That’s my perspective, and this list reflects that. Hidden World, The Chemistry Of Common Life, David Comes To Life, and now Glass Boys (which comes out today) are four of the best punk full-lengths - that is, all-killer-no-filler, front-to-back full-lengths - ever made, even when they barely resemble punk. A big pile of singles does not a singles band make. It’s light on non-LP material because, to my ears, Fucked Up have always saved their best songs for their LPs. Hell, I’ve got a friend who can only get into the Zodiac series, which might surprise even its makers.įeel free to consider all that a disclaimer about the list that follows. There’s the hardcore lifers who are only interested in the old seven-inches, and there’s indie-rock fans whose first exposure to the band came when The Chemistry Of Common Life won the Polaris Prize and only like the LPs. The problem with constructing any kind of a definitive list of the best Fucked Up songs is that plenty of Fucked Up fans only identify with one or two of the coexisting versions of the band. You can’t fully understand Fucked Up until you’ve seen Damian Abraham lope around an audience, sweating and shedding on grateful recipients, while the tightest band in punk looms onstage behind him like a circle of ambivalent monoliths. Beyond all that, they’re first and foremost a live act. They’re aesthetes, drawn to symbology and the art of the sleek, simple record sleeve. They’re punk rock fanboys on an apparent Sisyphean mission to cover every obscure Canadian hardcore band ever. They’re also art-rock weirdos who channel their least marketable urges in the 15-minute-plus A-sides of their Zodiac 12-inch series. They’re critic-friendly rock stars, affable in interviews and happy to play festival showcases.
They’re still those basement hardcore heroes, as evidenced by their joy (and the response) when they play tracks off old seven-inches live. The reality is less that Fucked Up evolved from the former band to the latter and more that they exist as both bands simultaneously, plus half a dozen more. When you look at Fucked Up’s discography, it’s easy to force a certain narrative onto their career arc: they started as a hard-charging hardcore band terrorizing tiny Toronto shows and became genre-agnostic critical darlings, capable of comfortably sharing a bill with either Foo Fighters or Final Conflict and selling out venues with “Ballroom” in the name.