We've said it once, we've said it a thousand (or at least a dozen) times: the golden age of a Canadian pop-punk renaissance is upon us. After burying the hatchet with Simple Plan on "Ruin My Life" last month, Sum 41's Deryck Whibley has announced the Ajax band's plans to unleash a double album called Heaven and Hell – half of which will see them returning to their pop-punk roots.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Whibley revealed that the double LP came about almost by accident. At the height of the pandemic, his only way of getting out of the house — and soothing his newborn baby — was to go on long drives around Los Angeles with his wife Ari, for which he began compiling playlists. One of them consisted of punk-rock favourites from his high school days (bands like NOFX, Good Riddance and Pennywise), which he says he hadn't listened to in years.
"[Listening to this music] kickstarted me into writing again," Whibley told the publication. When the 20th anniversary of Sum 41's debut album All Killer No Filler came around last year and he didn't have any from-the-vault tracks to include in a potential reissue, the musician offered to tap into his own nostalgia and write some new ones.
"Once I had about four or five songs, I was like, 'You know what? I like all these. I'm not giving these to anybody,'" he explained, and so the first half of Heaven and Hell was born. The second side is metallic, like Sum 41's more recent offerings, working through anger, confusion and anxieties, while the former encapsulates a "positive energy."
"A lot of other people were retreating to things that made them feel good in the past," Whibley observes — and he did the very same in channelling the band's original sound. "There's some weird nostalgia that kicked in because of the pandemic," he says. "It all made sense to me why pop-punk is coming back: it's feel-good music. There's something that's happy about it. Something young and innocent and free."
Next month, Sum 41 and Simple Plan pander to aughts pop-punk revivalists (almost) everywhere, kicking off their Canada-less Blame Canada tour in the US.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Whibley revealed that the double LP came about almost by accident. At the height of the pandemic, his only way of getting out of the house — and soothing his newborn baby — was to go on long drives around Los Angeles with his wife Ari, for which he began compiling playlists. One of them consisted of punk-rock favourites from his high school days (bands like NOFX, Good Riddance and Pennywise), which he says he hadn't listened to in years.
"[Listening to this music] kickstarted me into writing again," Whibley told the publication. When the 20th anniversary of Sum 41's debut album All Killer No Filler came around last year and he didn't have any from-the-vault tracks to include in a potential reissue, the musician offered to tap into his own nostalgia and write some new ones.
"Once I had about four or five songs, I was like, 'You know what? I like all these. I'm not giving these to anybody,'" he explained, and so the first half of Heaven and Hell was born. The second side is metallic, like Sum 41's more recent offerings, working through anger, confusion and anxieties, while the former encapsulates a "positive energy."
"A lot of other people were retreating to things that made them feel good in the past," Whibley observes — and he did the very same in channelling the band's original sound. "There's some weird nostalgia that kicked in because of the pandemic," he says. "It all made sense to me why pop-punk is coming back: it's feel-good music. There's something that's happy about it. Something young and innocent and free."
Next month, Sum 41 and Simple Plan pander to aughts pop-punk revivalists (almost) everywhere, kicking off their Canada-less Blame Canada tour in the US.
