Album Review: Sum 41 - 'Heaven :x: Hell'
In 2022, Canadian pop-punk pioneers Sum 41 first announced they were working on an ambitious double-record. One that would combine a nostalgic return to their bouncy skater-park sound of the 2000s with a new electrifying metal-inspired style that will take over the airwaves. This record is the biggest, the greatest, and the final ever release for the band; this is Heaven :x: Hell.
Only last year did the group announce that this new era would be their last ever, and after one last hell (and heaven) of a tour, they will be calling it quits in January 2025. Going out with a 20-track summarisation of their near 30-year career, there is no better way to let their lives flash before their fans’ eyes just one last time while giving them one more collection of new music to feast on.
Beginning on the up-above side, the album kicks off with no pulled punches or blocked kicks with ‘Waiting On A Twist Of Fate’. Feeling like a previously unreleased single from their world-famous All Killer No Filler days, it shows that when it comes to the music, no time has passed. Frontman Deryck Whibley still sounding as young and rebellious as he did back in the 2000s is an audible argument that the lifestyle is never a phase and punk rock never dies; it just reincarnates for a new audience, a new generation. With an act as quintessentially pop-punk as Sum 41, their discography is one that will live on and on, never changing and never being watered down or wasted. Following this track is the lead single ‘Landmines’: a catchy anthem with a chant-worthy chorus and vocalising that will get thousands in arms together singing along. Using this as the first ever snippet of the final project the band will ever release, it shows that they know their audience and they know the sound that got them to the top of the musical mountain at the very beginning. If one is born in pop-punk, they will die in pop-punk; til death do them part.
Moving over to the down-below counterpart of the record, this half opens with the slow build-up of ‘Preparasi A Salire’. Being inspired by their harder, louder, more metal-based discography of recent times, this is the part of the record that details how the band have managed to grow up alongside the trends in alternative music. There is living and dying by pop-punk, but Sum 41 proves themselves to be a band of innovation, reinvention, change and evolution. Taking inspiration from their heroes, their enemies, and their colleagues within the industry, they have grown up big and tall and brought the sound with them. It’s refreshing for those who were the pop-punk kids in their youthful years, or still are deep down inside.
Following on later in this chapter is ‘Stranger In These Times’, a fast-paced guitar-running track which allows everyone to show off their skills and their talents within their field. The guitar riffs, the half-spoken dramatic vocals, the steady yet storming percussion that carries every other sound from start to satisfying end.
Comparing the final tracks on each half of this record, Heaven’s ‘Radio Silence’ is a heartfelt punk ballad that will streak all cheeks with eyeliner and smudge the colours around eyes everywhere. Songs that were once dismissed as cheesy, vapid, the least meaningful from an alternative act such as Sum 41, are given new life as these kids listening to these anthems grow up and learn to understand every word and every emotion how the writers and the musicians intended it. Whibley and co. have managed to bring their all to this first closer, strumming heartstrings and beating broken hearts like experts in the field of feeling. This is a track that will mean the most to fans, either from being one of their last or being one of their deepest and sweetest.
‘How The End Begins’ concludes Hell and in terms of discography, concludes Sum 41 altogether. Again being a more emotional track, with a chorus kicking off with the line, “now it’s the end, we can’t get it back”. It highlights how all good things must come to their end, naturally or unnaturally, and there is no going back. There is an expectation to have understood the process, being one of life and death that everyone and everything experiences, but this is fought back with an understanding that it’s how it is. No one on Earth can change what is inevitable; it can be delayed but never can be stopped permanently. A perfect representation of the end of Sum 41’s active years being the last ever track released on their last ever record, one that supposedly rests in Hell when it sounds nothing close to hellish.
Taking this double-record as a retrospective account of the group’s career, summed up in 20 new tracks between the two ends of their stylistic spectrum, it can bring a tear to any fan’s eye knowing that they have managed to combine elements from every era of their musical life and go out on a bang that goes beyond the living realm.
To the 28 years of Sum 41, there are praises and thanks to go around. Here is to an enjoyable afterlife, no matter what side they end up in.
Words by Jo Cosgrove
