Band: Fucked Up
Album: Disabuse
Label: Sub-Pop
Released: 3/14/2025
Bandcamp
I first heard Canadian hardcore giants FUCKED UP in 2011 after picking up their first two LPs at my local record store (RIP Size Records). Hidden World (Jade Tree/Deranged Recs, 2006) was itself paradigm changing for me, a sonic wall that straddled the line between hardcore and psych rock in a way that compromised no single component part. By comparison Chemistry of Common Life (Matador, 2008) was like a form of ego death—a blueprint for maximalist extreme music that I had heretofore not been privy. The first song on the album, “Son the Father,” starts with a fucking flute solo that bleeds into guitar feedback that then turns into something absolutely fucking transcendent before Damian Abraham’s bellicose scream tears the whole motherfucker down and you’re moshing, you’re just moshing, wherever you happen to be in that moment.
I was lucky to have learned about the band in 2011, as coincidence would have it that was the year they released their first concept album, David Comes To Life, a story about a factory worker who falls in love with an activist, is radicalized, and has to watch shit fall apart when their plan to liberate the other workers goes horribly awry. And look, I like David Comes To Life just fine. I think the music is wonderful, the ideas they’re playing with are interesting and very in keeping with the rest of FUCKED UP’s discography, but I do also think they began the process of inserting their whole heads up their ass on this one. If Chemistry was a blueprint of the possibilities this kind of maximalist hardcore could play with, David was an establishment of its limitations. And I’ll be honest, I kind of fell off the train after that as I thought the edge was slowly seeping out through the margins of the band’s work.
I shouldn’t have doubted them. They have nothing to prove to any hardcore critic to begin with, but their forays into weird soundscapes has never prevented them from absolutely fucking ripping when necessary. This is not a band who has ever gone soft. And they prove it handily with Disabuse, this new two-track EP on Sub-Pop.
What surprised me the most about this 7-inch was Sub-Pop’s marketing copy, which reads in part: “‘Disabuse’ and ‘Self Driving Man’ are unlikely light-speed cuts of pure hardcore from Fucked Up. These tracks bleed off the record, having been born from the indelible stamp of Poison Idea’s 1990 anti-oppression anthem ‘Discontent’ and Japanese punk legends Paintbox’s ‘The Door.’” Bands and labels of course have used comparisons before but these pulls are extremely specific. And like I love PAINTBOX, but who in 2025 is making anything inspired by them? FUCKED UP is, I guess. And I’m here for it.
So what we have here is a breezy seven minutes of throwback hardcore from the folks over at FUCKED UP, and it starts off extremely strong with “Disabuse,” a ferocious love-letter to Damian’s trans kid that plants a clear flag where it belongs: “Zero fucks left to give/ Death to all of those (homophobes/transphobes/xenophobes).” It’s honestly really sweet in an appropriately menacing way. This is the “Discontent” analogue, which is fitting because POISON IDEA was approaching scene unity with a similarly menacingly positive position: get the Nazis out by any means necessary.
“Self-Driving Man” is a demented critique of car culture where Damian temporarily inhabits the perspective of a guy who just got a bigass car (pick a car, any car) and is running pedestrians off the road and generally just being a menace to society with the kind of impunity usually only afforded to cops and Elon Musk (as of late). Musically, this is the PAINTBOX analogue, and it mainly shows up in the harmonizing guitar parts and the (extremely brief and faint) horn section that appears on the track. Wildly, I enjoyed this track slightly less than “Disabuse,” though let’s be clear: both tracks go very hard. And played by itself as a self-contained unit, the Disabuse 7-inch is primo shit. I was right to get excited for this one.