Fucked Up have been working on a series of albums based on the Zodiac for the past 20 years, and their latest release, Year of the Rooster, is the 12th and final installment in this project. The album’s lead single, “Good Goat Saw a Leaf”, showcases the band’s ability to blend different styles, including alternative rock, hardcore, prog, folk, sludge metal, and heavy metal. The song is a five-minute clusterbomb of musical ideas, with numerous vocalists trading positions and complementary timbres and voices from across the underground rock, punk, and hardcore landscape.
The ambition of this closing project is satisfying in a deeply intellectual way, using three Zodiac releases to tell a single gargantuan 5-hour story over a mere 10 epic-length tracks. The music itself justifies the scale, with ideas moving freely in and out of each other. Fucked Up are not just the rightful inheritors to the throne of Husker Du but also arguably the best and most ambitious band of their musical world potentially ever.
Honorable Mentions
200 Stab Wounds – “Pangs of Conscience” is a death metal track that passes through a number of styles, from up-tempo melodic death metal to progressive death metal abstraction to pure hardcore pummel. The song keeps itself contained to just a few minutes, letting clean singable melodies hang in the air long enough for you to sink your teeth into them.
Haywire – “Sincerely Yours” captures perfectly the complex rough lives of people who often grow up to be punks, metalheads, and the scuzzy alternative folk interwoven into common life. The song is a great rough-throated alternative rock song just on the edge of hardcore, retaining that necessary messiness to convey its sincerity.
Mental Cruelty – “Frost” is a symphonic black metal influenced track that exemplifies deathcore at its best. The band wields a post-Immolation sense of quite kingly riffs, a wide range of harsh vocals to pull out different emotional substrates of the song, and some incredible blastbeats that feel vicious rather than mechanical.
In conclusion, Fucked Up‘s Year of the Rooster is a monumental release that showcases the band’s ambition and musical prowess. With “Good Goat Saw a Leaf” as its lead single, the album is a must-listen for fans of alternative rock, hardcore, and heavy metal. The honorable mentions, including 200 Stab Wounds, Haywire, and Mental Cruelty, also demonstrate the diversity and talent of the metal and punk scenes, making this a great week for music fans.
Pixel P. Snarkbyte, widely regarded as the “Shakespeare of Sh*tposts,” is a video game expert with a unique knack for turning pixels into punchlines.
Born in the small town of Respawn, Pennsylvania, Pixel grew up mashing buttons on an ancient NES controller, firmly believing that “blowing into the cartridge” was a sacred ritual passed down through generations.
Pixel P. Snarkbyte: proving that life, much like a buggy open-world game, is better with a little lag-induced chaos.
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