Simple Plan

Out of Reset, and a name taken from a film

Simple Plan started in Montreal in 1999, and it started with a departure. Chuck Comeau had played drums in the local punk band Reset with Pierre Bouvier, left, and then set about assembling something else, with Bouvier eventually joining him on vocals. Guitarists Jeff Stinco and Sébastien Lefebvre came out of the same Quebec punk circuit, which had been busy through the 1990s. The band took their name from the 1998 film A Simple Plan.

That four-piece is still the four-piece. The one change was at bass: David Desrosiers joined in 2000 and held the position through several hiatuses — in 2008, in 2016, and again from 2017 to 2019 — before leaving permanently in July 2020 following allegations of sexual misconduct. Bouvier has handled bass in the studio since, and the band has toured as a quartet.

Comeau has been blunt about where they sat relative to the scene they came from. "Simple Plan and punk rock has always been a bit of a contentious relationship," he told Exclaim! in July 2025. "A lot of people have strong opinions about it." His argument is that the punk ethos shaped how the band was run even after pop radio took the songs.

The records, and what they actually did

No Pads, No Helmets... Just Balls arrived in 2002, reached No. 35 on the Billboard 200 and No. 22 in Canada, and kept selling long after release: it is certified double platinum by the RIAA and triple platinum by Music Canada. It carried "I'm Just a Kid", "Addicted" and "Perfect", the last of which reached No. 24 on the Hot 100, No. 5 in Canada and No. 6 in Australia.

Still Not Getting Any... in 2004 was the commercial high point — No. 3 on the Billboard 200, No. 2 in Canada, four times platinum at home — and produced "Welcome to My Life", which went double platinum in both the United States and Canada, and "Untitled (How Could This Happen to Me?)", a No. 4 single in Canada.

After that the chart line bends downwards while the catalogue keeps working. The self-titled third album (2008) reached No. 14 in the States and went platinum in Canada. Get Your Heart On! (2011) only reached No. 52, but gave them "Summer Paradise", certified five times platinum by Music Canada and, by that measure, the biggest single they have. Taking One for the Team (2016) stalled at No. 94. Then the major-label chapter closed: Harder Than It Looks, released in 2022 after a six-year gap, was their first album made without major backing. It reached No. 84 in Canada and missed the Billboard 200 entirely — which, on an independent release, is a different kind of number to a failed major-label one.

Written off in print, then handed a second audience

The band's stock answer to the hostility of the mid-2000s is that the audience never agreed with the reviews. The evidence arrived without their involvement. In April 2020, "I'm Just a Kid" became the soundtrack to a TikTok trend in which people recreated childhood photographs with their families — a lockdown format that needed exactly one eighteen-year-old song. The RIAA certified the single platinum on 26 May 2020; it has since gone double platinum, with a Silver certification from the BPI.

That resurgence is the hinge in how the band is now discussed, and it explains why an act whose last album charted at No. 84 in its home country can sell out theatres. The Simple Plan Foundation, set up in 2005 to fund work on teenage suicide, poverty and addiction, had raised and donated close to three million dollars as of November 2024 — a parallel structure that predates the streaming revival by fifteen years.

Twenty-five years, put on camera

The anniversary was marked with a film rather than an album. Simple Plan: The Kids in the Crowd, directed by Didier Charette and running a little over ninety minutes, premiered on Prime Video in July 2025. It mixes unseen archival material with access to the 2024 touring leg and interviews with Mark Hoppus, Avril Lavigne, Dexter Holland and Noodles of The Offspring, and Fat Mike of NOFX. Much of it is about the critical weather of the early 2000s and how the band handled it.

A soundtrack followed on 11 July 2025 — the first career-spanning compilation they have released, gathering hits, rarely heard demos and one new song, "Nothing Changes". Two months earlier, on 9 May 2025, they had released "Young & Dumb" with Avril Lavigne, whose Greatest Hits tour they had supported from August 2024, the same year they played When We Were Young.

Comeau's framing of the documentary was that it was meant to "kick off a whole new chapter, look back on what we've accomplished, and use this to start the next part of the story". Bouvier's line in the same round of press: "We still feel like we're the same 20-year-old guys chasing after that dream." No new studio album has been announced.

Where the touring stands in September 2026

The Bigger Than You Think! tour was built for the anniversary and has outgrown it. The first leg, produced by Live Nation, opened on 9 August 2025 at WaMu Theater in Seattle and ran nineteen cities through late August, with LØLØ opening, then 3OH!3 and Bowling for Soup.

On 10 February 2026 the band announced a second North American run — Bigger Than You Think! Tour – The Sequel! — with tickets on general sale on 13 February. Nineteen more dates ran from The Pearl in Las Vegas on 24 July 2026 to the RBC Amphitheatre in Toronto on 20 August, this time mostly outdoors: Isleta Amphitheater in Albuquerque, Moody Amphitheater in Austin, Jacobs Pavilion at Nautica in Cleveland, Red Hat Amphitheater in Raleigh, and SummerStage in Central Park on 19 August. Bowling for Soup and 3OH!3 supported throughout, with Marianas Trench added for Toronto. Two days after the leg closed, the band played the Vans Warped Tour date at Parc Jean-Drapeau in Montreal on 22 August 2026.

Next is the largest booking of the campaign. A UK and European arena tour was announced on 1 December 2025 and went on general sale on 5 December at 9am. It opens at the O2 Apollo in Manchester on 2 October 2026 and moves to the OVO Arena Wembley the following night, then runs nineteen dates across the continent through October — Brussels, Düsseldorf, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm, Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Vienna, Munich, Milan, Barcelona, Madrid and Zurich — finishing at the Accor Arena in Paris on 31 October. Neck Deep support on the mainland dates. The band's stated plan for those shows: "performing all of our biggest hits along with fan favourites we rarely play live, spanning our entire discography."

The room, and who is in it

The reviews of this run tend to spend as much time on the audience as the band. Coverage of the Central Park show on 19 August 2026 made the obvious point without much cruelty: songs written about adolescent problems, sung back by people who now have mortgages, careers and teenagers of their own. Some of them bring those children.

At YouTube Theater in Inglewood on 13 August 2025 — a show that sold out quickly — the reviewer's description of the crowd singing every word in unison is the same observation from a different angle, and the write-up ended on the band being a fixture of the genre rather than a revival of it. The staging supports that reading: a highlight reel to open, an illuminated band logo, and, at the point where a Scooby-Doo theme cover would normally be a joke, dozens of fans in Scooby-Doo costumes brought onstage.