According to Deryck Whibley, his band's next album is greater than the sum of its parts.
"It's our most everything record," the Sum 41 singer said. "It's the heaviest we've ever done, but at the same time it's the lightest record we've ever done. It's the perfect mix of our last two records: It's really aggressive, like the last record, but I don't think we sacrificed any melody or anything catchy from the first record."
Whibley, guitarist Dave Baksh, bassist Cone McCaslin and drummer Steve Jocz have written several songs — "Welcome to Hell," "Open Your Eyes," "88" and "Some Say," among them — and are recording in a Toronto studio with producer Greig Nori. The group's songwriting process has been made easier by lessons learned from working with punk legend Iggy Pop (with whom the band wrote "Little Know It All" for Pop's latest album, last year's Skull Ring).
Whibley remembered the process of collaborating with Pop as a proud, nerve-wracking and educational experience.
"He didn't come out and say anything, but just being around and working with him, you pick up and learn things," Whibley said. "The most important thing is not to overthink anything, just go in and do it. And that's how we did 'Little Know It All': Everything about that song was the first idea we ever had. We didn't sit and say this is better or this is better. What came out just came out. I took that [lesson] and applied it to writing our new record."
Whibley expects the album's title to evolve in the same off-the-cuff, first-draft fashion as the moniker of 2002's Does This Look Infected? — which is to say it'll be the last thing they think of. The album's cover, which shows a zombiefied-looking Jocz picking at a huge head wound as blood streams down his face, was chosen even before a title was slapped to it.
"Our record company kept saying that we had to think of a title," Whibley remembered. "And we're like, 'Yeah, yeah, we'll do it.' Then we went on tour and [one day] they said, 'You have to give it a title in the next half hour or it's not coming out for another couple of months.' So we just sat around, and that was the first one that came out. We were looking at the picture and thinking, 'Now what is this picture saying?' "
Sum 41 expect to wrap up the recording process by mid-May, before they take off to the Democratic Republic of Congo to shoot a documentary on the troubled African country for the Canadian human-rights organization War Child (see "Sum 41 Plan Trip To War-Torn Congo To Film Documentary").
Whibley isn't sure why his group, known for hilarious videos and songs like "Hooch," "Billy Spleen" and "Crazy Amanda Bunkface," has suddenly decided to use its popularity for charitable purposes. (Note: The word "maturity" never came up.)
But he is absolutely certain why the group chose to spotlight the Congo, which has suffered a bloody civil war for the past six years.
"The whole reason of their civil war is over a natural resource called coltan, which is used in cell phones, computers and everything that is relevant to our society right now. And we decided that we can have the most effect by going there, because there are so many people over here whose life is based on cell phones and computers. Everyone uses them every single day, including us. So we decided that was the best place to go."
