Sum 41 – Heaven :x: Hell
Release Date: 29th March 2024
Label: Rise Records
Order/Stream
Genre: Pop Punk
FFO: Green Day, Blink 182.
Review By: Jeff Finch
Among their contemporaries, Sum 41 never really got their fair shake; sure, with songs like Fat Lip and In Too Deep they got a lot of airplay and a lot of people to sing along, but when compared to Green Day and Blink-182, Sum 41 was relegated to a distant 3rd, which is just a shame, considering that Sum 41 was easily the most energetic, frenetic, and arguably heaviest of the three bands. Releases like Does This Look Infected? and Chuck demonstrated just how heavy they could get, but since day one, they always had this thrashy style to their playing which was easy for a metalhead to gravitate towards. Now, 28 years into their careers, with numerous health scares afflicting front-man Deryck Whibley, to the point of near-death, Sum 41 is about to call it quits, with one final release to ride off into the sunset. And I’ve got to say, they go out with a bang.
Obviously, Sum 41 was relegated to the pop-punk moniker, and rightfully so, but they’ve always had this chaotic freneticism about them; fast-paced, thrashy, heavy, they knew how to be catchy but also blend brilliantly with metal. What Heaven :x: Hell does here is ‘split’ the listening mindset, as it were, between their pop-punk (Heaven) and their most recent focus solely on heavy metal (Hell), and the first three singles from the record do an excellent job of setting the scene for listeners: Landmines sounds like it was pulled straight from their debut album, full of catchy hooks, simple riffage, not even hitting three minutes. Meanwhile, Rise Up, from their Hell side, still contains the energy of pop-punk but ups the ante: chugging riffs, chaotic drum fills, and a hellacious scream preceding a blistering solo, a song that could easily have been included in Chuck or Order in Decline. Almost blending the line between the two, album opener Waiting on a Twist of Fate is catchy, heavy, anthemic, features a brief melodic solo as the drums get the hell beat out of them, and doesn’t even break three minutes. It’s the perfect mixture of both albums, and it starts the whole thing off with a bang.
Among other album highlights are the bands’ stellar cover of Paint It Black by the Rolling Stones; utilizing bass instead of acoustic guitar for that background music (you all know what I’m talking about), and overall just amplifying the song by focusing less on acoustic and more on electric, the song really jumps from the speakers and, though purists may disagree, Sum 41 does a more than admirable job taking a bona fide classic and making it their own, those military style drums at the end packing a serious punch. Anyone unfamiliar with the original track (somehow) could be forgiven for thinking this was their own song, it’s done so well and varies just enough from the original so it clearly isn’t a case of Sum 41 doing karaoke. Meanwhile, I Can’t Wait is a lean piece of pop-punk focusing on two things: a fast pace and taking us all on a nostalgia trip, as it sounds like it could have been released alongside Fat Lip way back in ‘02.
Now, not all songs on this are winners, unfortunately, but for a 20 song double album, that was bound to happen. Unfortunately, most of the non-winners come from the Heaven portion of our album; Dopamine, while containing some very real lyrics (you did it for the dopamine and it didn’t mean anything at all) and a great performance from Deryck, the song just feels like it was written and thrown in here to bring a bit of mid-tempo melancholy and faux-emotion into the mix. I understand not all pop-punk is going to sound like Fat Lip, but this one just sounded forced. Same with Johnny Libertine, only on a much smaller scale. The song is a bop; it’s fun, fast, chaotic, but the chorus is not good, almost as if the band had everything else written and needed to throw something in quickly, since the song doesn’t even hit two minutes. It’s a part of the song you’ll be remembering for the wrong reasons. Hopefully it grows on me, because it’s a blast of energy.
Now, enough about individual songs, anyone going into this probably wants to know one thing: is this album more like their first few albums in terms of quality or more like their post-Chuck output, which has been heavily criticized as being subpar, to keep it light. And for this listener, who really didn’t get into Sum 41 until late, the answer is a resounding: it doesn’t matter. This album is Sum 41, after all of the health scares, after being relegated to, at best, 3rd place in the pop-punk hierarchy (I disagree, they’re number one, but that’s me), at the end of their career, giving us a double album that’s bound to keep any of their fans happy. Between some excellent screams, a phenomenal rhythm section, and, probably most importantly, an energy that just can’t be faked, Heaven :x: Hell sees Sum 41 throwing everything they had into one final release, effectively taking their entire discography and breaking it down into 20 songs spanning nearly an hour. Apart from a few songs that just aren’t up to par, Heaven :x: Hell is a more than fitting ending to a band that almost disappeared at least twice because of Deryck Whibley’s health concerns. But he persevered, they persevered, us fans persevered, and, with this final record, Sum 41 has but one thing to tell us: they did not waste their time and become another casualty of society. They leave us with almost 30 years of great music and a career spanning album to ride off into the sunset with; if they’re to be believed, and this is really the end, then you have to choose, once and for all: Heaven or Hell?
(4 / 5)
