Having spent more than two decades in the game, Cancer Bats have come to learn what is and isn't important, and why the job is ultimately never done. As they gear up for eighth album Give Me Dirt, Liam Cormier dives into the inner-peace powering this new chapter, reflects on his road-dog life and shares why the fans mean more than anything...
There’s a bin in Nepal that tied everything together for Liam Cormier. As Cancer Bats were chipping away at what would become their eighth album, their singer, a man frequently on the biting end of the travel bug, headed there “to go ride dirt bikes, visit temples, and be around this incredible culture.”
The first time he and his band went there in 2019, to play at Kathmandu’s Silence Fest, “it changed my life in so many different ways.” Today he calls it “one of the coolest places on Earth.” As he headed there once again last year on holiday, he was hoping that what the place does to him might shake loose the missing bits of inspiration for the lyrics in his head, having found himself “at one of those weird, creative standstills.”
“Normally it’s super-easy,” he puzzles. “One song on this album, I was on a plane, thought of that chorus, pulled up my phone, wrote all the lyrics down and went back to sleep. That’s kind of how I work. But I couldn’t figure out this one song. I kind of knew, going to Nepal, that it would be the cheat code to unlock it.”
Anyway, the bin. Liam was at a restaurant getting some dal bhat when he saw it, emblazoned with the hand-painted and “probably lost in translation” instruction to ‘Give Me Dirt’. For the rest of the trip it turned into a phrase between him and his mates as they tore around on their motorcycles. When he got to writing, “it became a mantra, just repeating it”.
As he was painting the artwork, without a title, hoping that one would come as he worked, the phrase kept coming to him. On the painting, mountains pointed to Nepal, and “the spiritual side of the record”, but the words seemed to represent everything. “I called the dudes and said, ‘I think we should call it Give Me Dirt’. It’s so right.”
“It seems fitting with the fact that I don't want to use computers to do the art. It seems fitting with the raw and dirty record that we made. Where we are as a band, where I am in my life, what I find value in – just gimme dirt!”
It feels like something that could be said of Cancer Bats – Liam, bassist Jaye R. Schwarzer, drummer Mike Peters and new-ish guitarist Jackson Landry, who replaced Scott Middleton in 2021 – at most points over the past two decades. The Liam that K! meets today in a coffee shop in Reading on a sunny summer afternoon isn’t that different to the younger model of back then. He still buzzes with an ever-present, likeable energy and enthusiasm. Chat is constantly punctuated with “ripper” and “killer” and “homie” and “dude”, always with a big, warm, boyish grin.
At 46, there’s a smiling admission that “I know I can’t stage-dive anymore”, and the level of roughing it on the road has improved the tiniest smidge, but other than that, he remains a true tour dog. On the day we meet, the band are playing a show as their Bat Sabbath alter-ego, which is about to embark on a month around the UK.
“Dude, if it seems like we don’t stop, well, we do, but this is just what we do, man,” he grins. “I love touring. And then when I’m not, I love travelling outside of tour, like riding motorcycles and traveling to different places that I couldn't go with the band. I think I'm just obsessed with travel and exploring.”
He grins again.
“Just gimme dirt, dude.”
There’s “a big connection to nature” on Give Me Dirt. It’s as much a literal request as it is a metaphorical idea. “I think a lot of us are questioning how much technology we have in our lives and how much of a disconnect we are at right now with the actual natural world.
“Everyone I talk to is wanting to get back to something more real. No-one's wanting to dive in more into technology. Everyone I talk to wants to regress, and be more connected to being outside, being in the woods, being near the ocean, being near water.
“I want to be like in nature more, and I want to be connected to it. The lyrics on this album often look at the idea that a lot of answers to our problems are in nature. Like, a tree's not being stressed out, he's just being a tree. So just slow down, chill out.”
Tallying with this, where Liam currently calls home, and has done for seven years now, is a place he calls “The Shack”, a century-old wooden house out in rural Nova Scotia. With his own hands, he’s been doing renovation work on it himself, proudly boasting that he’s been so good with recycling materials that the whole process has cost him “less than 10 grand”.
The lack of plumbing means he needs to bring in his own water, but there is electricity – “I have one lightbulb!” – and a stove. Amenities in the small fishing town nearby mean he can stock up on food, fuel and, when needed, use a washroom. Other than that, “I’m on my own.”
“It's really nice to have in between tours, because we get to travel and be in all these major cities all over the place, so that when I come back from that, it's good to have that kind of space where I can just sit by fire and be literally by myself.”
A lot of Liam’s contributions to Give Me Dirt were concocted in this earthy environment, often forcibly free from other distractions.
“A lot of the area doesn't have cell service, so some of those distractions that you would have, like just even emails coming in, or somebody asking you a question, that’s not so much,” he says. “If I'm driving my pickup truck through the woods, I'll drive 40 minutes without cell service through like winding dirt roads and trees. I’m endlessly inspired by all of that.”
Even when the less appealing realities of living in such a place crop up, it’s another way to get things done. Part of the song Ocean Crash came up during a flood.
“I wrote the bridge for that song in my pickup truck,” he recalls. “The bridges up there are always down. Storms and stuff will happen, so a bridge will get washed out, and then your trip sometimes gets extended by an hour. I’m always like, ‘You know what? I'm on this route that I'm taking through all of these winding country roads, might as well turn on the demo and work on the song.”
Is this your quiet way of turning into an old man?
“Maybe! I'm gonna be a little bit like that guy from the Burt's Bees lip balm. That'll be me. Except I'll just make hardcore records.”
This understanding of the importance of seclusion and recharge is one of the areas in which Liam Cormier has changed a little over the past two decades. When Cancer Bats’ Birthing The Giant debut came out in 2006, their singer describes “being in a rush,” wanting to take the bull by the horns, to get out into the world and grab hold of as much of it as possible.
“I definitely think about being 46 versus being 26, and what I was writing about 20 years ago,” he ponders. “I was writing about being in a rush, and how I couldn't wait for things to start, how I couldn't wait to do all these things, and to travel the world. Birthing The Giant and Hail Destroyer have so much of that. It's about being on tour, it's about being excited.
“Twenty years later, it's about slowing down, returning to nature, reconnecting with those things that are important. So maybe it's a cool full-circle in that, but I hope that 20-year-olds identify with it as much as 46-year-olds do!”
“My life now is about slowing down, returning to nature, reconnecting with those things that are important”
As a younger band, the goal was “literally just touring”. Mike had played in Figure Four, who had made it all the way down to Brazil while they were still teenagers. The idea that this was not only possible, but in fact doable trumped whatever actual returns there might be.
“The goal was never to pay our rent,” says Liam. “Because we didn't have rent.” Indeed, until 2009, Liam’s living situation could best be legally described as of no fixed abode. With the band doing around 300 gigs a year, there wasn’t much point.
“Bro, we were homeless, essentially,” he laughs. “That was the whole goal. That was the lifestyle. We were just like, ‘This is sick.’ We were on tour with Comeback Kid, Parkway Drive, Rise Against, The Bronx, we did a huge tour with Bullet For My Valentine and Bring Me The Horizon, we were like taking every opportunity that we could.”
Costs were low. “All we had to buy up front was plane tickets.” In the U.S. and Canada, the band owned their own van, on which they would make monthly payments, and in which they would sleep and live. In the UK and out in Europe, “we would stay at people’s houses all the time.”
“We didn't even start getting hotels until way later. That was the lifestyle, and it’s awesome doing that. You make friends that way, and they show you the cool places to eat, or where to get coffee, or whatever. We were like, ‘This is best.’”
When asked at what point he and his friends realised being in a band had outgrown this rolling blag of staying on the road to keep one step ahead of reality, and was actually something that would last for life, he points to “roughly 10 years ago”, around 2015’s Searching For Zero. That was when they all started looking to things outside the band – Liam to starting Treadwell Clothing, Mike to starting a family, Jaye to carpentry, then-guitarist Scott Middleton to studio work – “to make sure Cancer Bats was something we were all excited to do.”
“I was like, ‘I need to work hard again. I need this separate thing from the band to also be successful, even if just to prove to myself that I’m able to do something outside of this one aspect of my life.’”
Liam calls this era “a real turning point”. As well as looking outward, it was about this time they began looking inward to how they actually ran their affairs as well. The new album may be coming out through Marshall Records, but in many parts of what they do, Bats have used all their on-the-road training to take on a lot of work at the back end themselves. For a time, he and Mike were booking all of the band’s Canadian touring themselves because “we have literally every promoter’s phone number, so we were just doing it all over text.”
“If we weren't doing the band, we would either work at a record label or we would work at a management company,” he enthuses. “We decided we should just be managing ourselves, we should just be like doing all of these things that we've learned how to do, and to kind of be in more control over.”
Continuing to work on the shop floor like this is one of the reasons why people love Cancer Bats in the way that they do. Liam being a people person, and genuinely one of the nicest folks you could ever hope to meet helps. Knowing those connections are still there are one of the buttresses that keep them all going.
“Having an interaction where people say how much the band means to them, it feels a little bit more like an act of service, us doing this band,” he says. “It feels like people are genuinely getting something out of seeing our band live, or listening to our records. You have a rough day, and come to a Cancer Bats show, and then be like, ‘Everything's gonna be okay!’ I'm like, fuck yeah, that's like 100 per cent why I want to still be doing this, why I want to still be there for those people.”
On Give Me Dirt, there’s a lot of this. Liam’s PMA has always been at the forefront of Bats’ lyrics, as have the other catharses it helps unknot. Here, with the grit of the record, it stands, grubbier, but taller than ever.
“I'm always mindful of that, especially knowing that people really love our band for that. I know that's something that they want out of a song. They’ll tell me when they’re bummed out, they listen to us, or when they’re having a really hard day. But that’s not necessarily just for the PMA all the way.
“I wrote Stay Stuck, and I was like, ‘Sick, this feels like a Cancer Bats song’. It has that fun sentiment, same with Positive Grit. It’s still PMA ’til I'm DOA, but it's updated now to how I'm feeling today.”
“I have this brain that doesn't think of anything not working out. I'm just gonna get super stoked on it, and do it as hard as I can”
How Liam Cormier is feeling today is, predictably, “stoked”. He’s always stoked. It’s just who and how he is. And there’s much to be stoked about: the album is brilliant, their upcoming touring is their biggest they’ve ever done in the UK, he’s found a burrito place to get dinner before tonight’s show.
But talking to Liam, it’s plain he’s stoked because these things are happening and there’s things to do. The success of any Cancer Bats move, even taking a more grown-up approach to the back end now that they actually do have homes to pay for, seems to still be secondary to them happening at all. Everything seems to be alright in the end anyway.
“I feel really lucky because I do see some friends that really struggle with anxiety, where they struggle with depression and that side of stuff, and I have this brain that just doesn't think of anything not working out, you know what I mean?” he nods. “I go, ‘Yeah, I'm just gonna do this thing, and I'm just gonna like get super stoked on it, and I'm just gonna do it as hard as I can.’”
And it’s on the Give Me Dirt level, the natural, basic, most human one, and the interactions that come with it, that all this goes so right.
“To feel like just one person is feeling better about their life, and having those interactions, that’s the best. If I was just backstage all the time, I would miss out on those conversations, or someone young being inspired to like start a band, someone old being like able to be stoked again, feel 18 again. That’s awesome.
“That’s what makes me really pumped to play another show and keep doing this.”
Give Me Dirt is released August 7. Get your copy now on vinyl or CD with a limited-edition hand-signed art card. Catch the band at 2000trees this weekend.
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