Billy Talent

Billy Talent’s many influences have turned the band into one of the most sonically diverse punk groups in Canada’s heavy music scene. Formed as Pezz in the ’90s in Mississauga, ON, when the members were teenagers, Billy Talent has simply grown its sound alongside the aging of its constituent parts. “It’s the one constant throughout our lives,” vocalist Benjamin Kowalewicz told Apple Music about the group’s influence on its members. Its massively commercially successful 2003 self-titled debut, dense with blistering riffs and Kowalewicz’s soaring screams, laid the blueprint for its emo and hardcore-tinged punk; Billy Talent II (2006) and Billy Talent III (2009) went even bigger and more bruising. On albums like Dead Silence (2012), Afraid of Heights (2016), and Crisis of Faith (2022), which features contributions from Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo, Billy Talent incorporates more alternative, classic-, and hard-rock influence into its metal, creating its anthemic, arena-rocking sound.