mixed (but largely positive) feelings about the new (and allegedly final) Sum 41 album

[originally posted March 30th 2024 on cohost]

Sum 41 have announced their breakup already quite a while ago, but not before dropping a final album, consisting of two halves, the first being Heaven, calling back to their early pop punk roots, and the second Hell, leaning more into the metal influenced sound of their more recent output. I have criticisms, but understand that this comes from a long time fan of the band, and I say everything I say with love and the desire to see the band do as well as possible.

The problems I personally have with this album primarily have to do with its very concept. First of all, I find the album art almost offensively tacky. Just hate to look at this thing. Makes me think I'm about to listen to store brand Evanescence. Looks terribly dated and does not fit the overall aesthetic of this band at all. I know the album cover shouldn't detract from the overall quality of the album, but I can't help that this immediately leaves me with a bad taste before even listening to it. But beyond that, the heaven/hell concept plainly doesn't work for me sonically either. While, yes, the poppy tracks tend to be on the first half and the fast, riffy stuff tends to be on the second half, the Heaven side does have plenty of pretty heavy and fast tracks that I think could've easily went to the other half. However, this album does have a couple of mid-tempo emo pop punk tracks, which all ended up on the Heaven side. And maybe that's my cynical reaction from having been exposed to Machine Gun Kelly against my will, but I don't really like any of these tracks, and they make up like half of the Heaven side. The other half of the Heaven side is fast melodic punk tracks, which, as I've already said, I find don't sound particularly heavenly and don't really differentiate themselves very well from the fast tracks on the Hell side. This means, lacking much of a notable vibe change in the middle that the album concept promises, you end up with an album that's too long and that has all of the stuff I don't like bundled up in the first half. The album does have tons of great tracks, but this pacing makes it pretty tough to get through for me.

That being said, I think the band excells at the fast melodic skate punk style, and I especially enjoy hearing them settle into the more thrash metal influenced, riffy, but still fun and melodic punk sound that they developed over the previous 2 albums. I do think that over the course of this band's career, they always seemed very uncertain about who they wanted to be. They hopped from style to style between each album, borrowing sonic elements from other acts, trying to find something that suited them, but never sticking with anything. I do think they executed every style they have tried on very well, and I enjoy mostly every album they have put out, but with every style change I always felt a bit of restlessness. Is this it now? Is this it now? How about this? When 13 Voices came out, I didn't know it yet, but in hindsight, this to me seems to be where they found out who they wanted to be. And it suits them, they do this sound so well. In my opinion they did it best on the follow-up Order in Decline, but they continued it very competently now on Heaven :x: Hell. The only problem with it is that it is contained to mostly the second half of a rather bloated album gimmick, by the end of which I may have already lost my patience to fully engage with it.

Overall, I think this album is very good, but I can't help but feel that forcing the material they had into this Heaven/Hell concept does squander a lot of its potential. I don't even neccesarily think that they should've taken out the emo tracks. I do think that maybe this album could've been a couple of tracks less (maybe strip it down by 10 minutes and later release the remaining tracks an EP or so), but I mainly would've liked to hear the album sequencing not being focused on splitting the tracks into two stylistic halves that don't really meaningfully exist, and instead embrace that you have a batch of pretty diverse songs that you can arrange to how they flow together the best. That's how they've always done it. My favourite album of theirs, Chuck, is stylistically all over the place, but it works extremely well cause the album sequencing just creates something like an exciting, well-paced roller coaster ride.

Still, solid record. I wish them the best

P.S., for an album with a similar concept that I think works, you can check out Chumbawamba's Swingin' with Raymond. That album consists of a Love it and Hate it side, the former being 6 sweet pop folk tracks, and the latter being 7 loud, shouty rock songs, probably the most guitar heavy batch of songs the band has every recorded. While being far from my favourite Chumbawamba album, here the two sides actually feel distinct, there's a clear shift at the halfway point, and each side works as its own, standalone mini-album. The two sides are stylistically different enough for it to make sense to separate them, and I think the hard split does make the album better than how it would've been if you tried to sequence them into a single, coherent album.