Liam Cormier is gushing about his relatively new home of Halifax, Nova Scotia where he is speaking to me from.
“I just moved here in 2019, and I highly recommend it,” the Cancer Bats lead singer says. “I was living in Toronto for about 15 years, and I came out here traveling and was like, ‘Oh man, this place is amazing.’”
“There’s tons happening here,” he continues, “There’s great music; There’s a great art community; There’s tons of cool fashion, stuff like that happening. It’s a really inspiring place to live.”
It is this satiating environment where Cormier locked himself down for the duration of the pandemic and helped write the Cancer Bats’s seventh record Psychic Jailbreak, the first as a trio with founding member and guitarist Scott Middleton leaving last year.
So did your new home help inspire the new record?
1000%. Yeah, being here and just being inspired. Also, I would say, again, because of the pandemic, I was just in Nova Scotia literally the whole time. We would try and link up to jam, and then there’d be a lockdown; My flight would get cancelled, like, the money was back on my account, and I was like, “Oh yeah, I’m not leaving.”
So instead, I’d be like, “OK, I’m going to go work on lyrics beside the ocean” because I couldn’t go to any coffee shops or anything like that, which was normally where I will write a record. I’ll get out of the house. I’ll walk to the coffee shop, and I’ll work on some lyrics. But because I couldn’t sit in a coffee shop, I was like, I’m going to drive my pick-up truck to the coast, and I’ll listen to the track while I get up there, and then I’ll sit at Peggy’s Cove, watch the ocean, and I write lyrics for the day there. It would just wash over me creatively (laughs).
Something that people don’t really talk about is that there’s tons of lakes out here. There’s all of these windy lake roads (where) you can do and crazy loops. You can do a loop driving around the city for an hour and pass by probably 50 beautiful lakes.
Yeah, I don’t want to blow it because then I’ll probably get chased out of town (laughs), but it’s kind of a secret Nova Scotia thing that nobody talks about … these beautiful lakes everywhere.
Ok, well, maybe I won’t include that so you don’t get chased out of town.
(Laughs) I just want to toot the Nova Scotia horn.
You sound really excited about the new record.
Yeah … I’m so excited for it to come out. We really worked hard on it, and it’s been … again, because there weren’t any shows, we were able to take more time with it, which was nice to kind of work on stuff and then put it down and do other things. We started working on it pretty much like in 2020, and then when we sort of found out that there wasn’t going to be any more shows in 2021, we all kind of like, in the summer 2020, “Oh, OK, cool, let’s just put this down and take six months and just live and hang out … which was great. It was like, we wrote a few of the songs that started shaping the vibe, and then we all took probably the rest of the year off. It was a really cool, like a much-needed break. And then when we reconvened, Mike, Jay and I pretty much got back together in the start of 2021 and asked some big question like, “What do we really like about these songs? What do we really like about being in this band? It was like all of the above and this cool introspection-like moment moving forward.
I was, like, skateboarding a ton, and I skate with all these old guys that listen to like Melvins, old Metallica, old White Zombie. I was like, “Why are these dudes still listening to this years later?” So it was cool to have that time to reflect and ask those things for the new album.
So when you guys revisited those songs after that kind of time out, it sounds like you had a fresh, new perspective to move forward, is that right?
I would say so, yeah. And then it was at that point too, where it was really looking like it was just going to be the three of us, like, working on it as well. Because we were all separate, it was really dependent on who was coming to the table. We have a Dropbox for us to fill with ideas, and there was just a certain point where it was just like, Jay and I are putting up ideas; I would fill myself playing drums, so I would do something and then Mike would add when he could play drums, or he had a really funny like electronic drum kit in his basement, but he would play at 10 at night while is kids slept.
So, we were throwing around these ideas, and that was kind of like where we weren’t hearing any ideas from Scott, and we were like, “Oh, I’m starting to get the feeling that Scott’s busy.” Like, Scott has his studio that he’s fixing and moving into; He’s got his own stuff going on; He’s busy working with bands, and those were the moments where we were like, “OK, we’re just like a three-piece at this point.”
And you’re moving forward a three-piece, correct?
Yeah, that was where we just decided. We had talked to Scott and got the impression that he was just not into this, and he was like, “Yeah.” It was really like chill in that way, that it wasn’t, like, a big weird fight, which was nice. So it made moving forward with the record, like, really positive, and it just really fired us up, and we really wanted to take it seriously. It was a cool transition, too.
The beginning of a new chapter in the Cancer Bats story.
Yeah, and taking a real inspiration … a real direction to just be like, “OK, Cancer Bats are back, and we’re still in business. We’re still that band that’s gonna rage and that’s gonna deliver the same caliber of music that you’ve been, like, jamming to for the last 15 years, which I think in some ways is really good because you can really question what you should be doing. You know what I mean? When you’re like, “Oh man, this is our seventh record; should we be trying to, like, Radiohead it and do something completely different (Laughs)?
I think, again, it’s because of those conversations we’re having is like, “Why does everyone still like the Melvins? Why does everyone still like Metallica? Why does everyone still like these older songs?” We just need to be Cancer Bats, and we need to write the shit out of a Cancer Bats record. It became very clear what our focus needed to be. And not in terms of, like, “Oh OK, we need to just reinvent all these songs,” it was more like, “Yeah, we’re still on this track, and we need to just run the race as hard as we can.”
We’re always conscious of how the crowd responds to certain songs, and we’re such a live band … like, when we play this one, people jump up and down—I love that. And you’ve got think about it as (a) fan and what I like about the music as well, you know? And also where do they lose me?
You really try to put yourselves in the listeners’ shoes.
Totally, and where we put ourselves in this seat of being a fan, where you put on the new Mastodon record or you put on the new whatever … that new Gojira record, I would say, is a perfect example of something that really resonated with me as fan. If I wrote down everything I love and then gave them a list—it felt like that. Hearing those records were really inspiring … like, I don’t want Gojira to sound like Radiohead (Laughs). I want it to sound like Gojira.
Another great record for that was the new Turnstile. I really loved Time and Space, and I’m into everything the band does. (The new album) was a cool, creative extension of what you all do, but you’re not losing any of that when you bring in some new ideas; you’re just adding to it.
[Pauses]
Like, I want to put on that record and rip a mini ramp (Laughs).
You’d pointed out how Cancer Bats are such a live band and love to play live shows. What did you miss most during the long break in touring?
I think the biggest thing, for us is seeing all of our friends. So many Cancer Bats fans are people that we’ve become friends with—All the promoters are really good friends; The people who own the bars … it’s become our community around the world. I think for me, that’s the biggest thing that I’ve missed. It’s just like being able to actually see all of these folks and see how lucky I am that Cancer Bats affords me a way to have all these friends all over the world. So yeah, I’m really excited to play some shows, but I’m also really excited to hang and catch up.
Have you played any shows yet, or is the upcoming tour with your friends Comeback Kid the first ones?
We haven’t, no. We did those acoustic shows in Winnipeg. We did that and that’s the closest thing that we’ve come to playing a show. That was amazing too, to even just get to play with different musicians and to change up the Cancer Bats dynamic… that was super refreshing and really fun. It really opened our eyes to the possibility of moving forward, the Cancer Bats can be anything.
I think it was a good way to wrap our minds around writing and recording and being a band while still living in different cities. Everyone had to do their own homework, so I feel like a little bit of that was, like, where we could kind of ease into this new idea of how we’re going write records. I think irregardless of pandemics, now that we’ve figured this out, we’re like, “Oh, we know how to make demos now. We can do all of this cool stuff and we don’t need to spend 12 hours a day in a jam space.”
It also sounds like those shows help keep some rust off of the wheels.
Yeah, I think so. And also I think with all of us being physically active during this downtime, all of that has made us less nervous. I feel more physically fit than I have in years.
Do you think we’ll see that energy on the upcoming tour?
Oh yeah, I feel really ready for these shows and to tear it up—and I know the rest of the guys are, too. The shows are selling out, and people really love the first two songs we’ve put out. I feel more confident now than I have in a really long time. It feels really good.
Watch the video for “Lonely Bong” here:
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Photo courtesy of Sid Tang
