Fucked Up – “Normal People” Video

Fucked Up – “Normal People” Video

Towards the end of July, Fucked Up announced a new album called Dose Your Dreams, the successor to their 2014 release Glass Boys and their first for Merge. Along with the announcement, the group shared a ferocious, infectious lead single called “Raise Your Voice Joyce,” which turned out to be our favorite song of that week. That was certainly the main attraction, but the lyric video came with a second half featuring the album cut “Two I’s Closed” and a clip of Jonah Falco rowing a boat. Today, the band is back with the first official video for Dose Your Dreams, “Normal People.”

While “Raise Your Voice Joyce” was a gratifyingly characteristic Fucked Up track, full of Damian Abraham’s somehow-very-catchy roars, “Normal People” is quite different. In fact, it’s quite different from itself over the course of an almost six minute runtime. There aren’t any hard cuts exactly, so it doesn’t quite feel explicitly like a multi-part saga or anything. But “Normal People” casually flips between different voices and aesthetics — opening with a spoken word intro courtesy of John Southworth, then a straight-up indie-rock passage sung by Falco, before Abraham enters almost two minutes in. Then, at its conclusion, “Normal People” drifts out into an instrumental coda dominated by spectral saxophone lines.

Directed by Fucked Up member Mike Haliechuk, the video for “Normal People” follows the song’s structure and functions like a series of snapshots woven together — or, as they put it in a press release, “vignettes that attempt to make sense of daily life.” There are clips of quotidian activity, people eating or milling around during their morning routines and subway commutes, and there is once more Falco in that suit and rowboat. Eventually, we see Abraham (as David, Fucked Up’s recurring central character) sitting with Joyce Tops, a central character of Dose Your Dreams for whom “Raise Your Voice Joyce” was named. Check it out below.

Dose Your Dreams is out 10/5 via Merge Records. Pre-order it here.

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