Heavy Song of the Week: F**ked Up Bring Progressive Hardcore to “Good Goat Saw a Leaf”

Heavy Song of the Week is a feature on Heavy Consequence breaking down the top metal, punk, and hard rock tracks you need to hear every Friday. This week, we highlight the new single “Good Goat Saw a Leaf” from Fucked Up.

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Fucked Up have for the past 20 years been slowly constructing a series of albums based on the Zodiac in parallel to their primary catalog. For years both in coverage and in a lot of fan spaces, these releases were overlooked, with eyes predominantly focusing on records like The Hidden World, The Chemistry of Common Life and David Come to Life. But in the background, a dense and polyphonic sonic world was being stitched together by the band, weaving elements of alternative rock, hardcore, prog, folk, sludge metal and even, as of Year of the Goat, Iron Maiden-style heavy metal. “Good Goat Saw a Leaf,” one of the two lead singles from their 12th and final Zodiac record Year of the Rooster, wields all of those and more in a single five-minute clusterbomb of musical ideas.

The ambition of this closing project, using three Zodiac releases to tell a single gargantuan 5-hour story over a mere 10 epic-length tracks drawing together not just all of the Zodiac records but also much of their primary catalog to boot, is satisfying in a deeply intellectual way. But it is the music itself here that justifies that scale. Ideas move freely in and out of each other, with numerous vocalists trading positions with complementary timbres and voices from across the underground rock, punk, and hardcore landscape.

Fucked Up are not just the rightful inheritors to the throne of Husker Du but also arguably the best and most ambitious band of their musical world potentially ever. This is the clarion call to the close of a 20-year meta project and they understood the assignment and came with their best.

Honorable Mentions

200 Stab Wounds – “Pangs of Conscience”

Death metal is incredible. On “Pangs of Conscience,” 200 Stab Wounds pass through a number of styles, from up-tempo melodic death metal to progressive death metal abstraction to pure hardcore pummel. There is a thrash portion, very architectural riffing a la Death, and even some classic early Sepultura rippers. And yet despite the many varied approaches to this most perfect of genres, it keeps itself contained to just a few minutes, lets clean singable melodies hang in the air long enough for you to sink your teeth into them, and keeps free enough of some of the more bizarre and mystical wings of the genre that it should prove welcoming to newcomers not yet initiated into this greatest of human inventions, death metal. Plus, just, the name.

Haywire – “Sincerely Yours”

Haywire capture perfectly the complex rough lives of people who often grow up to be punks, metalheads, and the scuzzy alternative folk interwoven into common life. The song is a great rough-throated alternative rock song just on the edge of hardcore, retaining that necessary messiness to convey its sincerity. As much as the musical element is perfect pop wrapped in lovely distortion, it’s the lyrical component that makes this track really sing. I can only speak for myself, but it touches on a real sense of not-quite-nostalgia, the confusion and yearning and anger of growing up too strange. Hardcore is about unity. Haywire know that to their bones.

Mental Cruelty – “Frost”

It is not the mere fact of the symphonic black metal influence on “Frost” that makes it so compelling, nor is it just the very charismatic vocals. It’s that the band doesn’t do one of the cardinal sins of much of deathcore and metalcore, that being shoehorning in a melodic section or clean vocal seemingly just for the sake of it. Nor do they include lyrical passages that read, at the genre’s worst, like the kind of petulant misogyny you get from a young teenager. Mental Cruelty exemplify deathcore at its best, wielding a post-Immolation sense of quite kingly riffs, a wide range of harsh vocals to pull out different emotional substrates of the song, and some incredible blastbeats that feels vicious rather than mechanical. It’s a testament to the power the genre holds in the right hands.