Music

It’s finally starting to dawn on the members of Sum 41. This is really it.
“For the first time, this really feels like the end,” says Deryck Whibley in an exclusive interview with Billboard Canada.

The frontman of the quintessential Canadian pop-punk band is speaking over Zoom from his studio in Las Vegas during a rare break from Sum 41’s “Tour of the Setting Sum.”

Back from Australia and looking ahead to the final leg of the tour in the band’s home country, Whibley is coming to terms with the finality of a decision he announced in 2023: after more than two decades together, Sum 41 is coming to an end.

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Now — following a world tour that has stretched on for nearly a year and a final album that has brought them some of the biggest success since their years as high schoolers breaking out of the garages of the Toronto suburb of Ajax, Ontario in the early 2000s — the band has just one concert left, Jan. 30 at their hometown Scotiabank Arena.

“I never had an idea of when to end it or how to end it or if I’d even end it,” Whibley admits. “There were lots of times I thought this is going to be the thing I do forever. But I just couldn’t deny the feeling that this was the time. Something internally was telling me it was time to move on. It even surprised me.”

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It surprised his bandmates, too. “Blindsided” is the word Whibley uses.

Two of those members, bassist Jason “Cone” McCaslin and lead guitarist Dave “Brownsound” Baksh, he’s known since his first year of high school. The others, drummer Frank Zummo and guitarist Tom Thacker (also of vital Vancouver punk band Gob), have been with the band for years. They all had settled into a locked-in performance peak and momentum that had brought them through the pandemic and towards an album they all recognized as one of the best in their sizable discography.

That now-final album, Heaven :X: Hell, has exceeded those expectations. It hit No. 37 on the Billboard Canadian Albums chart and No. 23 on the Top Rock & Alternative Albums chart. In 2024, “Landmines” hit No. 1 on the Alternative Airplay chart, breaking the record for the longest gap between No. 1 hits – 22 years after “Fat Lip” ruled in 2001. Another single, “Dopamine,” soon followed, hitting No. 1 on the same chart near the end of the year.

But ending the band now gives Sum 41 the opportunity, for the first time since those early days, to control their own fate. The band, and especially Whibley, has had an unbelievably eventful career – from record-breaking album deals to struggles with addiction, tabloid infamy to multiple near death experiences. And now, they are going out on a high, ending with an induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame on March 30 with a final televised performance in Vancouver on the Juno Awards broadcast.

“There’s a story there, and I’m proud of the whole story,” says Whibley. “It’s a validation of everything we’ve been working for, from playing in the basement as teenagers to now – here we are. We’ve gone through all the ups and downs, sticking through it all and getting to a point where we could write our own ending the way we wanted to.”

For Whibley, writing that ending has meant coming to terms and processing everything Sum 41 has been through as a band, and everything he has been through personally. And doing so has also cast what we know about the band in new light.

In 2024, while Sum 41 was basking in the success of “Landmines,” Whibley set off another explosion.

In his autobiography, Walking Disaster: My Life Through Heaven and Hell, published by Simon & Shuster in March, Whibley revisits the band’s whole history. He writes about going from high school to becoming one of the biggest Canadian punk bands of all time, mixing rock star tales with introspective and raw reflections on living with addiction and possible PTSD.

As he re-explored the band’s history, he kept coming back to something he had not spoken about publicly and had only shared with a few people in his life, not even his bandmates.

Greig Nori, Whibley’s mentor and Sum 41’s manager from their early days until his eventual firing in 2005, he writes, groomed and sexually abused him over the course of many years. It started when Nori was 35 and Whibley was 16, he says in the book, and it often made it hard for him to celebrate the band’s biggest successes.

It took him many years to recognize what he went through as misconduct, he says, and it was his then-partner Avril Lavigne and his now-wife Ariana Cooper who told him that what he went through was abuse. He still won’t use a specific word to describe it, instead choosing to just recount what he went through without labelling it.

“This was my first time truly confronting it [in the book],” Whibley says. “I have heard other people’s stories of grooming and abuse and thought, is that what happened to me? It was still a question mark, but the stories were similar. I couldn’t deny that it felt manipulative. As an adult now in this position that I’m in, I can see how easily that 16-year-old kid could have been manipulated. I see how I fell into it.”

Nori, the former leader of the band Treble Charger, has denied the allegations. As SooToday has reported, Nori has filed a notice of action seeking more than $6 million in damages from Whibley and Simon & Schuster for “libel, breach of confidence, intrusion upon seclusion, wrongful disclosure of private facts, and placing the plaintiff in a false light.” Whibley has reportedly responded with his own notice of action seeking $3 million in damages from Nori for accusing him of lying in his memoir and damaging his reputation.

Through representatives, Whibley declined to comment on the legal actions, which were filed shortly after our initial interview. However, in that conversation, he did talk about the possibility his accusations could make their way to the courtroom.

“In a way, I hope it does,” he says. “I’d love for him to go under oath and talk about it in front of a jury and a judge. I have nothing to hide at this point. It’s all out there. I already went public with it. Let’s see what you have to say, Greig.”

Though he accepts the possibility of a legal battle, Whibley says writing about his experiences was as much about Nori as about himself. Going public means he no longer has to hold his story in and deal with its effects on his own. But it’s also about helping others who may have had similar experiences.

After the book came out, Whibley went and read all of his Instagram comments and messages. He’d checked his personal DMs so rarely in the past that he had to ask his wife to show him how. But he wanted to be there for people who recognized something in his writing.

“I’ve had so many messages of people messaging me on social media, and also people who I know who have come up to me and said, ‘I went through something similar,’” he says. “People who have never said anything in their lives. No matter what happens, it’s worth it if I can help people.”

When he was first approached about writing a book, Whibley didn’t quite get it.

“I thought it was going to be really boring,” he says. “‘High school band makes it.’ Cool, that’s fun. But what else is there to say?”

As he started putting it all on paper, he realized just how consistently eventful and unpredictable Sum 41 has been.

“There’s always something good or bad happening, and we’ve never really taken a break.”

Left to right: Dave “Brownsound” Baksh, Jason “Cone” McCaslin, Deryck Whibley, Tom Thacker, Frank Zummo, .

Lane Dorsey/Billboard Canada

Whibley met McCaslin and Baksh along with original drummer (and occasional rapper) Steve “Stevo32” Jocz as high school students in Ajax in the ‘90s.

They played their first official show as Sum 41 at a battle of the bands at the Opera House in Toronto. They hatched a scheme to sell the most tickets, which would guarantee them a professional photo shoot, but despite the school bus full of friends they brought to the show, they were made to play first on the 5 pm slot and were subsequently ghosted on the prize.

But it was there they solidified their relationship with Nori (who Whibley had invited after sneaking backstage at a Treble Charger show) and Marc Costanzo of the band Len (famous for the Billboard Hot 100 No. 9 hit, “Steal My Sunshine”).

Those connections helped Whibley sign a publishing deal with EMI Publishing Canada when he was still 17. That helped them record their demos, which they sent out to all the major labels in Canada, getting a hard pass from all of them. Whibley writes in Walking Disaster that Universal Music Canada called them the worst band they had heard in a decade. (The only bite was from a smaller Canadian label called Aquarius Records, run by music industry legend Donald K. Tarlton, who they gave exclusive Canadian rights to when they eventually signed a worldwide major label deal.)

The key, they thought, was to get the labels to see them live, where they went all out in every show, which included trampolines and roman candles and flaming drumsticks. Instead of playing private shows in sterile label offices, they arranged a five-week residency at a venue called Ted’s Wrecking Yard and invited all of the industry bigwigs to see them there – and this time, they thought beyond Canada.

The shows became the stuff of local legend, and it became the spot for other thirsty bands to try to make deals too.

“There were all these other bands who thought, who’s this young kid band out of high school that’s getting all this attention? We’ve been doing this forever, we’re more punk rock than them,” Whibley remembers. “Then when all these labels started coming out to see us, every band in Toronto was all of a sudden our best friend. I remember this one band, Robin Black & The Intergalactic Rock Stars, coming to out to our shows and trying to get a record deal, like ‘f-ck this Sum 41 band, you need to sign us.’”

By the end of 1999, Sum 41 had signed a $3.5 million record deal as the first rock act on the major label Island Def Jam. At the time, it was the biggest deal ever signed by a Canadian band.

The band’s debut on the label, 2001’s All Killer No Filler, became a big hit on both sides of the border, going platinum in Canada and the United States. “Fat Lip,” with its iconic video that perfectly captures the burgeoning counterculture of the era, topped the Billboard Alternative Airplay chart, joining videos for the endlessly catchy “In Too Deep” and “Makes No Difference” (from their debut EP, Half Hour of Power, the video featured an out-of-nowhere cameo from DMX) in heavy rotation on MuchMusic and MTV.

Sum 41 were the right band at the right time. It was an era when bands like Blink-182 and Green Day were hitting the mainstream, Warped Tour was providing a home for teenagers to see punk bands on a yearly basis, skate culture was hitting its peak and Jackass was becoming a home for unapologetic juvenile humor.

They were four high school punks from the suburb, playing pranks and having house parties – and they gave their fans a front row seat. In a time before social media and YouTube, they took a camcorder everywhere they went, filming their pranks (usually involving petty property damage with eggs or fire extinguishers, though also often piss and shit) and used them as their VHS calling cards.

It resonated with fans and music media, but not so much with critics. They were often written off in the media as goofy burnout kids, trend-folllowers or mainstream rip-offs of underground bands. They were covered for their antics, but not as much for the songs.

“In a way, I think you set the tone for the way people are going to receive you. When you come in and everything’s a joke, then nothing really gets taken seriously,” says Whibley. “For the longest time, that was a pet peeve for me. I have a sense of humour, but I’m not the funny person in the band. I’m the writer and I’ve always been the writer, and I’ve always wanted to talk more about the lyrics and the music and the inspiration. I do love the humour of the band in the early days. I just always wished there could have been some kind of balance. It was very personal to me and I was very serious about it, but it did get overlooked or overshadowed.”

As the band progressed, their music got darker and heavier. Songs on 2002’s Does This Look Infected? and 2004’s Chuck often covered themes of depression and existential angst, alienation, health and societal unrest. Looking back, Whibley recognizes lyrics, like the “dead end situation,” he sings about being stuck in on “No Brains,” that may have subconsciously touched his private struggle with his feelings about what he was going through with Nori.

Chuck was also informed by a near death experience the band had while on a War Child trip to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Gunfire broke out while they were there, and they named the album after the Canadian UN peacekeeper who saved them, Charles “Chuck” Pelletier. The album often felt far removed from the pop-punk hijinks of just a few years ago.

Around this time, Whibley dated Paris Hilton and then spent four years married to Avril Lavigne from 2006 to 2010. While Whibley was a regular of the celebrity-filled L.A. party scene, he was often mocked for his height and his unconventional rock star looks, which he says took a toll. He became an unlikely fixture of celebrity tabloids, which were rampant and often vicious in the 2000s era.

“I hated that kind of stuff,” he says. “The funny thing is as much as Avril and I ended up in some of it, we avoided it at all costs. The amount of times we were able to go in and out of back entrances to avoid being photographed was amazing. We were out quite a bit, and I would say 90% of the time we were never photographed – but we had to work at it. There’s some times we couldn’t, and that’s when you saw us.”

He was still in the public eye, but frustratingly rarely for his music.

Sum 41 photographed on Jan. 27, 2025 at Canada Life Place in London, Ontario. Left to right: Tom Thacker, Frank Zummo, Deryck Whibley, Dave “Brownsound” Baksh, Jason “Cone” McCaslin

Lane Dorsey/Billboard Canada

Over the years, Whibley struggled with addiction to drugs and alcohol and had multiple near-death experiences, sometimes in the midst of Sum 41 tours. After being hospitalized for liver and kidney failure in 2014, Whibley and his wife Ariana dedicated themselves to getting clean. He’s now been sober for 11 years.

Sum 41 took their only break during that time, though Whibley says it was barely a break – really only the length of one album cycle, with a five-year gap between 2011’s Screaming Bloody Murder and 2016’s 13 Voices.

The lineup shifted, with first Baksh (in 2006) and then Jocz (in 2013) parting ways with the band, replaced by drummer Zummo and guitarist Thacker. Baksh later returned to the band in 2015, giving the band a three guitar attack and often freeing up Whibley to focus on singing and become a more theatrical frontman in live shows. They went independent, signing in 2016 to Hopeless Records then the semi-indie Rise Records for Heaven :X: Hell.

Though no longer in the cultural zeitgeist like they were in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, the band kept releasing solid albums and playing for a consistently engaged audience of diehard fans.

Then eventually, things started to change.

“It felt like things started getting taken more seriously,” says Whibley.

After outlasting the hype and the antics, the health issues and the record label feeding frenzies, Sum 41 were finally being covered on their own merits, as songwriters and performers. When Sum 41 got called for interviews, journalists actually wanted to talk about the music.

Whibley, who had done some production work for Avril Lavigne and other artists, started getting asked to write songs for other artists – some smaller and some more household names (he won’t divulge who). When Covid lockdowns paused the band’s touring schedule, he decided to give it a shot. But he was surprised at what he was being recruited to do.

“Everyone was asking for pop-punk style songs,” he says. “I thought, pop-punk? Why does anyone want pop-punk? It’s been like 15 years since I’ve written a pop-punk song.”

As he started writing, it came surprisingly easy to him. One of the first songs he wrote was “Landmines,” which he says only took him about 10 minutes to write. He kept writing, and the songs kept coming.

“After about seven songs, I thought, you know what, I actually kind of like all these songs. I don’t know if people will see them as Sum 41 songs, but I don’t want to give them away either.”

He decided to turn them into a double album, with one side pop-punk and one side metal – the two sides of Sum 41. The album, Heaven :X: Hell, has been their most successful in years. After “Landmines” brought them back to No. 1 on the Alternative Airplay chart, they followed it with another No. 1 in “Dopamine.”

“We didn’t think we would chart on radio or even get played on a single station on this record,” Whibley says. “It’s pretty phenomenal. It feels like a miracle.”

Now, it’s starting to feel a lot like 2001. Pop-punkand emo are hot again, with bands like Blink-182 and Green Day headlining festivals and Warped Tour making a 30th anniversary resurgence featuring Sum 41’s friends and fellow Canadians Simple Plan. Festivals like When We Were Young and Canada’s All Your Friends Fest are drawing nostalgic 30 and 40-somethings back to the angsty music of their youth.

Mainstream pop and hip-hop acts like MGK and Willow Smith and Machine Gun Kelly have also ‘gone’ pop-punk, fusing throwback riffs and hooks with more modern sounds. There’s a newfound appetite for Sum 41 as a touring and recording project, but this is the moment they’re taking their final bow.

“It never felt to us like we were trying to do anything except for what we loved to do. And over time, I felt like we proved that,” Whibley says. “You know, we’re leaving the music business at the time when our genre is at a peak, because we just do what’s right for us.”

Sum 41 went from being labeled a flash-in-the-pan to becoming nearly three-decade veterans of rock. They witnessed multiple music industry shifts and grew old within a scene that many other bands flamed out in.

So what is their legacy? What do they want to be their epitaph?

Whibley sums it up with one word: honesty.

“Everything for us has just always been honest,” he says. “We never gave a f-ck about anything other than what we wanted to do. That’s who we are.”

This article originally appeared on Billboard Canada.

Sum 41

Lane Dorsey/Billboard Canada