Fucked Up Released Video For “Cicada”

This Friday, January 27th, Toronto’s Fucked Up will release their highly
anticipated new album, One Day, via Merge Records. Today, they present its
final single/video, “Cicada.” Dedicated to lost friends, the bittersweet“Cicada”
features guitarist Mike Haliechuk on lead vocals. Directed by Colin Medley,
the black-and-white video is an intimate look at the life of Fucked Up.

In Haliechuk’s words: “‘Cicada’ is about what life is like after you lose people,
and our responsibility to carry them forward into the future, using the things
they taught us as a light. I like to imagine the sound of cicadas as a metaphor for
our strange life in the subculture—we all just live these weird little hidden lives
under the dirt, and then once in a generation, one of us gets to bust out of the
dirt and intone their song so loud that it can be heard all over.”

Written and recorded in the span of one literal day, One Day sees the band
delivering one of the most energizing and intricate albums of their entire
career. The Canadian hardcore legends have been known for their epic scale in
the past, from towering concept albums to 12-hour performances—so it might
be a surprise that Fucked Up’s sixth studio album is their shortest to date, but
it’s simply a massive-sounding record that arrives in deceptively small confines.

The idea to write and record an album in one day came to mind for Haliechuk in
the closing months of 2019, and it forms the ideological and structural backbone
of One Day. Haliechuk got himself into a studio and proceeded to write and
record the record’s ten tracks over three eight-hour sessions, reconnecting with
the core of his and the band’s songwriting essence in the process. Though work
on One Day was completed remotely, Fucked Up as a whole adhered to the
24-hour rule during the creative process, including vocalist Damian Abraham
(who returned to contributing lyrics as well for the first time since 2014’s Glass
Boys).

The resulting One Day is a record that sounds full-bodied and immediate, with
music that burns brutally and passionately in a way that only Fucked Up can
evoke. The guitars sound like ziggurats reaching to the sky, reaching dizzying
levels of melodic interplay while always maintaining a tuneful clarity. It’s an
undeniable work of confidence from a band that continues to operate at the top
of their game, making music that’s guaranteed to last a lifetime and beyond.