EASY DOES IT

BEFORE ANYONE HAS EVEN UTTERED THE WORDS COVID-19', SIMPLE PLAN HAD ALREADY DISTILLED EVERYTHING THEY ARE INTO SOME OF THEIR FINEST WORK. HERE'S HOW THEY MADE HARDER THAN IT LOOKS'.

- MADDY HOWELL

Variety is the spice of life, you know.

Repeating the same motions day after day can become monotonous, and there's certainly something to be said for trying new things, but what happens when you hit the winning combination?

It's rare but it happens, and once you strike gold, the hardest part is accepting it, something that pop-punk legends Simple Plan began coming to terms with on 2016's 'Taking One For The Team'.

Reflecting on almost two decades of ups, downs, and fearlessly finding themselves, the Canadians started to uncover just what makes their band so incredible.

"I started to feel like we were becoming what people would call a legacy band. I never really had that feeling before," vocalist Pierre Bouvier starts. "For a long time in our career, we didn't get a lot of great reviews and we didn't have a lot of super cool people loving our songs, we were always a people's band," drummer Chuck Comeau adds.

"There was always a self-consciousness to that... but after 23 years of being in this band, all of that has started to change." After hitting the road in support of their landmark fifth album, and celebrating the 15th anniversary of the genre-defining 'No Pads, No Helmets... Just Balls', Chuck, Pierre, and their bandmates Jeff Stinco [lead guitar] and Sébastien Lefebvre (rhythm guitar] sat down to define their band's future as they looked towards album six.

"We started to feel a lot more pride in what we did, and we started to realise that we created something that means a lot to so many people," Chuck explains. "Instead of trying to run away from that or feel ashamed of it, we realised that this is who we are, and it's time to embrace it.