It’s finally time for the setting of the Sum.
Sum 41 will play their last-ever concert on Thursday with a sold-out show in Toronto. For frontman Deryck Whibley, the performance will mark the culmination of a decision that he wrestled with for years.
“I’d been thinking these thoughts for awhile about wanting to do something different, and would I potentially end the band one day, and do I still wanna do this this way,” Whibley tells ABC Audio. “I had been thinking about that since probably about 2019.”
When he started having those thoughts, Whibley’s initial instinct was to suppress them.
“You’re thinking about it, then I would bury those thoughts and say, ‘You can’t think like that, this is everything that you do,'” Whibley explains. “‘This is your band, this is what you’ve done since you were 15 in the 10th grade. You’ll get over these feelings and stop thinking like that!'”
“I’d move on, and then a couple months would go by and I’d fall back in, ‘You know, I’m still kind of feeling like I wanna do something different,'” he continues. “The window just kept getting smaller and all of the sudden it’s, like, every week I’m thinking that.”
Eventually that became a daily thought, and in 2023 Sum 41 announced that they’d be breaking up after a final album and tour. The album, 2024’s Heaven :x: Hell, spawned #1 hits on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart in “Landmines” and “Dopamine.”
Even after Thursday’s show, Sum 41 won’t completely disappear immediately — they’re being inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame during the Juno Awards in March.
Copyright © 2025, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
