Simple Plan have spent 25 years making music, and drummer Chuck Comeau says some of their shows are drawing crowds full of first-time concertgoers. The band will return to Australia for Good Things Festival in December while working on songs for a seventh album. Next year also brings the anniversary of their debut and a children’s book inspired by “I’m Just a Kid.”
Simple Plan have a question they ask from the stage: how many people are seeing them for the first time? Drummer Chuck Comeau says the response can be startling. On some nights, he estimates it is around 85 percent of the room. He was describing what the band sees from the stage, and the figure gives a sense of how unfamiliar an audience can be even when it already knows the songs.
“I’m Just a Kid” is one reason that can happen. The song appeared on the band’s 2002 debut, No Pads, No Helmets…Just Balls, and found another audience through TikTok years later. The track became the soundtrack to videos in which people recreated old photographs. The idea gave listeners a reason to use a song about being young for a joke involving how much time had passed.
Comeau describes that revival as a gift. A musician who has made a record can play it again and put it in front of new people, but a listener making a video can give it a life the musician had little role in planning. For Simple Plan, the result is audible at shows. People can be hearing the band in person for the first time and still know material written before they were born.
The audience also includes people who did hear those records when they were new and are now bringing children of their own. Comeau has heard younger listeners describe the band as classic rock, a label that still surprises him. The phrase says something about the distance between 2002 and the present for someone encountering the songs today. The group first came to prominence in the pop-punk of the early 2000s, a period some of its audience can now approach as history.
There was plenty of material for that audience to find. Still Not Getting Any…, released in 2004, reached No. 3 on the Billboard 200. “Perfect” and “Welcome to My Life” both made the Hot 100. Those records were widely heard before the social platforms through which some listeners now find them existed. A concert brings the two forms of discovery together in the time it takes for the band to start a song.
Comeau also sees a difference in how people move between genres. Streaming has made it easier for listeners to spend time with records from scenes that used to feel more separate. He remembers the uncertainty of playing festivals with bands such as Slipknot. The experience taught him how readily an audience could move between different kinds of music on the same bill, provided it had a chance to hear them.
Simple Plan will see another version of that in Australia at Good Things Festival. The dates are December 4 in Melbourne, December 5 in Sydney and December 6 in Brisbane. The lineup also includes Limp Bizkit, Spiritbox, the All-American Rejects, Bad Religion and MxPx. It will be the band’s third trip to Australia in three years, and Comeau has spoken about his readiness to keep returning.
Work has started on songs for a seventh studio album, the follow-up to 2022’s Harder Than It Looks. Comeau expects the writing to continue into 2027, with the band taking the time it feels the material needs. There is a particular challenge in introducing a new song to listeners who have lived with earlier ones for years. He describes it as a kind of competition with the band’s own history.
That history also gives Simple Plan a milestone in 2027, when their debut turns 25. Comeau said the band were considering a special vinyl edition and some anniversary appearances. A full tour devoted exclusively to the album is outside the plans he outlined. The debut has a distinct place in the band’s work, and a concert now has room for songs from the records that followed it.
The band are taking another route back to that record with I’m Just a Kid: The Story of Simple Plan, a picture book illustrated by Jomike Tejido and scheduled for March 9, 2027. Its subjects include friendship and persistence, and the idea came in part from seeing early listeners start families. A song that once helped those listeners talk about being young has become a way to make something they might share with their children.
For Simple Plan, the schedule in front of them contains festival dates, writing sessions and an anniversary. Comeau said a farewell tour was outside the conversation. The band still ask who has never been to one of their shows. At the Australian dates, the answers will give them another chance to see how far those songs have travelled since their first audiences heard them.
