News

Fucked Up Explains Enigmatic Album Artwork

7:38 p.m. · January 3, 2011 · by Jacob Kaplan

Canadian hardcore-and-beyond sextet Fucked Up have a thing for esoterica. It shows in their lyrics, but, perhaps more apparently, it shows in their album artwork. Pretty much each and every Fucked Up release (and, wow, are there a lot, if you count all those obscure singles, splits and tapes) features artwork at once beautiful, shocking, perplexing, and, frequently, archaic. According to the band's blog, Looking For Gold, many of those sleeve-decorations are in fact the works of obscure 19th and early 20th Century painters the band unearthed after much time spent combing library archives. A few are modern-day pieces made specifically with the album in mind (the photograph on the cover of "The Chemistry of Common Life" full-length comes to mind), and still others are of uncertain origin. All of them, however, mean something, and Fucked Up are not shy about explaining. Check out said explanations at Matablog or at Looking For Gold.