Sarah Piantados

Winnipeg isn’t the first place that comes to mind when you think of the Canadian music scene, but there’s a good case for bumping it a bit higher on your list. The city has produced some amazing bands over the years: the Guess Who (and spin-off BTO), Propaghandi (and spin-off the Weakerthans), and a little artist named Neil Young. Comeback Kid represents the heavier side of the ‘Peg, and has carried on the city’s DIY punk tradition. “There’s always been a healthy underground following for the punk hardcore kind of thing,” says Comeback Kid guitarist Jeremy Hiebert. “I’m 34 years old and it’s never been super hard to find people who book local stuff throughout the years. There’s still kids doing that, renting community centres or whatever.”

The band has since moved out of the rec centres and onto a massive tour—three back-to-back tours, actually—spanning Canada, the U.S., Europe, Australia, and South America. For the Canadian leg, dubbed the “Through the Noise Tour,” they’re joined by fellow punks Mad Ball—a band whose music influenced the band’s transition to hardcore in the ‘90s—A Wilhelm Scream, Living With Lions, and Devil In Me. The tour started in Victoria, and the bands have been working their way east, playing a mix of big cities and small towns.

“There [are] places that we’ve played before that have always been great for us that we’re stoked to get back to. On the Canadian run in particular we’re doing some cities we haven’t hit before,” Hiebert says. “Being a small town kid myself, I kind of look forward to playing these smaller cities and bigger towns for the first time. They don’t get shows quite as often, so kids are usually pretty stoked, especially if it’s Friday or Saturday night and there’s nothing else going on in town.”

The band is touring in support of their fourth album, Symptoms + Cures, which was released August 31 on Distort Records.

“We don’t really sit down and say ‘We want to write this kind of a record’ or ‘This worked for us before so we should try to capitalize on this kind of thing,'” Hiebert says. “We just come up with the ideas that we have song by song and it just kind of all comes together as a record.”

Sure, the music’s hard-hitting, but it’s got a pretty wide range of song styles, from chant-along anthems like “G.M. Vincent and I” (Hiebert’s favourite song to play live) to speedy, frantic tracks like “Crooked Floors.”

“You’ll hear songs that are a lot heavier, you’ll hear more melodic songs—it’s just kind of all over the place,” Hiebert says. “But it represents where we are musically as a whole.”

Losing any member is tough on a band, but the departure of a lead singer can be career ending. At the very least, it changes the band’s sound; it’s not hard to hear the difference between Black Sabbath with Osborne versus Dio, or Van Halen with Hagar instead of Roth. When Comeback Kid singer Scott Wade left the band in 2006, guitarist Andrew Neufield stepped up to replace him. Symptoms + Cures is his second album on vocals, (following 2007’s Broadcasting…). However, this album has given him the opportunity to come into his own.

“With the last record I think the focus was picking up where Scott left off. We didn’t want to have a completely different vocal style, but at the same time Andrew is not Scott Wade,” Hiebert says. “In the last three or four years that he’s been fronting the band, he’s developed his own style with Comeback Kid. He wanted to have that vocal style that he does live a lot more on the record.”

And it shows; the Comeback Kid on Symptoms + Cures have not only adapted—they’ve matured.

“We didn’t know it would get to this point,” says Hiebert of the band’s success.

But if their 11-week tour is any indication of their work ethic, it shouldn’t be a surprise. It doesn’t hurt that they can shred, too.

Comeback Kid is playing at Le Studio Juste Pour Rire on September 25. Tickets are $20.