Cancer Bats: Hey World, You’ll Never Break Us

For almost seventeen years now, constant touring has been practically a way of life for Toronto hardcore punk stalwarts CANCER BATS, who’ve made a career out of blasting legions of fans in the face with their trademark brand of hulking riffs and feral vocal attack. So of course, it stands to reason that we find ourselves in the dying days of 2020, the most bizarre of years thanks to the global COVID-19 pandemic, sat across from the band’s magnetic frontman Liam Cormier via Zoom, about to discuss their latest endeavour – a country & western-tinged acoustic EP entitled You’ll Never Break Us // Separation Sessions Vol. 1, which sees the band reworking some of the standout moments of their considerable back catalogue into something very different indeed.

Faced with the rather broad opening question of how the year of lockdowns has been, we find Cormier in a characteristically chipper mood, despite the circumstances of having spent the best part of a year away from the stage. “It’s been good – I mean, obviously different, obviously a little bit unexpected, but I will say like on the side of CANCER BATS I would say we were quite fortunate because this was already supposed to be a year that we had off”, he explains matter-of-factly.

“So we had finished two years of pretty solid touring for The Spark That Moves and then our plan was to just like play some festivals, kinda like hang out, but for the most part we were just gonna be writing a new record, working on some stuff and just sorta taking a much-needed break. Man, my heart goes out to all the bands that were where we were two years ago. If we were about to put out the record in the exact same way that we had, I would be completely different; I would probably have been like crying for the last six months versus like hanging out and dirt-biking!”

Of course, with much of the world having been in various states of lockdown for the past year or so, actually getting together to record new music proved an impossibility for CANCER BATS this time around, with the band having to instead resort to working separately and collating various recordings remotely. “Because we can’t be together, it’s really slow-going to do any of these things – there’s a lot of back-and-forth, a lot of emails; it’s a lot less of the fun, spontaneous ‘we’re jamming, we’re trying out all these ideas’ stuff. It’s more like people sending through demos in the middle of the night and you wake up in the morning, you’re sat drinking coffee and listening to it like ‘I think I know what you mean’ and you have to get on the phone,” Liam notes of the new trappings the band found themselves having to overcome.

Naturally, with the reimagined takes on the EP seeing Liam tackling a vastly different vocal approach, trading in his usual caustic screeching for a more melodic croon, we can’t resist poking fun at the band’s previously-noted disdain for doing acoustic shows. “That’s the thing – now I feel like we’ve blown it!” Cormier laughs at the notion. “Now people know like we can do acoustic versions, so we can’t really make excuses anymore. But I think now that we’ve actually taken the time figuring out how to like do the songs in these cool versions; I dunno, it’s like there’s a million videos of bands just playing their songs acoustically and it’s okay but they’re never like that great. Everyone always thinks it’s gonna be as good as like NIRVANA Unplugged or whatever, but that was because they like rewrote all those songs and made them really cool. And I think that was like our version, like okay if we’re gonna do this we need to like take it really seriously and make this more like ALICE IN CHAINS Unplugged-level, and not just like a playing-in-the-CD-store kind of thing. So yeah, I feel like now we’re probably gonna get asked to do acoustic sets, which I’m okay with – it’ll force me to like sing for once!”

As to whatever the future might hold for Cormier and his CANCER BATS brethren, the frontman remains unsure but optimistic at the time of our chat. “I still feel like everybody’s kinda like waiting to see what the future holds,” he notes pensively when pressed on any further plans past the EP’s release. “And like I said, we’re not in a rush or anything. I feel for those bands that are like waiting to put out their records and waiting to tour it. I mean, for us, I still feel like we’re not gonna know until like March or April what’s really happening. Man, I just want people to be safe, you know what I mean? I don’t want people to get sick for something that should be fun like going to a show and hanging out with your friends. That shit is the best, and I don’t want anyone to have it like in the band of their mind that they’re like nervous about getting sick, or worst-case that you don’t know you’re sick and end up really hurting somebody else that wasn’t expecting it. I know everybody wants to see a show, like man, I can’t wait to go and see heavy bands and be a part of it, but at the same time, I think it’s good sometimes to take a break and think on what’s important.”

You’ll Never Break Us: Separation Sessions Vol. 1 is out now via Bat Skull Records/New Damage Records. 

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