SUM 41's 'Heaven :x: Hell' masterfully melds nostalgic pop-punk with heavy metal, symbolising their evolutionary arc in what may be a potential farewell with an album that both surprises and satisfies.

Words: Steven Loftin.
Photos: Travis Shinn.

The second helping from Canadian punks Sum 41's upcoming eighth album 'Heaven :x: Hell' is a hair-raising, metal-sheened, call-to-arms. 'Rise Up' careens with weighty intensity and emotion, following the full-force pop-punk of 'Landmines'.

These two slices of the grander two-disc project introduce its intended duality. While 'Landmines' is as anthemic as Sum 41 have sounded in yonks, a proper throwback to their output two decades ago, 'Rise Up' fits more neatly into their heavier modern-day stuff. Both are as deliciously decadent in their respective fields; just don't ask guitarist and vocalist Deryck Whibley where 'Rise Up' came from.

"As soon as you asked me, I'm like, I don't even know where it came from. I have no recollection of it. And I have a good memory, too!" he laughs. "Sometimes they come quickly, and you forget about them. A lot of times, I'll go through my phone looking for ideas I've written, and I will come across something from a year ago, and it's a fully written song. It's a little gift that you forgot about."

'Heaven :x: Hell' is set to be a twenty-song epic, with the two sides taking ten tracks each. "'Rise Up' represents the second side," Deryck explains. "The album 'Heaven :x: Hell' has 10 songs on each side; the Heaven side is a pop-punk side, and the Hell side is our heavier, metallic, metal-ish sound," he confirms. This record is also billed as their farewell album after nearly three decades.

"I didn't sit down to try to write an album, especially with this album," says Deryck. "When I first started writing songs, it was early in the pandemic. I thought at first I was writing songs for other people because I was getting asked by managers and record companies if I would work on music for other people - and I didn't have any music. So I thought, okay, well, I should probably have something just in case I end up working with somebody, and I started writing songs, but I ended up liking everything that I was writing, and I thought, I don't really want to give this away. So I just started stockpiling music, not thinking it was for Sum 41 at first, and after a while, I just had a bunch of stuff. I seriously don't really remember writing 'Rise Up' like it was just there. I don't know where it came from!"

The bruising track is a testament to Sum 41 – completed by Dave Baksh (guitar), Jason McCaslin (bass), Tom Thacker (guitar), and Frank Zummo (drums) – and their deft ability to crank out melodic punk gems that traverse the chasm between pop and metal. But Sum 41's move back toward their pop-punk start was due in part to the birth of his son just before the pandemic in 2020.

"The only way you could get out of the house was to kind of just go drive around, and we'd be indoors all day and just go take him out," Deryck recalls. "And he'd cry, as infants do, and the only thing that would calm him down was 90s punk-rock music that I used to listen to in high school and that I hadn't listened to in so long."

Deryck decided to pop together a playlist of formative bands that led him down the path towards Sum 41: Rancid, NOFX, Pennywise, Strung Out, Lagwagon, Bad Religion - he packed it to the rafters with nostalgic melodies and feelings that wound up building the stairway to Heaven.

"After every day of listening to all the stuff that I used to listen to in high school, I noticed by accident I was writing music that was in the vein of our first few records because that's all the same music I was listening to back then. It was a wild, accidental experiment to try to re-visit that old sound - but it worked."

On whether 'Landmines' has passed his son's pop-punk barometer, Deryck chuckles. "I've never played any Sum 41 music for him, but he came to the 'Landmines' video shoot, and he became obsessed with the song. He still listens to it every day, and we have to play the video for him every single day, a couple times a day, like before school and after school."

Along with 'Rise Up', Sum 41 have now well and truly opened the gates for their finale. With both sides of their being firing on all cylinders, Deryck reckons that the Heaven side proved to be the most seamless to write, even though he admits that "I hadn't written a pop-punk song in about 16 years."

Driven by those adventures with his baby at the start of the pandemic, he acknowledges that, "If I were to try to write pop-punk songs ten years ago, or five years ago, it probably would have been really difficult." But it's thanks to those nostalgia-fuelled outings that Heaven came together - a bit too easily, in fact.

"I had to stop myself after a while of writing only pop-punk songs because they just kept coming," he beams. "When it was clear that this was going to be an album, I needed a few more songs to fill out the Hell side because I had too many on the Heaven side. It felt like I could endlessly write the pop-punk stuff this time, which was new."

There's no doubt that Sum 41 are a pivotal part of the pop-punk DNA thanks to 2001 smash hits 'In Too Deep' and 'Fat Lip', but across their last few albums, from 2019's 'Order In Decline', back to 2016's '13 Voices' and beyond, they've turned their hand to darker, broodier pastures.

Deryck nods, "Everything that I've been writing for over a decade has been on the heavier side, so that was the easier route. That was [always] the easier lane for us. It wasn't till the pandemic and people started asking me for music; everyone was asking for pop-punk stuff. I thought, man, I don't even know how to write a pop-punk song anymore, but I guess I'll try it. 'Landmines' was one of the first ones, and I thought, well, I actually liked it, and it set a benchmark, and they all just kind of kept coming."

An enviable position, certainly. But Deryck also knows that with this part of the job - the knuckling down, writing, recording, even inevitably talking about it to music mag scribblers - there's also the flip side, which is where the dividends are paid.

"When you get to release it and share it with people, that's the best part of it," he enthuses. "[But] sometimes it can be torture, and sometimes people can hate what you've done, and people will rip it apart. But I feel pretty confident about this record; I do believe that this record is probably our best record and the best idea we've ever had. And I don't say that about every single record we've ever done," he says with a hypothetical eye cast mysteriously toward the Sum 41 back catalogue. "And we didn't intend this to be the last record. It was only once I sat back and listened to it that I felt, you know what? I'm actually good to go out on this one. I feel that confident about this record that this could be a final Sum 41 album."

This euphoric pride helps 'Landmines' and 'Rise Up' bristle with excitement. There's an anticipation that Deryck and co can't wait for us to hear what they've concocted, which he confirms: "I don't think I could be more proud than I am right now about this record. And I'm sure some people will have their opinions. Some people will say it's not the best record we've ever made, some people might say it is, or that it's not as heavy as they thought it was gonna be, or it's not as punk as they thought it would be, or whatever they want to say. But I just feel like none of that can really touch me at this point. You can think whatever you like. I think it is the best record. So, to me, it is."

And for any doubters about Sum 41's final countdown, Deryck offers this sage outlook: "We were not intentionally trying to achieve [this], but we're pleasantly surprised with the end, and feeling like it was a gift. I'm so happy with it… everybody else is invited to the party, but the party is awesome whether you're there or not."■