Three years ago, Canada’s most powerful metallic punks, Cancer Bats, were Searching for Zero, and today—on April 20, or 420, the day when more things are lost than on any other day of the year—they are back to announce to the world that they’ve found it.
The Spark That Moves, the group’s surprise sixth record—dropping via the band’s own Bat Skull Records, in partnership with New Damage Records in North America—serves as a stunning and invigorating reset button. It’s a fiery, forceful reclamation of all that has made Cancer Bats such a singular voice in the art of melding crunchy Southern riffs with punk and hardcore bite and proclaims that these Canucks are kicking more ass than they ever have.
The Spark That Moves feels like a record for the fans, like Cancer Bats took their 11 best songs and brought them into the future with all the experience and wisdom they’ve gleaned over years. It’s guaranteed to be a fan-favorite, because all of the things that made each of the group’s previous records so special are represented here in one album. It has the type of energy and grade-A certified riffs that will excite a 60-year-old biker, a 30-something new parent, and a kid in high school equally—all with the venom and bite of an angry, coiled snake.
In short, Cancer Bats have not watered down their greatness after all these years.
There’s a reason the record feels like a mid-career Best Of experiment. Vocalist Liam Cormier explains, “When we were starting to write this, when you have endless possibilities—I was like, ‘Let’s look at our setlist. Let’s look at why we play these 15 songs every night. What are we looking to add to the conversation?’ There’s a reason everyone has gravitated toward these songs and asked us to play them. It’s not like we want to rewrite those songs over again, but we realized [these live favorites] are the spirit of our band.”
“As much as we like throwing in some stoner songs and other stuff,” he continues, “I was saying, ‘We’ve already done that, though.’ We don’t need to write another thrash song, because I’m down to just play ‘All Hail’ and ‘Pray for Darkness,’ and we’re never going to play more than two thrash songs in a set. We don’t need that. If we want to play a super sludgy song, we have ‘Sleep This Away,’ which we don’t even play. If we need to get the sludge out of our system, we could just start an Electric Wizard cover band,” he laughs.
Searching for the band’s creative spark—or zero—required some serious reflection and time away, and not being tethered to a record contract was instrumental. “We have this freedom, and part of that was everyone having done some other things in life,” Cormier expands. “So, we were like, ‘Let’s come back and do Cancer Bats as best as we can.’ That’s been really helpful, because we didn’t have a label or anything—we were out of contact with everybody—so we were just existing as dudes playing music. We didn’t even know if it would turn into a record. It was from a genuine desire to play together and have fun.”
Why the surprise release? Cormier laughs and compares releasing an album to baking brownies—which is extra apropos on 420. “I’m really stoked on the idea of saying, ‘We have a new record. You can order it right now,’ instead of the usual thing where it’s like, ‘We have a new record, and here’s a teaser video. it’s coming out in three months,’” he explains. “People think this little counter we have is going to open up to a preorder that will explain that our record’s coming out in October. Fuck that! When I see a preorder for a band, that’s just a bummer. I just want the record right now. Don’t tell me until the brownies are done. Don’t tell me you went to the store and that you’re going to invite me over in three months. Call me when there will be some kickass brownies ready.”
This move of giving fans what they want when they want it is rooted in the punk ethos, Cormier notes. Cancer Bats are saying their art is available now—come support them if you want. “I think that the internet is more punk than it’s ever been,” he adds. “To be able to put up an online store, and there are places that can help you stream, and we can go contact a record processing plant. We can do all those things ourselves, and we have been, slowly. We didn’t want to do a GoFundMe or anything, so we started putting money aside while we were still touring, because we know how much a record costs to record. We tried to put ourselves ahead of the game a year and a half early, because we knew, eventually, we wanted to do this.”
The result is a sonic experiment that tested the hypothesis: What if a band got to rewrite their classics later, when they were better songwriters? Assessing that hypothesis through multiple spins—they are pressing vinyl!—is not only encouraged, it’s doctor recommended. The Spark That Moves isn’t the sound of a band retreading old tracks; it’s the sound of a band embracing what makes them unique—and why fans have stuck around—and harnessing those traits to amazing ends.
