Montreal rock band Simple Plan had a simple plan for this year: Get their sophomore album Still Not Getting Any... out to fans. Going from Point A to Point B, though, wasn't easy.

"We were under a deadline," drummer Chuck Comeau says in a Toronto hotel room earlier this week. "At some point around May or June, we didn't think it was going to come out. We were like, 'It's not going to happen, there is no way we are going to finish this.' At the end, we had two studios going. It was insane."

That insanity, created and captured with the help of producer Bob Rock, makes the new album a bit more adventurous and livelier than 2002's No Pads, No Helmets, Just Balls...

While there are still the sugar-coated teen angst songs like Welcome To My Life and Shut Up!, the album, out Tuesday, closes with a string-laced song entitled Untitled.

"We didn't know where to take it at first," Comeau says of the song. "We finished it two days before the end of mixing. We were mixing it in one room and writing it in the other. I think it came out awesome. And to have 20 string players on it was really cool."

Comeau also says there was less tinkering with this record, resulting in a rougher, in-the-moment type of vibe.

"We were happy with the first record, but sometimes I think it felt like there was too much the same kind of colour to it," he adds. "We wanted everything to be perfect and ridiculously pristine and that was a mistake. This one, we weren't going to complicate stuff; we just wanted to go in and play."

Comeau has a personal favourite on the album, a rarity since most musicians look at their songs like children. He says he's the proudest about Crazy, the album's centrepiece.

"That song came from travelling and meeting tons of different kids at shows," he says. "A lot of those stories were touching and really sad. You hear kids, and a lot of them don't seem to be happy with themselves, the way they look and their life in general. This is like our state of the union song."

The group -- Comeau, bassist David Desrosiers (who lets Comeau answer nearly every question), lead singer Pierre Bouvier and guitarists Jeff Stinco and Sebastien Lefebvre -- toured this summer, but tested only Shut Up! on the road.

"The truth is we didn't have time to learn them," Comeau says with a laugh. "We're still learning them right now."

Simple Plan had some fun with their latest video and some album photos in the liner notes. Welcome To My Life features Bouvier sitting high atop a bridge in Los Angeles.

"You're the first one who didn't ask if that's him for real; everybody asks that," Comeau says of the video shoot. "It's totally him and they had a chopper going around him. It was pretty surreal to be there. I think it's a cool metaphor for the whole song, like you're alone in the world."

The quintet also aged rather ungracefully in photos thanks to more than four hours of makeup. The back sleeve features the band using canes and walkers to get around.

"There's the whole image of the rock star, rock band thing, where you have to look cool," Comeau says. "And what's more uncool than being 95 years old? It was freaky to do because it's your life in a nutshell basically."

The group, who played a club show in Toronto earlier this week, starts an American tour Oct. 30 but plan on hitting Canada again early next year. And Simple Plan just performed on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno for the third time, a tougher gig than a regular show.

"You have to be on," David Desrosiers says. "The band comes out of a little television speaker, so you can't hide mistakes -- every little mistake is picked up."

"It's really dope to do it, though," Comeau adds. "You remember growing up watching all your favourite bands doing it. And you can tell that it looks prestigious to our parents."