Inside the final days of Sum 41, Canada’s wildest pop-punk band | Canada Voices

On the final bus ride of Sum 41’s nearly 30 years of touring, someone played the travelling Wilburys’ End of the Line through the speakers, and bassist Jason (Cone) McCaslin started to feel tears in his eyes.

It is not a particularly punk song, and it was not a particularly punk moment, but it was, in fact, the end of the line for Canada’s wildest, metal-worshipping pop-punk export. They were headed home earlier this week to Toronto from London, Ont., for the long-planned final two shows of the band’s career. And so, after hearing George Harrison’s opening riff, McCaslin politely insisted to his bus mates that they turn off the song. He’d already started feeling anxious about the end.

When McCaslin relayed this to Tom Thacker at sound check the next day, the guitarist decided, in jest, to try to make his bandmate cry. Thacker played the Harrison riff onstage, sending it blasting throughout the Scotiabank Arena. But the quest for tears did not succeed, and so he, McCaslin, guitarist Dave (Brownsound) Baksh and drummer Frank Zummo got to work, jamming out songs in the shadow of an inflatable, 15-foot-high skeleton bust.

Front man Deryck Whibley wasn’t with them. He was walking around the arena as his bandmates played, making sure the music sounded great. When he was satisfied, he descended down the lower bowl and hopped onto the stage, launching into a couple of tracks.

Even after nearly a year on the farewell “Tour of the Setting Sum,” he insists on a full sound check at every show. “If I’m going to do it, it’s got to be the best that I could possibly do it,” he said a few minutes later backstage.

Quality control is, for Whibley, a key reason for ending Sum 41. He wants to go out on top, and, like any good punk, to keep his fate fully in his control. After this week’s Toronto shows, there’ll just be a couple of media appearances and a Juno Awards performance. So far, he’s less anxious about it than some of his bandmates.

“From day one, we’ve just always done what we wanted to do,” he says. “Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. But all the decisions were our own.”

Things have already looked a little different lately for Sum 41 than in, say, the early 2000s, when touring was an explicit excuse to party. These days, they’re taking in the moment instead of tearing up hotel rooms. Some members of the band are now sober; others have traded all-night ragers for wine and good conversation.

Tour bus chats, particularly among the band’s longest remaining members – Whibley, Baksh and McCaslin – have turned reflective. To give a completely unverifiable yet note-perfect example provided by McCaslin: as they rolled through Austria last November, they laughed about the time they flipped a car onto its side in Vienna – rather than going out and flipping another car onto its side.

Sum 41 burst out of Ajax, Ont., in the late nineties as punk’s prankiest, hardest-partying hit writers. They introduced the world to a crasser kind of Canadian anthem, serving rave-ups for the middle-finger-giving skate punks (Fat Lip) and cleverly disguised pop songs (In Too Deep) before embracing metal (We’re All to Blame) and sincerity (Pieces).

They lost two formative members, gained one of them back, pulled through Whibley’s near death, and underscored their lasting influence in 2024 by landing a Billboard Alternative Airplay No. 1 (Landmines) more than two decades after their last.

They sold 15 million albums along the way, carving their name onto the Mount Rushmore of early 21st-century pop-punk. And in doing so, they showed Canadians that they could make a globe-spanning career out of being themselves.

Before Sum 41, “it seemed to me like pop-punk was so hated that there would never be a band with that much success again after Blink-182 and Green Day,” says Thacker, who also co-founded the seminal B.C. punk band Gob – for whom Sum 41 once served as opening band, and who opened for Sum 41 on its final tour. Gob also tasted the major-label world, briefly, after Sum 41’s early success.

“They blew up,” he said of Sum 41, and “opened the door” for other bands.

In 1999, Sum 41 leveraged a videotape full of pranks and concert footage into a $3.5-million record deal with Island Def Jam; they signed with Aquarius in Canada. Their 2001 debut full-length album, All Killer No Filler, thrust them onto the global stage.

The world saw the members as goofy punks having a great time. But in his 2024 memoir, Walking Disaster, Whibley tells a different story.

He alleges that the band’s manager, Treble Charger co-front man Greig Nori, had pressured him into a non-consensual sexual relationship soon after he turned 18. (Nori has called Whibley’s allegations “a lie,” and both have threatened to take their months-long dispute to court.)

Whibley’s bandmates, who found out about the alleged assault through advance copies of the book, have rallied to their friend’s side. “I believe Deryck,” McCaslin says.

Whibley and Nori’s relationship ended a few years later, and the band spent the next 20 years juggling euphoric highs and impossible lows. Baksh left Sum 41 in 2006, tired from the road and itching to spend time with family; Thacker replaced him. Whibley and Avril Lavigne got married, then divorced. Ticket sales dropped off. Long-time drummer Steve Jocz left. (He did not respond to interview requests.)

Whibley’s relationship with alcohol, which deepened as he coped with a back injury, caused his liver and kidneys to fail in 2014 at age 34, forcing doctors to put him in a medically induced coma. He’s been sober since.

The past decade saw Sum 41 back on an upswing: the return of Baksh, the arrival of wildness-tempering children and stepchildren, growing concert attendance. The band appeared to be riding a high as they prepared last year’s half-punk, half-metal double album Heaven :x: Hell.

But for Whibley, pandemic lockdowns had provided an unexpected glimpse into his own psyche. Something had been bugging him; it was bigger than burnout, but he buried the feeling whenever he could. Hearing the completed Heaven :x: Hell brought him clarity. He wanted a change.

“The work, creatively, was complete,” he says. “Not only did I feel strongly about the songs, but like, where would I go after this?”

It was the perfect moment, he decided, to tear it all down. He sent an e-mail to his bandmates saying it was time to end things. It was titled: “There’s no better way to say this.”

The news hit the other guys by surprise, and in the following days they all had hours-long phone calls with Whibley. McCaslin was at first confused, especially since the band had spent years climbing back to the heights of their debut. But Whibley’s pitch began to make sense.

“Are we going to let this band go into the ground?” the front man asked his long-time bassist. What if, Whibley wondered, “people don’t come to see us play, or we all start hating each other?”

Zummo has sometimes found himself feeling angry behind the drum kit. When he told his therapist, she pointed out that he was probably grieving the end of the band.

Now, he says, “I welcome that feeling.” But there will be more to process in the months to come. He’s ending his decade with Sum 41 with an arena tour – ”it’s what I wanted my whole life.”

For Baksh, the decision meant facing the reality of leaving the band a second time. He respected Whibley’s decision because he wanted his friend to be happy, but for a while, it felt like “a dream was being taken away.”

Since then, the guitarist had some time to mull – he’d been in other bands and recently started dabbling in voiceover work – and realized there will still be life on the other side.

“Musicians tend to grind themselves to death,” Baksh says. “It’s important to pay attention – when you’re practising, when you’re onstage – to really see if you truly will last another 30 years. I have to do a little bit of reflection, but I’m not sure that being a guitar player is at the forefront of where I want to be.”

Baksh has always been deeply analytical. No matter how much the band partied in the early days, during concerts he’d have his guitar feed recorded onto MiniDiscs so he could listen back to how he played, like an athlete watching game tape. On this final tour, he’s simply been basking in the crowd’s reactions instead.

Lots of bands who break up get back together. But things sure feel final to Sum 41’s members, who’ve started tearing up during the last few shows as they launch into their encore-ending, perhaps most famous song, In Too Deep.

One would assume, then, that the crowd-pleasing 2001 hit would have been the band’s final song on their final night. And obviously, they played it – at the end of what would be the first encore. Whibley, always a son of Ajax, introduced the song by saying, “it was our dream to play Toronto.” He named every local venue Sum 41 aspired to in the nineties – the El Mocambo, the Opera House – and the gravity of performing at the arena where the Maple Leafs and Raptors play fell on the crowd.

The audience surged. Every emotion was there: grief, elation and, surely somewhere in the pit, anger that the band was over. But even though In Too Deep was the show closer for so much of this world tour, Sum 41 wasn’t done. They came back again for two songs. And when Whibley launched into the final number, Welcome to Hell, it was a sly reminder that he’d refused to let anyone else call the shots.

These were to be the final lyrics Whibley sang with Sum 41 – just before the book closed on the band in 2025 – for all the people who doubted that a high-school band from Ajax, who dealt with disappearing members, who dealt with a mid-career decline, who dealt with near death, could make it. It was a punk lyric from a punk song from a punk band: “No one will be with you in the end.”