punk, when he’s sharing recent band updates. Tellingly, he also says they have one show in December in Toronto and then only one for the first few months of 2025. They’re not a band that tours relentlessly (anymore) but the tone of his voice as he shares that development signals a bit of weariness with matters relating to the band.
Maybe I’m just reading too much into things. Damian has also alluded to the fact that he’s not as involved in the songwriting or lyric writing with the band as he was even 10 years ago. Or, that’s what I glean from Vish Khanna’s Kreative Kontrol podcast episodes where Mike has been a featured guest. Whatever the case, this is as prolific as the band has ever been in terms of songs and releases in a given year. There was also a digital-only single, a cover song on a comp, and three one-day-only digital live album releases from this year’s summer tour. Like I said, it’s a lot.
That said, this process seems to be fruitful for them in the sense that it reflects the ways that bands need to be a little creative and out-of-the-box in order to continue making a living playing music. I’m speaking here of their practice (five times this year now) of making an album available on Bandcamp for only 24 hours. For most bands, that process probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. Surprise dropping albums is one thing; making them ephemeral is another. But that speaks to the touch-and-go (not only in the record label sense!) nature of the sounds that brought the band together. Strike while the iron’s hot because that fire is not going to last.
This record, of course, is the third in the day cycle, following 2023’s "One Day" and the August 2024 release of "Another Day." At that point, I figured that was it for the cycle. The overriding question of “what could you do with just one day?” expressed with a pre-COVID album and then that same process later on in 2022. So, two variations on the same theme. In my review of “Who’s Got the Time and A Half?,” I figured that was the logical extent of the project. Now, it seems there are at least four parts to it and this is the third. That also means “Who’s Got the Time and a Half?” isn’t part of the same cycle, even if it’s made from similar ingredients. Someday, it’ll all make sense.
A discerning listener can infer that the fourth album will be entitled "Today" given this lyric from “I Took My Mom to Sleep,” the fourth song on this album. It goes, “One day, you’ll understand, my keepsake / another day, comes after the heartbreak / someday, we’ll be free together / but today, you are my seed in a feather.” I was thinking it would be everyday but what do I know? There’s still time for it to be released this year, too. They marked December’s Bandcamp Friday with the release of “Someday (guitar),” which, as the title indicates, is the base guitar tracks for the album itself—nothing else. It raises the question of whether they’ll eventually go full Trent Reznor and release all of the base tracks from their recordings for their fans to use for remixing purposes. That seems unlikely given that most NIN fans are already interested in the idea of computer software based remixes, while the guitar-centric punk fans in FUCKED UP’s ant army are unlikely to obsess over the elements of the recordings in the same way.
As for the album itself, the descriptor on Bandcamp calls it psychedelic punk and that’s not too far off the mark. There are repeating cycles of riffs that seem almost hypnotic when listened to on the guitar-only version of the album. It’s fuzzy, buzzy, and busy. The harshness of Damian’s lead vocals take a back seat, as he appears on only two of the songs as the main vocalist. Mike, and other singers with less blood and bile in their throats, makes up the remainder. When Damian shares the mic with Max Williams of RIFLE on “Man without Qualities,” the relentless obnoxiousness of the chorus grates with repeated listens. I was hoping this would be an autobiographical song about Josh Zucker, Mike’s guitar complement, as he has used this pseudonym as a credit previously. Sadly, that does not seem to be the case. Had it been so, it would have fit in with the album’s exploration of personalities and perspectives that are different from those of the band members who usually write the lyrics (i.e., Mike and Damian).
In that respect, just as “Glass Boys” was mostly about trying to make sense of your life in the punk scene as you grow older within it, “Someday” seems to concern how everyone outside of white punks find their way through a society that has made the idea of kinship and families necessarily fragile and tenuous because of fraying social ties. It’s not about the war atrocities or the heartlessness of those in power but the embodied effects of living through those policies. The lyrics to “In the Company of Sisters” speak to that directly: The same hands you used to hold me / are the ones they use to control me / they want to criminalize our lives / I’m gonna set your world on fire. A song supporting reproductive rights would not have sounded as good from this band had they tried it 15 years ago. That’s not because anything in their politics has changed—their sound is more expansive now and can more easily accommodate a topic like this one. I was also surprised at how hard “Feed Me Your Feathers” would hit me when I read the actual lyrics. “I held my daughter in my arms / so she’d be there for someone else” is a line I couldn’t imagine from this band before now.
That ability to inhabit other perspectives and make them believable is a recurring theme on the album. There’s the frightened and alienated shut-in of “City Boy” alongside the refugee child of “Grains of Paradise,” the concerned mother of “Feed Me Your Feathers,” and two sides of the same coin in “Man without Qualities” and “The Court of Miracles.” In that first track, the lyrics describe a latchkey kid in a family that has guns to protect itself against imagined government intrusion. Things go wrong in the last line of the song when the kid left alone fires a shot that “finds a home in another child.” On the next song, the perspective shifts to a bike messenger immigrant to the United States, who knows it’s a place where “everybody can be somebody, but if your skin is dark, be careful who you are.” At the end of this song, the protagonist hears a gunshot near a regular delivery spot. When he cries for help, a resident replies “he’ll call the cops if I don’t get off their property.” There may still be other connections between the characters in these songs but this one stood out as readily apparent and emblematic of the album's idea that we are all connected in ways that might not always seem clear.
The title track is still throwing me for a loop. For one, there’s what sounds like a mistimed cut-and-paste hiccup at the 1:12 mark. Then, there’s the fact that the song itself is about a baby who is also a grown man making his way through the world. Only the chorus brings me back to reality: someday it’ll all make sense / someday, it’ll all make sense / I’ll find a place where I belong / and stay there until it’s time to come home. The video doesn’t help matters and its use of swapping of the band members’ faces onto babies is also confusing and off-putting. It’s a lot to take in, even as it seems quite simple on its surface. I hope that someday it will make sense. For now, I’m glad to have this record in my life. As the chasing arrows in the o of the album title indicate, it’s easy to let someday become never as time marches on. It’s up to us to make sense of the world we’re given, as confusing, contradictory, and frightening as it may be.
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