Trivia / Sum 41

• Creative Differences: The reason why Dave Baksh intially left the band between the releases of Chuck and Underclass Hero — he was the metal guy in the band and wanted to go in a heavier and more technical direction, which the rest of the guys weren't on board with, and he sensed that a gulf was forming between him and the others and decided to leave to focus on Brown Brigade, which he figured would be the best for everyone. By his own admission, Screaming Bloody Murder ironically wound up being everything he wanted from a Sum 41 album, and he regretted his decision to leave from the moment he first heard it, eventually re-joining shortly before recording of 13 Voices began.
• Creator Backlash:
  • In an interview done for the 20th anniversary of All Killer, No Filler, Deryck said he thought the album wasn't that great and had felt some embarrassment when it first came out. He specifically stated that his voice at the time was too undeveloped, claiming he experienced hard vocal strain on some of the songs.
  • Additionally, Deryck doesn't like the way Does This Look Infected? was mixed at all, as he stated in a 2018 interview for the album's 15th anniversary tour; he prefers the sound of his home demos compared to the final version.
• Executive Meddling:
  • The video release for "Screaming Bloody Murder" was canceled after the band had already filmed the video, resulting in the album not getting a single.
  • Parodied in the music video for "Still Waiting," where a label executive (played by Will Sasso) tries to change the band's appearance and even names to cash in on the then-recent Garage Rock revival. The video itself is a Shot-for-Shot Remake of The Strokes' "Last Night," which had kicked off the trend a year earlier.
• Fan Community Nickname: Skumfuks. And before that, it was The Goon Platoon.
• Multi-Disc Work: Heaven :x: Hell is a Distinct Double Album consisting of two differently-styled parts (Heaven, focused on the band's initial Pop Punk style, and Hell, which keeps the Heavy Metal sound that the band had progressively developed over the course of their later discography), with one disc delegated to each of them in all of the formats the album was released on.^note While it requires two discs to fit the whole album on vinyl, as was the case with the significantly shorter Underclass Hero and Screaming Bloody Murder (the latter of which never had a vinyl release), Heaven :x: Hell's 55-minute length is still short enough for a single disc on CD.
• The Pete Best: They had a string of bass guitarists before they found Cone. One of them, Mark Spicoluk, would later play with Avril Lavigne. They also had a string of vocalists come and go before Deryck (who was initially the lead guitarist) decided to take over.
• Permanent Placeholder: The vocal counterpoint on "Still Waiting" ("So am I down") were intended as dummy lyrics, as Deryck felt they were too bland to fit the rest of the song. He eventually decided it worked in context with the other parts of the song and that anything more complicated would have been distracting, so it was left as is.
• Record Producer: Greig Nori served as their producer up to Chuck (except for All Killer, No Filler, which was produced by Jerry Finn). Starting with Underclass Hero, Deryck took the responsibility himself, allegedly because any other producer they tried working with could not record the songs in the way he imagined them.
• Throw It In!:
  • During a photoshoot for All Killer, No Filler, the band started goofing around with a Polaroid, taking funny pictures of themselves and thumb-tacking them to a bulletin board for laughs. Someone at the shoot saw what they were doing and thought the image of a bunch of random headshots next to one another looked better than anything else they could've come up with, deciding then and there to make that image the album cover (it helps that it works as a Shout-Out to A Hard Day's Night).
  • During the making of the music video for "Pieces", Deryck walks across various trucks that spot slogans such as "The perfect family", "The perfect body" or "The perfect night". At the end of the video, he himself is in one such truck that reads "The perfect life is waiting for you". Then the F in life falls off, changing the line to "The perfect lie is waiting for you". While this was an accident, they decided to leave it there, as they thought it fit the mood of the song.
• What Could Have Been: When "Summer" was re-recorded for All Killer, No Filler, the band proposed recording a new version of the song for every following album as a joke, but quickly decided it wasn't worth it.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Does This Look Infected? was written and recorded in two months in between tours. Deryck had already written most of the album by the time they started and they still had to take work with them on the road, recording in various studios just to finish the last couple of tracks, hence its sparse production.

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