As a way to make some sort of artistic sense out of the year we just had, the Canadian newspaper The Globe And Mail recently teamed up with the Canadian Opera Company and the indie label Arts & Crafts to share a six-song compilation called Broadsheet Music: A Year In Review. The compilation features Canadian musicians contributing songs inspired by the 2014’s news events, sometimes with the help of opera singers. For the occasion, Broken Social Scene contributed the unreleased song “Golden Facelift,” which comes from the same sessions that gave us 2010’s Forgiveness Rock Record. Even though the song is technically old, it’s still the first new BSS song we’ve heard since 2010. The comp also has Fucked Up doing a 17-minute Italian opera called “Voce Rubata.” The song piece only features opera singers. Damian Abraham never shows up, and it never turns into a punk song. The band wrote it themselves. It’s one of the weirdest things they’ve ever done. The comp also features a solo song from BSS member Brendan Canning, as well as BSS member Jason Collett teaming up with Zeus on another one. Listen to all of it and read some words about the BSS and Fucked Up contributions below.

(via Pitchfork)

On “Golden Facelift,” Broken Social Scene write:

Golden Facelift is a song recorded during the Forgiveness Rock Record sessions, but which ultimately did not make the final cut for one reason or another. It is a song we as a band all felt strongly about lyrically and musically and we wanted to give it a proper unveiling when the time was right. We feel that chance is now as this year draws to a close; 2014 has not been without its beauty, but it has also been a year of incredible brutality and all of humanity has a great deal to answer for. Broken Social Scene aims to echo the voice and concerns of the underdog while creating music that will hopefully inspire those who are doing good and useful things for this planet and humankind.

On “Voce Rubata,” Fucked Up’s Jonah Falco writes:

We were thrilled to work with singers from the COC, but when we had a chance to talk to them and get into the rehearsal space, we realized that we had less than 24 hours. We went in with a vague idea, tore it up, started again. We didn’t want to waste those singers in a half-baked punk song. Mike, our guitar player, came up with the shell of an idea of a singer who was lured from her art by the illusion of freedom, promised by a nefarious stranger. We were interested in creating a piece that seized the musical opportunity rather than addressing one particular moment, but the frame of the story – a person who is free leaving the structures in which they’ve grown to do something new, only to have that illusion shattered by reality – is a very old narrative, and one that we see echoed throughout stories in this or any other year.

Read more about the project here.