Fucked Up
Year of the Goat
TANKCRIMES
It’s funny to think that punk and prog were once sworn enemies. Aesthetically, it makes total sense: One’s short, sharp, and proudly rudimentary, while the other is grand, ornate, and all about the technical bravura. But what’s quaint to think about, from the perspective of 2025, is that such staunch genre polarities were once even a thing. Music today is all about stylistic and era-smashing fluidity. Very occasionally this approach can still go so far that it becomes divisive (just look at how many metalheads hate Sleep Token, as an example), but generally, music today is in a place of remarkable fusion and oscillation, particularly when compared with punk and prog’s heyday.
There are few acts that fuse these two polarities like Toronto’s Fucked Up. The hardcore experimentalists have spent 25 years dismantling genre boundaries, releasing numerous concept albums and punk operas and an extensive series of album/EP hybrids themed around the Chinese zodiac. In my mind, at least, the band’s best albums are actually the likes of Glass Boys and Another Day—concise and lucid indie-hardcore blends that consistently hit with more emotional force than Fucked Up’s elaborate conceptual epics. This isn’t to say that their latest such experiment, Year of the Goat, isn’t fun. These two tracks, both of which are just shy of half an hour in length, literally overflow with ideas. There’s so much strange invention happening that it’s best just to jump in at the deep end and get dragged under.
Some of it is delightfully silly. There’s a lot of rather difficult to discern narrative lore at play (check out this playbook if you want to go all in), and you’ve got to admire Fucked Up’s commitment to their respective characters, who all have their own voices and personalities. However, some sections test the patience, such as the first 10 minutes of “Rivers and Lakes,” which are very, very rock-opera in their pomposity. The whole thing adds up to an odd blend of close and distant. Certain fleeting ideas will really work: a vocal melody, a guitar lead. Then, a bizarre new passage will emerge from nowhere and sweep the rug out from under your feet. This is usually a positive trait, but a relentless hour of it does wear thin.
Nonetheless, Year of the Goat is also an artistically commendable and consistently intriguing experience. Two things can be true at once. If you’ve ever taken psychedelics you might have experienced a similar paradox; being constantly stimulated by an array of novel, exciting sensory stimuli, but also being a bit worn-down by the elongated strangeness.
