10 2000s Albums That Are A Lot Better Than You Remember

9. Chuck - Sum 41

There's a good chance that most casual rock fans know Sum 41 as the soundtrack to their pool party back in middle school. As much as the guitars might have been blaring on records like All Killer No Filler, the sounds of something like Fat Lip and In Too Deep are a lot more sophomoric when you look back on them. On Chuck though, we had a different case on our hands. Sum 41 had grown the hell up.

After getting a more edgy bent on Does This Look Infected?, the mindset behind Chuck was a really inspired decision: taking the old school sounds of metal and merge them with the punk formula. For as much as something like this might have sounded like oil and water, songs like We're All to Blame are still great indications that this kind of mindset at least had potential.

Further into the album, Sum 41 show that they really have the chops to pull something like this off, with guitarist Dave Baksh clearly studying under the Randy Rhoads and Kirk Hammett schools of lead playing than your standard pop punk tropes, even going full Metallica mode on The Bitter End. Having just as many hooks as it did heart, this was the pop punk record that was a lot more concerned with the thunder than the spiky hair.

 
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