Happy Chinese New Year, everybody. May your Year of the Ox be Fucked Up. But first, the raucous Canadians in Fucked Up are sending off the old year with a 12" and digital EP featuring 11-minute A-side "Year of the Rat". Yes, this thing has been in the works for a while. Recorded at the end of 2008, the track is a guitar-stacked epic apparently intended to memorialize the year when everybody kept talking about change and stuff... think Hawkwind. It's tough to make out all the lyrics as Pink Eyes barks them, but it's hard to mistake the political quotes at the end as coming from any other lunar year. Good riddance, Rat-- choose your poison.[from the Year of the Rat EP; due 03/24/09 on What's Your Rupture]