Fucked Up’s Damian Abraham: “I stand behind everything I’ve said on this record”

After that – having stretched themselves further than ever, creating the most material they could hope to – it seems they weren’t too sure what would, or even could, come next. “I think the last time,” offers the band’s amiable frontman Damian Abraham, “I can’t even remember writing that record. I stopped writing songs at a certain point. I was just like, ‘I have nothing left to say. I’m done! I don’t know what I’m going to write about, Mike’. That’s why Mike [Haliechuk, guitar] wrote the vast majority of songs on ‘David Comes To Life’.

“I think this time around, I was engaged the whole time. I was definitely aware of the number of songs I was working on, and able to focus on them. I was even writing from my own perspective, and it felt really easy to find my voice in the songs. It was really easy for me to be like, ‘This is what I want to say.’”

What Abraham decided to deal with on the band’s fourth record was, in fact, that much closer to home. Gone was their “attempt at a fairy tale”, and in its place came real life. He turned to his own voice for the first time in a long time, casting aside the narrator costume that he had so often worn before. “The protective costume of hiding behind a character is gone,” he confirms. “Very, very early on in this band, I would write songs that were personal, but they were very angry because I was going through a terribly angry time in my life. Then, as the band carried on, I became very much a distant observer, talking more about the grand themes of this world.

“This is the first time, since the very beginning, that it’s written in the first person. There’s a vulnerability that I don’t necessarily always want to admit - about crying and missing my kids - but it’s real. It’s the honest way that I feel. At least I stand behind everything I’ve said on this record, and I can get behind it. I feel like if I hadn’t, then that would be lying. I’d also be lying if I said I wasn’t a little more apprehensive of this album coming out; being simultaneously so proud of something but at the same time, being so anxious and nervous of something because it’s just an extension of who you are.”

Fucked Up’s new album ‘Glass Boys’ is out now via Matador Records.

Tags: Fucked Up, News