Sum 41 on coming to terms with their breakup

TORONTO — Winding up a rock band is never easy, but for members of Sum 41, the experience has been an odd mixture of confusion, camaraderie and ultimately acceptance.

It started two years ago with a surprise email from the band’s leader Deryck Whibley, who’s also their main songwriter. He told them, that after many years of anxious contemplation, he had finally decided to pull the plug on the band.

“I was shocked,” recalled bassist Jason McCaslin. “Completely shocked.”

“In my mind, I guess I thought we’d never end.”

Sitting alongside guitarist Dave Baksh in a Toronto record label office, the two musicians are reflecting on life without Whibley in their immediate orbit and how within a blink everything is about to end.

Sum 41 plays one final concert at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena on Thursday.

Then in March, they’ll be inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame at the Juno Awards, a recognition of the Ajax, Ont. band’s enduring impact with hits that include “Fat Lip,” “Still Waiting” and “In Too Deep.”

After that, Sum 41 will cease to exist.

“It’s the complete worst; it’s the complete best. It’s everything in between,” said Baksh of playing the last shows.

“It’s a feeling I don’t think I’ve ever had. So I have no descriptive for it.”

Missing from this discussion is Whibley who, unlike the band’s other two Ontario-based members, lives in Las Vegas and was unable to make it back to Canada for a run of press interviews in early January.

That left his two lifelong friends to pose for photos without their familiar frontman, an absence that casts an unintentional weight over the proceedings. In some ways, it feels as if Sum 41 has already closed the book even before their curtain call.

It’s taken a lot of emotional effort to get to a point where, as Baksh puts it, they’ve come through the five stages of grief to arrive at acceptance. They recognize now that Whibley had to end Sum 41 for himself. There was no other option after his message landed.

“It was this very nicely worded email that explained his position,” Baksh said.

“You immediately go into a mode where it’s like, ‘OK, this person needs it. What can we do to help this happen?”

Despite the odds, Sum 41 lasted longer than many critics expected.

Whibley and his band mates burned bright and loud during the pop-punk heyday of the early aughts. They partied hard, rebelled against whatever stood in their way, and established themselves as one of the bratty forces of teen angst for a generation.

In his 20s, Whibley became tabloid fodder. He married and divorced Canadian pop princess Avril Lavigne, had a fling with Paris Hilton and was caught in many an unflattering photo by the paparazzi outside trendy Los Angeles clubs.

It all came crashing down in 2014 when alcoholism sent Whibley over the edge. He was hospitalized in a coma with severe damage to his liver and kidneys that nearly killed him.

In the years that followed, he underwent a major life reset that saw him pursue sobriety and settle down. But as he describes it, not everything changed.

Outside his control, the music industry machine continued to whir, and with it came heavy expectations.

Sum 41 would spend the better part of each year on tour, after which Whibley would hunker down in the studio for six or eight months to write a new album. Once it was finished, he’d be spit back onto the touring circuit to promote it.

While that repetition had always been part of his lifestyle, he found it harder to enjoy in the years after his recovery. Internal voices of discontent became increasingly louder and so he buried them as best he could in his work.

“I would crush (them) and say, ‘Stop thinking like that. This is what you do. You love being in Sum 41’ — which I do,” the 44-year-old explained over a video call from a hotel room in Winnipeg while on tour.

“But I couldn’t help but think this is all I’ve ever done.”

Whibley said his emotions came to a head near the start of the COVID-19 pandemic as he grappled with signs of burnout. The sudden pause of concerts allowed him to contemplate his priorities as he welcomed a baby boy, the first with his wife.

Once the industry got back into motion he was on the road again.

It wasn’t until Whibley put the finishing touches on Sum 41’s ambitious double album “Heaven :x: Hell” that he started to see everything clearer. The project captured both the pop-punk and heavy metal sounds that defined his band’s evolution, and he was satisfied with how it turned out.

“What else would I do after this?” he remembers thinking.

“It encapsulates Sum 41 perfectly … and that’s when it hit me, I think I’m ready for something different.”

At least six months passed before Whibley finally shared his decision with the band in early 2023. It arrived to them in an email that he says he titled “I’m Afraid It’s Come to This.”

“I’m not as excited about it as I once was,” he summarized. “And I don’t want to do it just because it’s a great paycheque.”

Whibley, who’s now father to a daughter as well, asked his band mates to digest his message and not act on their immediate emotions. He suggested they each hop on a phone call after the news settled in.

“I know the guys so well, I know how we operate, and I know how I would want something like that to be delivered to me,” he said.

“I wanted to give everybody the respect, time and the space to absorb it.”

Whibley eventually made those promised phone calls, which his band mates say helped smooth over their raw emotions and consider Whibley’s experience.

“To put it in perspective … he hadn’t ever taken time off for himself,” Baksh said.

“One day he told me, ‘I’ve never been on vacation.’ I was like, you should do that.”

Of course, Whibley’s decision didn’t just affect the band — it sent ripples through every corner of their business, which kicked into high gear.

Sum 41 immediately hopped on a tour with the Offspring, released their final album in early 2024 and then kicked off their massive Tour of the Setting Sum farewell run, which has been going ever since.

Last year, Whibley released an explosive memoir that chronicled his tumultuous experiences as a scrappy young rock star, including allegations of misconduct against the band’s former manager, which he has denied. The two have escalated the dispute to a potential courtroom showdown.

All of the renewed attention on Sum 41’s final shows has left most of the band a little shell-shocked, yet Whibley sounds as if he couldn’t be happier about seeing the finish line.

“It doesn’t really feel sad or scary,” he says. “I don’t feel anxious.”

Instead, he is looking forward to a simpler life. He said he doesn’t have any big plans, for now.

“I wouldn’t mind just being at home for a while. That sounds like vacation to me,” he added.

“Just, like, waking up in my own bed.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 29, 2025.

David Friend, The Canadian Press