It might not be printable, but F****d Up have made quite the name for themselves.
The Toronto-based hardcore punk band formed in 2001 and have since released four critically acclaimed studio albums, including 2009’s The Chemistry of Common Life, which won Canada’s Polaris Music Prize and 2011’s David Comes to Life, an ambitious, sprawling rock opera that Pitchfork memorably described as “a convincing demonstration of what can happen when a band works without limitations.” The group’s most recent album, last year’s Glass Boys, is a sober reflection on what it means to grow older within the punk scene.
The group’s latest tour, which will bring them to the Spring Street Firehouse on July 3, sees them forging into new territory. Instead of selecting songs from their four studio albums from their setlist, they’ll instead be performing songs from their Zodiac series, a sequence of annually released EPs that feature experimental tracks far longer than anything else in the band’s discography.
The concept for the series was germinated in 2006 during demo sessions for the band’s debut album Hidden World, based on “Year of the Dog,” a lengthy song written by guitarist and principal songwriter Mike Haliechuk, but the decision to continue the series didn’t occur until the following year, however, during the highly publicized trial of serial killer Robert Pickton, a pig farmer convicted of killing sex workers on his farm.
Troubled by the case, Damian Abraham wrote the lengthy Year of the Pig, “not to exploit that [story] but to deal with it,” he said. During that time, the band worked with organizations that helped protect sex workers, which made the decision to title the EP Year of the Pig “make sense,” according to Abraham.
“The title was kind of morbid — I don’t know if we’d make the same use of that song title today — [but] it fit,” he said.
Year of the Hare, released in June, is the seventh in the series and is as ambient and psychedelic as the band’s music has ever been. The title track, for example, begins with a long stretch of white noise that, as it turns out, is a recording of an empty studio that was in turn played in that studio and recorded again, over and over.
“It’s almost like a separate band,” Abraham said of the series, which is creatively driven by Haliechuk and drummer Jonah Falco. “It doesn’t really operate in the same way F****d Up operates.”
Even the Abraham-penned Year of the Dragon, released last year, stands alone within the group’s discography. “[That] is for all intents and purposes a metal song,” Abraham said. “It’s not the kind of music we would do with F****d Up normally, but it’s like, ‘Might as well try it.’ [Year of the Hare] is just Mike and Jonah going crazy in the studio: ‘Might as well try it.’”
The band seem adept at shrugging away the perils of such large creative leaps. Though this tour marks the first live performances of songs from the Zodiac series, Abraham downplays the challenge of bringing such experimental tracks to the stage — “It’s actually surprising how quickly the songs actually go by,” he said — in favor of expressing his excitement over the novel aspects of the tour.
“After so many years of touring, there were songs we ended up playing a lot,” Abraham said. “And we have several albums’ worth of material that we just never played. So we figured we’d try that out for a bit.”
The tour is also rendering Abraham’s sentiment that the Zodiac series is by a different band surprisingly literal. Toronto ambient trio Doomsquad has been added to the band’s onstage lineup for the duration of the tour.
“For us, the most exciting element is that we’re like vampires sucking the life force of Doomsquad, who have added other instruments and another whole aspect to playing live,” Abraham said. “Especially given the type of band they are — they haven’t played a lot of shows like the shows we play, so living through their reactions [to the crowd] is fun.”
The band’s typically high-energy live shows often end up with Abraham bloodied and at least partially naked — though with the exception of a few numbers, such as the police-brutality song “Police,” the mood is rarely anything other than violently euphoric.
Last year, Abraham, fully clothed, moderated a Toronto mayoral debate focused on government support of the arts. It’s a subject about which Abraham harbors strong feelings.
“We live in, for better or worse, a capitalist society, and unfortunately, money has to come from somewhere,” he said, mentioning a friend’s album titled Bands Don’t Run on Good Intentions and Records Aren’t Pressed with Hugs — “which never came out because they ran out of money,” Abraham added.
Abraham says that establishing funding for the arts, governmental or otherwise, is important because it stands in opposition to the current reality of corporate-funded art, “which is a lot like we had in the ‘50s, with companies paying for culture back then.”
“I think art that comes out of funding is generally a lot more subversive than the art that comes out of corporate money,” he added. “And I think you need subversive art to help move along the culture at times.”
Abraham points to rapper Killer Mike, whose lyrics openly condemn the oligarchical nature of America, as an artist making this type of important, subversive art.
“But I think there could be more,” he added. “This is not nostalgia, because I definitely did not like these bands at the time, but in the late ’90s, when you had bands like Rage Against the Machine or Chumbawamba, at least they were out there in the mainstream saying something. It seems like it was so long ago now.”
For Abraham, this desire for uncompromising music extends into his work with F****d Up. “All you can hope to do at the end of the day is be the band and write the record that comes out. It’ll make you crazy trying to guess what people are going to want,” he said. “I’ve always just wanted to be in a punk band that finds a way to keep that spirit alive.”
F****d Up will perform at the Spring Street Firehouse on Friday, July 3. They will be joined onstage by Doomsquad. Doors will open at 8 p.m.; the show begins at 9 p.m. Tickets for the all-ages show are $13 in advance and $15 the day of the show. For more information, visit saturnbirmingham.com.