TOUR DE FORCE
Career-making album’s 10th anniversary brings band to Lee’s Palace
The Cancer Bats celebrate the 10th anniversary of their career-making album with a stop in Toronto this weekend,
Hail Destroyer was the best thing that ever happened to the Cancer Bats, according to the Cancer Bats.
As far as sales figures go, though?
“Hail Destroyer is actually the lowest-selling album of all of our records,” says laughing frontman Liam Cormier down the line from Halifax, where he was in the midst of a sales trip for his Treadwell clothing line last week prior to returning home to Toronto for a pair of sold-out shows celebrating the 10th anniversary of Destroyer’s release at Lee’s Palace on Friday and Saturday. “Sales-wise, hard numbers, throughout the entire globe, it’s the lowest-selling album. But it’s our biggest record.”
Ah, welcome to the peculiar realities of the 21st-century music industry.
A fat-free, metal-edged hardcore burner released to instant excitement amongst transatlantic punk fans back in April 2008, Hail Destroyer was the sophomore record that finally allowed the young, hungry Bats — hungry in the literal, “we can’t afford to eat” sense as well as in the figurative — to start earning an almost-living wage from their music. It made the Cancer Bats a lot of fans. And those fans were kind enough, at least, to buy the odd concert ticket or T-shirt once in a while even if a lot of them didn’t necessarily feel the need to shell out for the record.
“Sharing music and illegal downloads and all that stuff were, I would say, at their height and I think it’s best seen in that light,” says Cormier, who bears no ill will toward anyone who might have nicked their copy from the internet.
“This was the big record that kind of changed things for us. It was the ‘game changer.’ That was where we noticed everything kinda stepping up. We had toured a ton on (2006’s)
Birthing the Giant and then we put out Hail Destroyer and instantly all the shows were, like, crazy and packed out and that was when we actually started making some money and we weren’t homeless any more.
“I don’t think we would have done as well if this record didn’t get shared as much as it did and if it didn’t get picked up by all of these people. For us, we never made any money off selling records, so it was, like, ‘Well, we don’t care because now we can just tour everywhere.’ We’ve always made our money on the road. But this meant we could tour way more non-stop.”
Cormier isn’t exaggerating, by the way: The Cancer Bats were indeed more or less homeless when they made Hail Destroyer 10 years ago.
The band wrote and recorded the entire record in two months while taking a break from the road they could ill afford. None of them, as drummer Mike Peters recalls, had a concrete place to stay because they’d all given up their apartments to eke out a living from touring — which made it easy to put their all into asecond record that turned out, despite the “advice” of several would-be record-label suitors that they should go more melodic to chase radio play, even heavier and more aggressive than the first.
“We couldn’t afford to do anything so it was, like, ‘This is all we’re doing,’ ” Peters recalls from Winnipeg, the old hometown to which he recently returned with his wife and newborn son.
“And we wanted to get back on the road. We had plans. It was, like, ‘We have this amount of time and we need to write 12 or 13 songs’ or whatever it was. But it was summer and it was Toronto and we got bicycles and it was super fun. We were young and we were excited.”
“For us, in retrospect, looking back on it, it’s really cool because when we were writing this record, we literally were touring non-stop because we didn’t have places to live,” Cormier concurs. “When we were writing the record we were, like, staying at our buddies’ places,” Cormier says. “I had a tent set up in my friend’s loft — at the Truth Explosion (magazine) loft space, specifically — and that was just the vibe. It was like, ‘We can only take two months off of tour so we have two months to write this record so we’re just gonna jam seven days a week, 12 hours a day and we’re gonna get it done.’ ”
Hail Destroyer featured some guest appearances from such punk peers (and sometime tourmates) as Ben Kowalewicz of Billy Talent, Wade MacNeil of Alexisonfire and Black Lungs and Tim McIlrath of Rise Against, so it’s possible this weekend’s hometown shows — which preface what Cormier calls “a little world tour” that will see the band playing the record in its entirety in a handful of other cities in Canada, the U.K. and Europe — might have a few surprises. That’s not counting the fact that the band is actually going to play “PMA ’Til I’m DOA” and “Zed’s Dead, Baby,” two late-album cuts that, Peters says, “no one really wants to play.” The latter has actually never been heard from the stage.
If there are other surprises in store this weekend, Peters and Cormier are being tightlipped. Rest assured you won’t see the Cancer Bats dining out on Hail Destroyer nostalgia after these 12 tour dates are done, though.
“We didn’t want to draw it out for too long,” says Peters. “We don’t want to dwell on the past for too long. I think it’s important. Sometimes, bands do it and they have to do the whole world and they spend, like, an entire year reliving the past and it’s great and people get excited but we want to be moving forward.”
“Plus we all have reasons to be home now. Back in 2008, when we were making this record, we didn’t want to have homes. We wanted to be on the road all the time. But now, it’s like, ‘I still love doing this, but I actually like being at home.’”