The Cancer Bats are more than meets the eye
Written by:Francesca Wahking
Date: May 25, 2009

Mutedmag: How is the tour going?

Liam Cormier: It’s good. We’re opening the whole tour it’s pretty fun. It’s kind of like a no brainer. We haven’t supported a tour outside of Toronto and Montreal, which is like normal American stops. But to do an actual west coast run of a tour where we’re not headlining, we haven’t done anything since 2006 with Alexisonfire. Other than that we’ve just only headlined but to do someone else’s tour where we don’t have to worry and we just role up and there’s going to be kids there and it doesn’t matter what time we play because kids show up super early and they’re all 15 and that’s the demographic for this tour.

Mutedmag: So what are your American fans like?

Liam Cormier:They’re rad. It’s a lot of kids who never heard of us before so it’s like we definitely wanted to do this tour to win over new kids.

Mutedmag: Glad to be back in Toronto?

Liam Cormier:We had a day off to come from Thunder Bay so we drove straight just to hang out. I had dinner with my girlfriend, hung out with some friends, it was nice.

Mutedmag: In your latest music video you have a lot of wolves, was there any special meaning behind it?

Liam Cormier:That was actually the director who wanted to do that. We had a really loose idea for the Hail Destroyer video. It’ll just be us playing in a really dark room, we didn’t want to have anything really literal happen like with reference to the song. So he [the director] then when we were on tour was like what if I can get wolves to be in the video? I was like “sure”, So we just showed up and that was that…I liked how it turned out.

Mutedmag: Rumour has it you have a new record coming out…can you give us any hints to what we can expect?

Liam Cormier: I don’t know 100%. I mean we JUST started. We have like four songs we’ve been working on. We found out like from Birthing the Giant to Hail Destroyer we’ve really kind of pushed ourselves and tried to step up to the plate, so kind of just looking at it the same way to let’s outdo the last record that we did. We know we can step up our game from there. And even correct any mistakes we made, I know we didn’t nail that record in my mind…I’m really happy with it, don’t get me wrong, but I know we can do better. That’s like us being “let’s crush that record” let’s make something that goes along with it. Less shaming that record more like being the bar and trying to raise it.

Mutedmag: How does it feel from going from winning Fu awards to being nominated for Junos?

Liam Cormier: It was cool especially since the Junos aren’t something that we expected…Ever. They don’t usually have hardcore bands or punk bands involved in that. Even just to be considered in that whole scene was pretty crazy. The FU awards were pretty cool, I mean we won that award not the Juno. For us it was like the Fu awards is basically all about the Edge, who are awesome, the fact that they do consider hardcore bands part of their scene, the fact that we were involve in that is pretty cool.

Mutedmag: But how does it feel to be getting more recognition in the music business?

Liam Cormier:I don’t think it will change in anyway, I mean you hope for like distribution and things like that in the business model. People are legitimally the number of kids showing up to the shows, realizing that heavy music is a viable option for money making. That’s the whole thing, it’s an industry and people going “oh punk shows make a lot of money.” There’s always been punk shows in Canada, there’s always been the music scene, it’s just certain people didn’t know about it.

Mutedmag: So are you against downloading music?

Liam Cormier: Not at all. It’s not going to change, it’s like when people thought recording music with cassettes was going to affect the music industry. It’s just like some people aren’t going to want to buy something but still want to enjoy it but they don’t have the money. I remember being a broke ass kid and you would just make tapes of records your friends’ own or you would buy a record and make copy for all your friends, that’s how things spread. It’s the same thing, it’s just not going to damage the record industry. People need to notice what product they’re putting out and then have that be something that people want to still pay money for. Or in a lot of cases it’s like now the change in the industry is that people are buying a digital download that will have the same quality cause tapes suck and a badly ripped mp3 sucks. It’s like you still want to buy that product and nowadays too kids want to collect things too, so you see people like well I’ll buy vinyl cause then the art works bigger and it’s like a lot cooler looking. It’s just compact discs are the best format anyways.

Mutedmag: What about trying to release an album for free?

Liam Cormier:The only reason why you sell records is so you have money to record. For those bands that are giving their music away for free it’s that they really don’t need that revenue. We still need to sell records so that we can record, we wouldn’t be able to do that 100% free. Even like Radiohead was asking for donations and they still made like 1 million pounds so it wasn’t really free, it was like a little experiment. Or someone like Prince who gives away their record but he gets away with tickets to his show, so it balances out.

Mutedmag: What about having Mp3s that are free?

Liam Cormier: We definitely have stuff like that out there. Like you don’t make 7’ to make money, you make 7’ cause you like them, I see that thing being our thing. I mean we pour our money into making vinyl cause it’s something we want not a business venture. But we’ll still need some financial recoupment cause we’re not the biggest band in the world.

Mutedmag: Do you want to be the biggest band in the world?

Liam Cormier:I don’t even know if I’d hope to be, cause then you end up making so many other sacrifices. For every example of a band that is able to be in complete control of their career at that level, there are a 100 bands that can’t. I can only think of a few that are really huge that can do whatever they want because in order to do what you want you have to make certain sacrifices. So I don’t know if I’d care to be at that level.

Mutedmag: So in an interview, you wanted to play a show in Antartica. Do you still want to?

Liam Cormier:I still would. I mean we were talking about playing everywhere that is possible. If there’s a bar we would go drink and party.

Mutedmag: What else is going on in Canadian metalcore scene?

Liam Cormier:It’s been kicking ass for as long as I know. I guess it’s what you consider metalcore…are we metalcore? Southern Ontario has a really good scene just for the fact that it’s between Detroit and buffalo and there are lot of bands come from there. Why metalcore is so popular in souther Ontario because we’re so close to Buffallo…Those bands would play in Canada all the time specifically in Oakville, Oakville and Buffallo is the heart of the scene, more so than Toronto. I mean that’s where a lot of amazing hardcore bands come from Hamilton, Oakville.

Mutedmag: Can you describe your relationship with all the other bands like Silverstein and Alexisonfire?

Liam Cormier:Everyone is really tight cause growing up everyone is traveling to see those shows. We would drive from Waterloo like 45 minutes to go to Oakville to watch the End play…there was like this really good scene going on. That’s how we met like Alexisonfire and like George Petit because he was like wearing an Evil Dead shirt at a show and we just became friends from that….those same people you see at shows, we’re like friends now cause we’re part of the same scene and those people grew up and became bands