Montreal, QC · pop · pop-punk

Simple Plan

2 upcoming festivals ↓

Montreal pop-punk that took the genre fully mainstream and has never pretended otherwise — 'I'm Just a Kid' now two generations deep.

Before Simple Plan, Pierre Bouvier and Chuck Comeau played together in Reset, a band formed in 1993 that had itself started life under a different name. By 1999 Bouvier had joined guitarists Jeff Stinco and Sébastien Lefebvre and reunited with Comeau, with bassist David Desrosiers completing the lineup soon after. The band nearly called itself Touchdown 999 before settling on Simple Plan, a name borrowed from a 1998 film.

Signed to Atlantic Records, the band recorded its debut, No Pads, No Helmets...Just Balls, with producer Arnold Lanni, released in 2002. Their songs are short, fast and heavily hooked, with lyrics about adolescence, family friction and not fitting in, delivered without much irony.

'I'm Just a Kid', 'Perfect' and 'Welcome to My Life' carried them onto mainstream radio, and 'I'm Just a Kid' found a second life online years later. Since that debut, the band has released Still Not Getting Any..., Simple Plan, Get Your Heart On!, Taking One for the Team and Harder Than It Looks, along with an EP and two live albums.

The band, whose lineup has stayed largely stable, has kept touring internationally and leans on that early catalogue in its sets. Along the way they appeared in the film New York Minute, performed at the closing ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics, played 'O Canada' at the 2016 NHL Winter Classic, and supplied the theme music for What's New, Scooby-Doo?

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poppop-punk