Hardcore, especially that of a New York flavour, can be a blunt-force instrument, a heavy hit of testosterone delivered with a scowl and a clenched fist. Opening tonight for Fucked Up, Big Cheese buck that trend by being enormous fun from start to finish. It does them no harm that vocalist Tom Hardwick is a seasoned rabble-rouser, or that guitarists Maegan Brooks Mills and Louis Hardy embellish their whiplash Cro-Mags/Sick Of It All thrash with the sort of symphonic riffage and faintly ridiculous flourishes you might expect to find on an early Iron Maiden album. You can’t help but crack a smile.

Hardwick may profess scepticism about the concept of water in a can, but he’s in no doubt as to the abilities of those on stage behind him, and rightly appreciative of their efforts. When Big Cheese’s set of pocket ragers reaches its premature conclusion, that same sentiment radiates back from the audience.

Torontonian legends Fucked Up are also nominally a hardcore band, though they’ve spent practically their entire career looking outwards rather than inwards, doing what you might least expect. The Chemistry Of Common Life, their 2008 album, was launched with a 12-hour gig in a Brooklyn record shop and won the Polaris Prize, Canada’s equivalent of the Mercury; its followup, 2011’s David Comes To Life, is an ambitious/audacious rock opera double LP set in Thatcher’s Britain. They released a series of 12”s named after signs of the Chinese Zodiac, and enlisted everyone from Yo La Tengo to GZA and comedian David Cross to record a cover of Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? to raise awareness of missing and murdered Aboriginal women.  

Given that Fucked Up have expended so much energy resisting and escaping the constrictions of a narrowly codified genre, new album One Day is effectively a double bluff, because they chose to impose a rigid limitation on themselves: each band member had a maximum of 24 hours to write and record their parts. The result is the leanest and most focused LP they’ve put out to date, one that flirts with pop-punk and Hüsker Dü melodicism and draws in stadium-sized guitar tones without sacrificing pace or power.

Tonight’s set opens with its first three tracks – Found, I Think I Might Be Weird (an outlier that bears the imprint of previous collaborations with Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig) and the epic and ferocious Huge New Her (which sees Deafheaven’s Infinite Granite and goes all in) – and features five more of One Day’s 10 songs. While the consequent lack of material from The Chemistry Of Common Life in particular is a mild disappointment personally, it’s good to see a band of Fucked Up’s vintage bullish about and heavily invested in their present rather than their past. On 2014 album Glass Boys, they reflected on the ageing process within the punk scene, and much has changed over the last two decades. The emergence of The Armed and Turnstile, for example, has taken hardcore into new directions, and within this band things are different too.

Guitarist Ben Cook left in 2021, and frontman Damian Abraham no longer marauds around the moshpit topless and sweaty, or crushes drinks cans into his forehead. Ever the affable enthusiast, though, he hails Llygod Ffyrnig’s N.C.B. as one of the first DIY punk songs and talks warmly about the episode of his podcast Turned Out A Punk featuring Gruff Rhys, from which he learned a wealth of information about Welsh-language punk.

It’s a marker of Fucked Up’s egalitarian ethos that Abraham shares vocal duties with everyone except founder and chief songwriter Mike Haliechuk: guitarist Josh Zucker, drummer Jonah Falco, bereted bad-ass bassist Sandy Miranda and Maegan Brooks Mills, doing double time to fill the Cook-sized hole. Each member may have recorded their contributions to One Day in isolation, but collectively they remain a tight-knit unit.

As befits a band who place as much emphasis on community work as on their prodigious recorded output, the gig is less an aggressive confrontation between performers and crowd and more joyful communal catharsis. In other hands, a song titled I Don’t Wanna Live In This World Anymore would be a defeatist emo dirge; in theirs, it sounds like a clarion call to create a better one.

Fucked Up / Big Cheese, Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff, Sat 11 Mar

words BEN WOOLHEAD photos NADINE BALLANTYNE