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AS A FAN, WHEN I SEE A PRE- ORDER, I’m just thinking, ‘Don’t tell me I can buy something in three months, tell me I can buy it right now. Don’t bother telling me until it’s ready,’” explains Cancer Bats vocalist Liam Cormier of why the Toronto metalcore band decided to surprise-release their sixth album, The Spark That Moves.

While Cancer Bats were noticeably quieter in 2017, they were slowly writing material for this new album. Once the new year hit, and the band were able to get together to record, they came up with the idea to release the album as a surprise for fans on April 20, the day they begin the Hail Destroyer tenth anniversary shows. “That’s where I love the idea of it being a surprise, because this is a surprise for Cancer Bats fans, and if other people find out about it, that’s sick, but if nobody does outside of Cancer Bats fans, I couldn’t give a shit,” says Cormier.

After taking a more experimental approach on their last record, Searching for Zero, the band have returned to the party punk sound that they’ve built their career on. Cormier says the darker atmosphere on the last album was a product of where the band were at the time, but on The Spark That

“This is a surprise for fans. If nobody finds out outside of fans, I couldn’t give a shit.”

Moves, they’ve been able to recapture the energy they had when they began.

“I feel like there are a bunch of those that have that sort of vibe where, as much as we can be a gnarly band, we’re also a really fun party band. I think [that’s] where we’re at, especially in our lives where everything is really rad and we’ve worked through a lot of those harsher kind of times.”