The veteran Canadian hardcore band recently released their 6th full-length album One Day. As the title suggests each band member committed to a self-imposed time frame of 24 hours to write and record their contributions. Compared to their previous ambitious standards the album is more straightforward, but it still carries considerable weight. It also features a couple of poignant social commentaries.
One example is “Broken Little Boys” which explores the generational cycle of toxic masculinity. The album also opens with “Found” which chronicles how Indigenous people have been displaced and murdered to build highways and “temples of police and landlords to worship money.”
The track was inspired by guitarist Mike Haliechuk’s experiences living on one of the oldest streets in North America and his observations of the tragic consequences of colonization and gentrification.
“I used to live on Davenport Road, which is one of the oldest streets in North America and has been a First Nations trail for thousands of years, running along the north shore of Lake Iroquois, which receded after the last ice age,” Haliechuk explained in a statement. “Just to the east was Taddle Creek, which was buried underground during the 19th century to build the streets I walk on. I thought about gentrification a lot, watching little stores get swallowed up by big buildings until I realized I am one of those big buildings.”
Haliechuk continued, “The name of the song comes from the Shadi Bartsch translation of The Aeneid, where she points out that the words ‘found’ and ‘stab’ open and close the book, which are two meanings for the same Greek verb. That discovery is actually conquest, and that settlement is always violence. And that any story I try to tell myself about the place I found to live can only be a story to justify the expansion of one people across the world of another.”
Lyrics such as, “There I stood on the shore. Of a story we don’t tell anymore. All the names were erased. Buried under a land that my people stole,” resonate considering the repeated talks of a reconciliation taking place within Canada. An essential part of the process is an acknowledgment that Canada is “a country found on a genocide”. It is time to discontinue the whitewashing of history.