Cancer Bats

On their first stop of their Canadian Tour, Dwayne Larson had had the chance to sit down with the Cancer Bats front man Liam Cormier for yet another interview. Like last time, speaking with Liam is invigorating, it reminds you why it is you’re doing all this in the first place. Being sincere and gracious, Liam never has anything bad to say about anyone and is always a pleasure to speak to.

April 17th sees the Cancer Bats new album “Dead Set on Living” drop on Distort Entertainment – we spoke to him about the upcoming album and the fact that they’re referred to to as one of the hardest working bands ever. Read on for more information.

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ThePunkSite- First off your name and what you do with the band?

Liam- My name is Liam Joseph Cormier and I sing in a band called the Cancer Bats.

TPS- So this is the first stop on the tour of the new album “Dead Set On Living” and you guys are crossing Canada for what probably seems like the millionth time.

Liam- Yea!!!!! We have ripped across the country a lot.

TPS- Touring is always exciting especially when you have a new record to promote and everyone is stoked to hear the new stuff live. What are you looking forward to on this tour the most?

Liam- I am super stoked for the bands and, for us, we wanted to put together a rad package for our record release or I guess pre-record release. It was really important to us. I love all the tours we get to do but I mean it’s OUR headliner and we want to take out the bands we want. I mean I am a huge Touché Amour fan I have known Jeremy, the singer, for a long time; so I am excited to hang out with those dudes and get to see them every night. A Sight for Sewn Eyes we know from Halifax and they are a rad band as well and we have toured with them there so we were like “hey lets bring those dudes out.”

TPS- When you guys do your headlining tour do you get to choose who you want to bring or does the label have some kind of input into it?

Liam-Yea for sure it’s all us. In the case of Touché we asked if they knew anybody and they were like “we are up for whatever.” So I was like OK well this is the band I want to bring. We definitely like to be in charge of that kind of stuff. Even like when we came through with 3 Inches of Blood – it was us and 3 Inches figuring out that whole tour. That’s why we got Sight for Sewn Eyes on the east coast and Waster out here. I think making a rad tour is what is most important for us. I mean you have to give a shit.

TPS- For sure if you don’t have any input then it might just be someone your label or management sets you up with and it might not be as fun for a few weeks. OR it could be awesome.

Liam- That’s the thing too – is that we are really involved with our label; so I like bringing out bands with the label that we are friends with. I mean when we first got signed to Distort we toured with The Gorgeous all the time. For us, that’s very much part of being a part of a band.

TPS-I saw on your twitter account that you guys had asked for the fans input on your set lists for the tour. How much to you let things like facebook and twitter come into the band dynamics or making band decisions?

Liam- I like having it as an element of interaction. We were really excited that as many people had feedback for us. Within 5 minutes of putting that up while we were having a band practice. I mean it is a cool thing to let kids know that we will be playing older songs that they may not have heard. We always get asked about stuff like that. A lot of kids know that I hang out at merch, so kids will ask for certain songs so usually I have to turn them down unless its the obvious ones. That was our other thinking- is that we will let kids know that we are going to be playing “PMA till I’m DOA”, or “Fire Crack This.” You know what I mean? Just songs that they might not normally hear.

TPS- New album is slated to be released April 17th it is titled “Dead Set on Living.” What’s behind the idea for naming it “Dead Set on Living”?

Liam-The title is basically us being stoked on life and having the best time with it. It’s our forth record and we are still here and still having fun and not getting sidetracked by a bunch of bullshit. That whole thing was coined by a friend of ours who the song Dead Set on Living is about. Basically he went into the hospital and was sick while we were working on the record and he came out and said “from now I am dead set on living, that’s what I am all about.” We were like “that is the best idea” and not only did that apply to him but it applied to everything we were doing. It’s like not loosing that focus or distracted and doing what is most important. So it made a lot of sense to me while we were working on this album to really push a lot of those ideas home.

TPS-The last album you just did was one of the heaviest records you had ever recorded and I know you were super stoked on that. What are you excited about for the new record? I have listened to a preview stream and to me it sounds maybe more hardcore then metal.

Liam- For us we are really conscious to take all those elements from every record; so I realize that “Bears” was heavy and super sludgey and had that side of things. I don’t want to be just that band because that is not Cancer Bats. When you come and see us live, its not like we just play Bears we still play tons of “Hail Destroyer” and still play tons of “Birthing” we even still play a couple songs off the demo. So its something we have always done and we talked about it when we were writing the record and we couldn’t forget about all those vibes. We still love playing those songs and we need to carry them along while we write the record. We approached writing the album like we do when we pick a set list. That’s not to say that there is going to be a birthing song or whatever; lets just not have slow brutal songs – we like to mix in like punk rock bangers that are really fun to play. So that’s why I think there is a healthy mix.

TPS-You guys have a new single out and video out right now. It is kind of goofy and campy; who came up with the idea for that video?

Liam- We have always had the fun videos we have done for each record. We have always had fun doing music videos so we wanted to keep that up. We did Old Blood and that was more of a straight performance so we wanted to have a bit more fun on this one. The idea came up for it when I was coming up with lyrics and we were doing demos. Everybody was like we shoot a video for this and the song is about road bros just as much for us as the truck driver or the army guy. So we were coming up with different characters like it would be awesome if Scott was a truck driver. It was funny to have those ideas ahead of time. Then when it became a reality how do we make this work especially within a smaller budget its not like we had $30,000 to make a video. It was fun working with the directors Peter and Josh and it ended up being just the 6 of us: the directors and the band. So we were essentially the crew so when we weren’t shooting we were moving lights or holding shit up. It made it more fun because everyone was involved in the project.

TPS-I asked on my facebook account if anyone had any questions for you guys and one of my friends wanted to know how it is you seem to stay so positive?

Liam- I think it’s just about always having fun! We are really lucky to be able to travel to all these rad places and do what we love doing. For me I am very appreciative to be still doing this thing that I love. I don’t find this labour some in any way.

Not to go back to the “Dead Set on Living” idea but that kind of point in our career we are doing this because we love it. We are not doing this because this is our job and we are tired of this because we are making SOOOO much money. We have to be passionate about it still in order to exist in this kind of scene. All the people that are doing the shows or record stores we go to we are surrounded by all these passionate people everyone’s in it because they love it.

TPS- You guys seem to tour A LOT and by a lot I read somewhere that you spent 300+ days on the road in 2011. How does it make you feel to be referred to as one of the hardest working bands going right now? 

Liam-I get stoked. I like that moniker because we do work really hard. We pride ourselves in the fact that we work really hard and tour really hard. We drive ourselves still and we do bring crew but we are always doing stuff alongside them. I like that title and I think you have to earn something like that. Then we can call bullshit on other bands that are called hardworking (laughs)

TPS- Writers sometimes tend to get writers block. Have you ever had that experience while writing lyrics for a record?

Liam- Yea sometimes I do. This record thankfully I did not. I was really inspired and in a really good place. The writing was just awesome. When there was tough things going on I could turn to writing to help me through it. I just found writing this record was really easy and happened really quickly. Whereas the writing on “Bears” was really tough, and really hard, and I was trying to figure out a lot of things. I think we were just in a point in our career where things were tougher and we were at an impasse. There was a lot of pressure on us as a band and now that we are done with that we were like “man fuck it!” Let’s do whatever we want and it was just like “WOAH!” It’s so easy, we can do whatever we want. We would talk to our manager who is in England and we would tell him that I am seriously just rapping the whole time. It was kind of a joke but then there are some parts that have some bounce to them like in “Rally The Wicked” that bridge I was just like “I am rapping this bridge fuck it!” It doesn’t sound like hip hop but it does have more of a bounce to it.

TPS-After this tour you guys are going to England.

Liam- Yea we literally have 24 hours off then we take off to tour Europe for 70 days.

TPS-Where are you guys going other then England?

Liam- We are going all over the place. We do 2 shows in the Uk. Then we go to the rest of Europe with Every Time I Die and that goes everywhere like Scandinavia. We go to Spain, Eastern Europe ,Portugal just a ton of new places or places we haven’t been back to in a long ass time.  Luckily we have France and that is a tough piece of the puzzle for a lot of bands unless you can speak French which I can a little bit so maybe that helps. We have also toured with a lot of French bands. We toured with Dillinger and they are very welcomed in the French community.

TPS-When you’re in England you are going to be doing what has been called “The Pentagram Tour” 6 shows in one day! Have you worked all the logistics out for that yet?

Liam- We are still looking at everything, nothing is 100% figured out yet. I know it can be done. I just hope we don’t get stuck in traffic or if we take the subway hopefully that doesn’t fail somehow. The big idea was we have played some really big shows in London and we want to give the kids the experience of seeing the Cancer Bats in, say, a 200 cap venue. That is where the Cancer Bats really thrive is in the smaller shows. When we play in the Electric Ballroom and it’s around a 1100 cap it was the biggest show we have played but we still couldn’t hang out with those kids because the second our show was done they all got kicked out because of curfew. I understand that is how a big show has to happen. If you are 14 years old you haven’t seen the other side of things. We put out the idea to our booking agent Ross that we wanted to do all these smaller shows and he is the one who came up with the idea.

TPS-Any final words/thoughts what’s going on after Europe?

Liam- More touring!!!! We are trying to go everywhere in the world that we can. We have to go the US which is fairly important piece of the puzzle. Hopefully Canada again. One thing I regret on Bears was that how little Canadian touring we did so I want to make up for that! Hopefully that will happen before the end of the year.