While many of their contemporaries rely on raw simplicity, Fucked Up have built their reputation on redefining what punk can be - making hardcore bigger, grander, and more ambitious than anyone thought possible. Concept albums, double LPs, multi-part rock operas with dense instrumentation, shifting time signatures, and complex narratives all within a genre traditionally built on stark simplicity. Their most recent album Someday, conversely, is sharp and lean. Ten tracks, forty minutes, and no wasted space, as the band zooms in on human-scale struggles rather than aiming for the cosmos, with each song sketching out a different life caught in crisis. It’s a furious, melodic, and deeply political record - but by stripping away their usual excess, Fucked Up has made one of their most immediate and gripping albums to date.

Opening with City Boy, a darkly funny portrait of a delusional man consumed by paranoia, Someday runs through a series of sharply drawn character studies set to some of modern rock’s catchiest, most anthemic choruses. I Took My Mum to Sleep emerges as the album’s emotional high point, with an utterly gut-wrenching performance from guest vocalist Tuka Mohammed, bringing an aching vulnerability to a song that spirals between tenderness and despair as a wall of voices, a choir of incantations stacked upon each other, swell to a rapturous climax. The album’s harrowing moments continue on In The Company of Sisters, featuring Julianna Roilino, following in the feminist punk tradition of pairing deeply disturbing subject matter with high-energy catharsis, flipping rage into resilience. Throughout the record, voices come crashing in, multiplying and stretching outward like waves, harmonies spiraling in every direction like a sacred hymn.

Throughout their career, Fucked Up have occupied an unusual space in punk’s evolution - too intricate and ambitious to fit within hardcore’s traditional confines, yet far too aggressive to slot neatly into mainstream alternative rock playlists. Their previous works positioned them as punk’s grand maximalists, unafraid to challenge the genre’s limits, but they also exist in stark contrast to a lot of modern punk, where so much of today’s landscape is dominated by an icy, detached, and often self-consciously cool post-punk revivalist sound. Fucked Up is unashamadely big - big emotions, big choruses, big political statements. Every record was bigger, more expansive, more ambitious, infusing hardcore with orchestral grandeur, and testing the very limits of what a punk band could sound like.

Like several of their recent releases, Someday was recorded with each band member having only twenty-four hours to record their parts. But because they’ve spent years honing their ability to think on a grand scale, what emerges isn’t undercooked - it’s refined. The compositions are layered, the melodies are massive, the songs are packed with ideas, and every song feels brimming with purpose. Despite the emotional weight of its themes and the sheer volume of the arrangements, Someday is an absolute joy to listen to, exploding with infectious hooks, relentless momentum, and gut-wrenching vocal performances.