Earlier this summer EDM star Avicii played a show at Boston’s TD Garden arena, and upwards of 80 people at the show needed medical attention for intoxication-related issues. When that story broke, it was easy to pin the blame on big-time festival rave music and the culture surrounding it. But then, getting fucked up at [...]

Two years ago, the young Brooklyn-based rock band Nude Beach released their album II, deeply enjoyable piece of classic-rock-informed punk. Every song aimed straight for the pleasure center and hit its target, and I fucked up badly when I didn’t give it Album Of The Week. (Seriously, in three years of writing that column, it’...

The Canadian music network Much Music is the station that employs Fucked Up frontman Damian Abraham as a VJ, but it’s still best understood as a more-local MTV analog, something that comes through pretty clearly if you look at the station’s annual Much Music Video Awards show, which went down this past weekend. Despite its [...]

When you look at Fucked Up’s discography, it’s easy to force a certain narrative onto their career arc: they started as a hard-charging hardcore band terrorizing tiny Toronto shows and became genre-agnostic critical darlings, capable of comfortably sharing a bill with either Foo Fighters or Final Conflict and selling out venu...

According to legend, punk rock began as a reaction against classic-rock excess. But every revolution calcifies into tradition eventually, and every rebellious kid has to grapple with growing up. On top of that inexorable life cycle, we’re living in an era of synthesis and quasi-universalism, when most of the taboos that helped keep mus...