So, here it is—Sum 41’s final attempt at a big bang to see themselves off. It does need to be said how fitting it is that they’re going out on their own terms, and how generally beneficial for them it is. They’ve never been as quick to tow the pop-punk line as a lot of their contemporaries, thus never reaching the same heights or plumbing the same qualitative depths. When the mid-2010s found so many of the genre vanguards at odds with the whole ‘punk’ thing, Sum 41 were drilling deep into Deryck Whibley’s health struggles and personal demons, and sticking the landing with far more grace.
See, Sum 41’s early reputation as another crew of jokesters hasn’t persisted to the extent of, say, blink-182, or even Green Day. A lot of that likely comes from how deeply they’d dive into metal, to give themselves a ‘legitimacy’ that set them on their own path. Maybe ‘high-brow’ is the wrong term, but from a point, a Sum 41 album could be counted on for greater sonic substance in pop-punk. For instance, Underclass Hero, in all the ways it’s effectively just their American Idiot, stands stridently ahead in ambition of the emo-pop that much of the genre had morphed into around them in 2007.
It’s no wonder that Heaven :x: Hell has been expanded to these proportions, then. With their breakup imminent, it’s a final attempt to punch away the remaining detritus of their portion of pop-punk ceiling they’d broken through long ago. A double album is one thing (and it’s still a wonder they hadn’t done one earlier), but a lot has been hinged on how it’s been structured—one side for pop-punk; the other for metal. Yeah, those alarm bells that might be going off aren’t unwarranted. There’s no doubt that Sum 41 have the chops for both, but there’s something about leaving them deliberately compartmentalised like this that’s oddly short-sighted for them. Successes have come from either blending them, or integrating them in a tight-knit fashion; plopping them down as two disconnected blocks walls off so many avenues opened by approaches like that.
In a sense, perhaps this is where ambition is extrapolated beyond its reasonable bounds, and Sum 41 believe they’re pulling something off that’s more radical than it actually is. Sure, few others would have the brass to try, but is that justification? It only hurts more when the album can be pretty decent in its individual cuts, showing that even in their final moments, the multiple faces of Sum 41 continue to deliver. But with every repeated listen, Heaven :x: Hell feels no less fractured or unwieldy. Its defining characteristic is the split, in how it makes the weaknesses of both sides leap out as really obvious.
It’s difficult to pick the ‘better’ half because of that, when there’s not a lot that lines up cleanly. You could honestly view them as individual albums, such is the lack of crossover features or qualities that tie everything up. Some grand finale of an event album, this is not, inasmuch as you’re left scrambling to find something truly eventful to go off. Perhaps the closer How The End Begins counts, thanks to a hook of“Now it’s the end, we can’t get it back / Why doesn’t anything good ever last?” that’s a sealed career-capper of a statement if there ever were one. It’s also the kind of moment that Sum 41 do deserve, and can justify; it has been good for them, and having them bow out is a genuine loss. It’s just a shame the preceding tracks seem to actively walk away from such self-reflection, to where Heaven :x: Hell’s pop-punk material in particular can seem surprisingly weightless.
There, the casualties of this creative segmentation are the most blatant, as there’s the most to lose from removing elements without substitution. It can be pretty mercenary, too, stripping out even the faintest whiff of heavier, punkier grounding, leaving in its place the slick, poppy, indelibly mainstream pop-punk that Sum 41 never even showed an interest in at its height. It’s absolutely a concession, though to what end remains unclear. When you’re going all in on an obtuse album concept and breaking up afterwards, pivots in this direction just don’t make that much sense. At least blink-182 found the drive to carry on and turn this sound into their thing; for Sum 41, it makes little sense.
Now, to be fair, they do produce a better version of it. By virtue of coming from a proper band and not some TikTok-mandated product, songs like Landmines or I Can’t Wait aren’t as terribly canned or susceptible to poor ageing. Whibley’s hoarser voice is absolutely a benefit to go with some fuller instrumental work, and the hooks are good enough to cross into ‘enjoyable on their own merits’. On the contrary, channelling the ghost of mgk’s pop-punk cosplay feels totally disingenuous, to such an extent that Sum 41 barely feel like themselves on certain tracks. If Time Won’t Wait’s nebulous melange of Tickets To My Downfall-isms will rub you the wrong way, then Dopamine sounding exactly—and I mean exactly—like Bloody Valentine will probably break the skin. At least when Johnny Libertine is a Green Day song by any other name, that’s a ballpark that Sum 41 could believably find themselves in. Or hey, why not do more like Future Primitive? Y’know, the one that sounds like a Sum 41 song.
The metal half at least gets why that’s an appealing prospect, and seeks to facilitate some stronger connection with older, better work. The three-song run of Rise Up, Stranger In These Times and I Don’t Need Anyone actually succeeds really well at that, being functionally metal in tone without shafting the punk and melodic hardcore that constitutes the Sum 41 variant of it. The result is a collection of songs with much more consistency than what came previously, aided by—wouldn’t ya know?—ties that are strong enough to resemble the band they’re coming from. But because of how Heaven :x: Hell structures itself, such a key factor gets sequestered to individual patches of tracklisting.
There’s also the matter of how, in terms of its strongest melodies and hooks, the front-loading on this album rockets out. Say what you want about the certain flavours of pop-punk production at play, but the earworms have the hardiness of cockroaches to withstand even the most polished job. Later on, meanwhile, a bunch of serviceable, mid-ranged cuts fill up the quota for a second disc, not being precisely bad but also with little defining character. In the strictest sense, they’re ‘metal’ insofar as they’re a bit stormier and more serious-sounding, which already feels like a bit of a cop-out. Had Sum 41 properly gone for broke to replicate the classic thrash they love, that alone would’ve given this longer legs.
Nowhere does that scream out more than the cover of The Rolling Stones’ Paint It Black which, as one of the final Sum 41 compositions to be put to wax and released, reeks of a space-filler. For starters, it gives blankly melodic 2000s radio-punk more than anything metal, which already feels like a missed opportunity to flip the existing song into something more wild and unconducive. It also just offers nothing in the way of nutrition for this album—a workmanlike Whibley performance that serves its purpose to relay this specific cover. Perhaps it might be massively reductive to place it as a totem for Heaven :x: Hell’s wealth of awkward-landing decisions, but, like…is it wrong?
Perhaps the targets of criticism seem magnified by how much there is on this album. 20 tracks is a lot (despite running for a fairly reasonable length), and in truth, a diehard—or even just a regular big fan—likely won’t take umbrage to most of what’s here. On reasonable grounds, this could pass as Sum 41’s swan song just fine. And yet, even trying to justify that thought process feels like deliberately omitting a lot of important information here. The concept of the split doesn’t work; even among the individual halves, there’s tremendous unevenness; and even though How The End Begins is a satisfying payoff, to get to it, you have to trawl through a lot of material and wonder whether this is. It’s a closing salvo that’s too flagrant in its scale to be an out-and-out black mark, but also not triumphant enough to paper over all its hang-ups. In other words, it’s the end, and we can’t get it back.
For fans of: Green Day, blink-182, Rise Against
‘Heaven :x: Hell’ by Sum 41 is released on 29th March on Rise Records.
Words by Luke Nuttall
