Year of the Hare (song)
| "Year of the Hare" | |||||||||||
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| Single by Fucked Up | |||||||||||
| B-side | "California Cold" | ||||||||||
| Released | June 16, 2015 | ||||||||||
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| Recorded | April 2013 ("Year of the Hare") & November 2014 ("California Cold") at Electrical Audio (Chicago, IL); Key Club Studios (Benton Harbor, MI); and Candle Studios (Toronto, ON) | ||||||||||
| Length | 21:38 | ||||||||||
| Label | Deathwish (DW172) | ||||||||||
| Writer(s) | Mike Haliechuk, Jonah Falco, Josh Zucker | ||||||||||
| Producer(s) | Mike Haliechuk, Bill Skibbe, Leon Taheny | ||||||||||
| Fucked Up release chronology | |||||||||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Aggregate scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Metacritic | 72/100 |
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |    |
| NME | 8/10 |
| Pitchfork | 6.0/10.0 |
| Punknews.org | |
"Year of the Hare" is a single by the Canadian rock band Fucked Up and marks the seventh entry in their Zodiac Series of releases, each named after a different Chinese zodiac sign of the Chinese calendar. The single was released on June 16, 2015 though Jacob Bannon of Converge's label Deathwish Inc., who also contributed to the album's artwork and packaging. The lyrical content, the song's composition and interactive music video all make allusions to time, loops and rabbits.
The A-side and B-side for the "Year of the Hare" single were recorded over a two-year period in three different studios, including time during the sessions for their 2014 studio album Glass Boys, when the members grew bored of working on the album and wanted to work on something else. Inspired by the books This Is Your Brain on Music and Perfecting Sound Forever, Fucked Up guitarist Mike Haliechuk said the band was looking for more experimental ways to record music that catered to the fact that sound is a subjective experience. The song was also intentionally made to be "a bit confusing and less structured" than a typical Fucked Up track, with a composition inspired by the structures of some movies or books.
The opening of "Year of the Hare" features several minutes of noise, which was a recording of an empty studio that was then played in the studio and recorded again and again through several iterations until the resulting recording became a "gnarly sounding industrial hum." Other experimental recording and production techniques on "Year of the Hare" included a recording of a member thinking of a lyric, recording members entering and exiting the sound stage, digital manipulation of audio, and audio loops inspired by Talking Heads's 1980 album Remain in Light and William Basinski's 2002/2003 album series The Disintegration Loops. The theme of "Year of the Hare" is "time, and becoming lost in it" and the lyrics make several references to rabbits, which are meant to be a "symbol for how little tasks and stresses seem to overpopulate our senses in daily life."
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Wikipedia