Fucked Up

Cops [Ep] (2023)

John Gentile

Fucked Up are never above a little meta-commentary and that’s one of the things that makes this infinitely complicated band that much more complicated and that much more fun. “Cops” is the … gasp… TWENTY YEAR response to the seminal “Police” single. While “Police” found Fucked up being the champs of neo-hardcore at the time, “Cops” finds the band looking back on themselves and the social architecture of capitalism. Now, the band is more heralded for their college rock concept albums and abstract experimentalism than for their perfection of the hardcore genre. Nodding to that, the band cuts a hardcore track as they are now, not as they were. “Cops” has the big, bright sound of modern Fucked Up, but the energetic charge of the band’s classic first slabs. Perhaps sadly, the message in the music is the same… except the “Police” cut was almost a such as a commentary on punk tuned about the police as it was the actual police, whereas “Cops” seems much more timely and relatable.

“fucks,” the response to the “Police” b-side is a bit more on the trad-hardcore style, though at times it verges into Integrity territory, especially at the end where singer Damian Abraham howls. They end with a surprise cover of Orbital’s “Quality Seconds” and turn the instrumental into a straight up hardcore smasher, thereby circling back around to whence they came. Fucked Up is at their best when they are weird or heady, and they are both here, and all that means is that 20 years in… the band is still at their best.