Simple Plan’s latest album recaptures its youthful spirit
MONTREAL — Think of the new Simple Plan album as the sonic equivalent of the I’m Just a Kid Tiktok challenge.
Harder Than It Looks, which was released Friday, is very much a return to the Montreal band’s classic sound. In other words, it’s old-school punk-pop, with big hooks, bigger melodies and plenty of buzz-saw guitars, all wrapped in a well-produced, accessible style. Appropriately enough, it comes out on the 20th anniversary of Simple Plan’s debut album, No Pads, No Helmets ... Just Balls, which relied on the same musical formula and turned these francophone Montrealers into global rock stars.
The I’m Just a Kid Tiktok challenge popped up on the absurdly influential social media platform in the early days of the pandemic. It just happened — it wasn’t kickstarted by the band members or their entourage. In fact, they only found out about it when it became huge. The idea was that people would create short videos flashing back to their childhood with the titular song, one of Simple Plan’s first hits, as the soundtrack.
Before you could say “viral phenomenon,” there were 3.4 million videos online as part of the challenge, including clips featuring Will Smith, Venus and Serena Williams, Usher and Ed Sheeran, leading to more than four billion total views.
So, let’s just say flashing back to the past seemed like a natural for the band. But drummer Chuck Comeau is quick to point out that Harder Than It Looks isn’t just about nostalgia.
“We wanted to make the quintessential Simple Plan album, but I think we wanted to make it in a way that would feel modern and fresh,” Comeau said from his home in the Toluca Lake neighbourhood of Los Angeles. “Instead of copying exactly what we did with our first album, we wanted to find the essence of the band, to find the ingredients that made Simple Plan Simple Plan — but to do that in a current way. And I think that’s easier said than done. I think it’s easy to say, ‘Let’s write an uptempo song, we’ll add these pop-punk arrangements.’ Then you do that and sometimes there’s just no magic to it. There’s no excitement. It just feels like you’re repeating yourself. It feels stale.
“So that was the challenge of the album. It was like, ‘Let’s find what we love about our band and what made us excited to play this kind of music, to form this band when we were like 19 or 20. And what our fans loved about this band when they first heard it.’
“What were the songs? What were the albums that people really connected with? What was it about these moments, these songs, that really connected, that made them special to us and to them? It’s finding that essence. These ingredients. So, let’s try to recapture the energy — let’s try to recapture the spirit. Let’s try to recapture the feeling we got when we wrote these songs or when fans heard these albums. And do it in a way that felt like we weren’t just repeating ourselves or just spinning our wheels in circles. To try to do something that would move the band forward.
“I really feel, when I hear the record now and I hear the reaction of the fans, it’s kind of like they can tell there’s something classic and vintage about these songs. But at the same time, they feel exciting, they feel like they belong in 2022 and they don’t sound dated. They feel like they’re of the moment.”
Comeau said the album was actually finished in early 2020, “right before the whole world kind of shut down and our lives changed.” Four of the 10 tracks have already been released as singles: The Antidote, Ruin My Life (featuring Deryck Whibley from Sum 41), Congratulations and the prophetic Wake Me Up (When This Nightmare’s Over), which was written before the pandemic but fits our times like a glove.