“Who’s taking resumés?” quipped guitarist Dave ‘Brownsound’ Baksh, walking into the backstage media room with his bandmates just after Sum 41 performed together for the very last time on March 30.
They closed out the JUNO Awards at Vancouver’s Rogers Arena, where they were inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame 25 years after releasing their debut EP, Half Hour of Power, and a day before releasing a memories-filled video for “Radio Silence,” a ballad from their eighth and final album, Heaven :x: Hell.
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“This whole thing is kind of foreign to us because we’re not really an awards show band, as much as we used to be in the early days. We haven’t been to them a lot,” bassist Jason ‘Cone’ McCaslin told SPIN, speaking earlier on the red carpet before the show began. “The performance is actually probably the easier part for us because we’re used to that. This is all just weird and strange. But I don’t know if we’ve thought about ‘This is the last thing.’ Probably feel it tomorrow or the next day.”
Flying in for the occasion were their pop-punk peers Joel and Benji Madden of Good Charlotte, who came up alongside Sum 41, slogging it out in vans before exploding on the world stage, where they remained. The two did the honors of inducting them. “These guys are legends,” said Benji.
Onstage, frontman Deryck Whibley — surrounded by his bandmates, Baksh; Cone; Tom Thacker (guitar, keyboards), who does double duty as leader of Vancouver punk band gob; and American Frank Zummo (drums) — did the talking, although the emotion of the moment came through in all their eyes. Whibley mentioned just one person by name in his speech: original drummer Steve Jocz, aka Stevo32, who left the band in 2013 and lives in Australia. “If I had to sum up our journey in one word it would be persistence,” Whibley said.
At the end of the JUNOS, the band assembled for the last time as Sum 41, performing a medley of their biggest hits, “Landmines,” “Fat Lip,” “Still Waiting,” and “In Too Deep,” complete with overhead hand waves, jumping, flashpots, and confetti. It ended with Whibley offering sincere and multiple thank you’s “to all the fans for sticking with us, through all the ups and all the downs, all the heaven and hell.”
And that was it — after around 30 years, sales of 15 million albums, charting-topping singles, a Grammy nomination, two Juno wins, and numerous other notches, including the Canadian Music Hall of Fame induction.
The band also have a history-spanning exhibit at Studio Bell inside Calgary’s National Music Centre, full of their memorabilia including the hijinks-filled “homemade EPK” VHS that helped get them signed, showing them rapping, performing a dance routine in a movie theater parking lot, blasting unsuspecting people with Super Soakers, and stealing pizza.
There will also be screenings of Rocked: Sum 41 in Congo, the documentary about their trip with War Child Canada, in which they were caught in a crossfire (showings are April 19, May 17, June 7). The exhibit will stay until February 2026, when the next inductee is named. As part of a multi-induction ceremony for other acts in May, members of the band are expected to come in person to check out the new exhibition and place their permanent name plaque on the wall of the adjacent Canadian Music Hall of Fame gallery.
Two days after the JUNOS, on April 1, Baksh and Cone were in Las Vegas, giving tours of the Punk Rock Museum, as part of its two-year anniversary festivities. “Did a little impromptu jam and DJ’d at night,” Cone posted on Instagram.
Whibley, who lives in Vegas, said in the JUNO Awards press room that in the next three weeks everyone in the band, his old band, will be coming to Vegas.
Baksh told SPIN his plan is “Taking care of the terabytes and terabytes of ideas that we have on our hard drives, finishing songs, finding our feet — and I’m going to Italy with my missus. I’m talking about our personal stuff, the voice memos at 4 in the morning.”
Cone has his weekly radio show, Cone’s Cave on Oshawa’s 94.9 The Rock, for which he just did some interviews at the Punk Rock Museum, including one with Fat Mike of NOFX and FatWreck Chords.
Whibley sat down with SPIN in early March, a few days after their final concert in Toronto, to talk about his decision to end the band, how the final tour and shows felt, and all the offers coming in — not just music related.
“Should we wait for these guys to leave?” Whibley asks, settling on a couch in an empty lounge at CBC headquarters in Toronto, where he and soon-to-be-ex bandmates Cone and Baksh just finished doing some promo for their upcoming induction at the Junos.
Weeks before, Sum 41 wrapped up the Tour of the Setting Sum, a year-long global goodbye, with a final two concerts down the street at the 19,800-capacity Scotiabank Arena. The tour was 117 concerts that began in Seoul, South Korea, on Feb. 27, 2024, and ended on January 30, 2025, in Toronto — in effect their hometown, just 30 miles from where Sum 41 formed in Ajax, Ontario.
The next day the band trekked out to Ajax to do a sold-out livestreamed Q&A with broadcaster Josie Dye at J. Clarke Richardson Collegiate Theatre.
While there, the guys also received the key to the town and a replica of the temporary street sign, “Sum 41 Way,” on Falby Court, the former site of Exeter High School where Whibley, McCaslin, and Baksh met in the ‘90s, and solidified the Sum 41 lineup (with Stevo32) that would make rock stars out of them.
The sign was supposed to only stay put until the induction, although many locals felt it should be permanent — and they just got their wish. The day after their swansong, the Town of Ajax announced that Sum 41 Way will remain indefinitely. “The sign is a reminder of the career & resilience of the band members who got their start in Ajax & for all to follow their passions,” it read on the town’s socials.
“I guess I should say ‘bye,’ though. I’m so used to seeing them tomorrow. I won’t see them for a while,” realizes Whibley, standing back up to see off Cone and Baksh who have their coats on, ready to leave.
The lifelong friends chat briefly about whether they’ll see each other that Friday night — Sum 41 is shooting a music video for “Radio Silence,” a reflective ballad featuring Whibley on piano — then Whibley’s wife, Ariana, excitedly tells Cone they love “that little fuckin’ gift candy bag” his daughter gave them, filled with “the grossest mix of candy, like three Pez, some smashed up sour keys, and two weird candy bars I’ve never seen before.” She calls it “the sweetest thing.”
“She also has a bag for Quentin,” Cone says. “Did she give you that?”
“Your mom probably has it,” Ariana says to her husband. The couple have two kids, son Lydon, 5, and daughter Quentin, 2.
“The things that I’m excited about is being able to go to take them to school, pick them up every day and drop them off. I don’t get to do that,” Whibley tells SPIN of life after Sum 41. “I don’t get to go to swim classes and stuff like that. I hear about it; I see photos, but that’ll be really fun.”
This is what life in a rock ‘n’ roll band is like after almost 30 years. They have been in Sum 41 longer than they haven’t — actually almost twice as long.
They are middle-aged men now, married fathers with responsibilities outside the studio and stage. Whibley just turned 45; Cone and Baksh (who has a fiancé and grown step kids) are both 44. And almost two years ago, on May 8, 2023, Sum 41 posted a message on their socials that they would be disbanding.
It takes guts to end a band on a high note, when money is still rolling in, big shows are selling out, fans are still loyal, your music still relevant, and everybody still likes each other.
“Yeah, usually not our age,” Whibley laughs. “It’s usually, you know, KISS, Elton, and stuff like that.”
“It’s very unusual. You tell me what contemporary band quit in their prime,” says Jeff Craib, their original booking agent whose company, The Feldman Agency, repped the band in Canada until the very end. “To make a commitment to something like that, it’d be like a sports person setting the record for something and then retiring. I respect it. If they come back and decide to do one offs in umpteen years and Deryck does solo stuff, and they all do studio projects or they form another band, it doesn’t even matter. The fact that they got to this point, ‘Let’s do a loop and say goodbye,’ it’s powerful.”
It was not a decision Whibley came to easily.
The response to the band was almost instant, after they started injecting their personalities into the band presentation. They attracted A&R with the EPK and residency at Toronto’s Ted’s Wrecking Yard for which they had a trampoline onstage. Each week word spread, and the turnout got better and better. Island Def Jam A&R guy Lewis Largent, who died in 2023, got onstage and started jumping on it. He ended up signing the band, co-A&R-ing with Rob Stevenson. Aquarius Records had them for Canada only.
Their debut EP, Half Hour of Power, came out in 2000, followed by their breakthrough album, All Killer No Filler, in 2001, featuring the anthem “Fat Lip” — the turning point for the band. 2002’s Does This Look Infected? came next, earning the 2003 Juno for group of the year.
In 2004, the band went on a humanitarian trip with War Child Canada to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they got caught in a crossfire. Their third album, Chuck, is named after the UN peacekeeper who kept them safe and won a 2005 Juno for rock album.
The fourth album, Underclass Hero, was the first of two without Baksh, and reached No. 1 in Canada and No. 7 in the U.S. Three more albums followed that next decade: 2011’s Screaming Bloody Murder, 2016’s 13 Voices, and 2019’s Order in Decline, and then nothing until they announced a double album. Heaven :x: Hell, on Rise Records. Released a year ago, the body of work is as good as anything on All Killer No Filler, yielding their first Billboard No. 1 alternative airplay hit, “Landmine,” since “Fat Lip” 22 years earlier, then another No. 1 with the fourth single, “Dopamine.”
Along the way, Whibley married Avril Lavigne, divorced Avril Lavigne, got shot at, was attacked, injured his back, trashed hotel rooms aplenty, almost died from alcoholism, got sober, got remarried, and had kids. All the craziness is chronicled in his 2024 autobiography, Walking Disaster: My Life Through Heaven And Hell, an exceptional and sometimes difficult read, including his allegations that he was groomed and sexually coerced by his orginal manager, Greig Nori of the band Treble Charger, with whom he had a sexual relationship for about four years. Nori has denied the allegations, and the pair are now suing each other.
As the frontman and main songwriter, Whibley knows without him there is no Sum 41.
He’s got an ecosystem of people who work for him, managers, booking agents, crew, who have other clients but it’s still kinda sad, an end of an era. But bandmates, that’s another story when it’s been your identity your entire adulthood. Cone has produced other acts and had a solo project Operation MD with the Offspring’s Todd Morse, while Baksh left Sum 41 for almost a decade (2006-2015) to do Brown Brigade and work with other bands. Cone now hosts a Sunday night radio show on Oshawa’s 94.9 The Rock.
“The bandmates were the hard part because I knew the feeling wasn’t going to be mutual,” Whibley says, “and, obviously, you can see we’re still good friends. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I’m so sick of these guys, I hate them.’ You know, we were just talking about Cone’s daughter; our families are all wrapped up together, so it was hard for everyone, not just the band guys. It was going to affect everybody.”
In their announcement to fans, they thanked them for the support and said they would be finishing up their worldwide headlining tour and releasing their final album, Heaven :x: Hell, and so they did.
When they launched the Tour of the Setting Sum, Cone and Baksh would sometimes make “last time in [name city]” posts on Instagram, but Whibley didn’t.
“At the beginning of the Canadian run [January 10], which was in Victoria, for the first time I was like, ‘Oh wow, this is like coming to an end,’ because everything all last year felt just like being on tour and a new album, night after night. It just never felt any different. And then, when I woke up at the hotel for the first show, it just hit me, ‘Oh, man, this is the last one.’ I was like, ‘I gotta take this in, as the final thing,’ and it stayed like that all the way through.
“So, after the first Scotiabank show, I thought it was great, but I didn’t feel any different. But then the day of the final show, it finally hit me, but it didn’t hit me that this was over. Obviously, I knew it was going to be over, but a different feeling set in, my nervousness before the show. You always feel somewhat nervous because you want to do a good job, whereas this was like, ‘Oh, man, this is the last one. If this show doesn’t go well, there’s no other show to make up for it.’”
But it did go well.
Michael McCarty, who attended the first final show with producer Marc Costanzo, the guy who brought Sum 41 to him and Barbara Sedun at EMI Music Publishing Canada in the ‘90s and helped get the ball rolling before Nori started managing them, says he was having all kinds of flashbacks during the concert.
“I said to Deryck after, when they first came on stage at Scotiabank Arena, full of people and fans going crazy, and the band starts playing, my first thought was, ‘Wow, they’ve come a long way from Ted’s Wrecking Yard back in the days when we put the residency together. And then my next thought was, ‘Actually, no, they haven’t really. They were that amazing at Ted’s Wrecking Yard. You felt like they were doing an arena show in a bar and all they’re doing now is the same show with bigger props on a bigger scale,” he laughs.
There was only a slight change to the final show. Usually, the band returns for one last song after the houselights go up and people are exiting the building, while the true fans know to stick around. This time, Sum 41 did not leave the stage, taking it all in.
“We actually played another song that we haven’t played this whole tour, so it was a longer show,” Whibley says of adding “Welcome To Hell” from Chuck.
Other than that, that was it. Craib and Costanzo who went to both last shows say the final show was more of a celebration.
So what is next?
They did film a lot of the tour, just like they did in the early days. “We just kept having a videographer with us, so we do have a lot of stuff. We’ve shot a lot of documentary stuff. We haven’t put it together. We are in talks with certain directors,” Whibley says.
But unlike other long kaput bands who keep mining their archives, he doesn’t think they’ll be any previously unreleased material coming out or box sets with demos.
“We were always on this quick cycle and this hamster wheel. Here’s your short amount of time to write songs for a new album and you’re back on the road. So, every single song I wrote made an album. There were no extras. I got 12 songs. That was it. And we put 12 songs on the album.”
After the Canadian Music Hall of Fame induction, he doesn’t know what the future will hold. All doors are open, he says.
“All I can say is I have no plans for anything. Now, creativity, music, sometimes just hits you even when you don’t want to. I always let the music tell me what to do, if all of a sudden there’s these great songs that feel like they have to come out. I don’t see myself doing anything this year, like putting out a record. That would be wild. But you never know [laughs] If It’s that good.
“See, the thing that happened is as soon as I announced this, there’s a lot of people that I know within the music business, or even in TV and movie stuff, who are like, ‘Hey, would you want to be a part of this? Would you want to do this?’ And they’re all different things. Some things have nothing to do with creativity; some are more in business,” Whibley says. “There’s so many things that are potentials that I’m just going to be taking meetings the next few months.”
He has not asked Cone or Baksh what their plans are.
“We’ve never talked about what any of us are going to do afterwards. We never really talked about the end or post Sum 41. I have no idea.”
After the Scotiabank Arena swansong, there was an after-party in the venue’s Platinum Club, packed with friends, family and various industry peeps who had played a part in their career, small and big, these 30 years.
“I think the processing part is going to begin now, or even in April, when all the Juno stuff is done,” Whibley says. “Where it’s really going to hit us, because normally we do an album, we go out on tour for a year, a year and a half, and then we have a break. Usually, I’m in the studio writing [laughs], but everyone has at least a year at home, and then it’s within that year everything starts back up. So, the hardest part is going to be this time next year when nothing is starting back up.”
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