Chimaira Quits Chimaira
Sadly but unsurprisingly, Chimaira has come to a conclusion. The week played out like a heavy metal version of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None: after the band concluded a tour just this past weekend, lead guitarist Emil Werstler almost immediately announced his departure from the band, after which every other member of the band save for founding vocalist Mark Hunter jointly announced that they, too, were leaving. Now Hunter has posted the below on Chimaira’s website:
Chimaira are the third prominent band from the New Wave of American Heavy Metal to throw in the towel in the past twelve months, after God Forbid and Shadows Fall. As I said when the latter band announced their plans for a final tour, these things are cyclical; the NWOAHM’s time has come, and that’s pretty much all there is to it. People get older, they start families, touring blows, no one is making enough money, and then everyone is over it. It’s just how things seem to go.
It’s no secret that I’ve been a massive Chimaira fan pretty much since the release of The Impossibility of Reason more than ten years ago; I know the band wasn’t everyone’s bowl of weed, but I sincerely love everything they’ve released since then with all my heart (and I’ve even started to soften on their debut, Pass Out of Existence), and I feel like they never got the credit they deserved for constantly allowing their sound to evolve while remaining heavy as fuck and distinctly, well, Chimaira. That was true even following the massive line-up shifts which took place over the course of the past couple of albums, and last year’s Crown of Phantoms was as strong as anything they ever made.
I’ll leave you with this somewhat cheesy, but completely true, story: ten years ago, before MetalSucks was even a twinkle in Vince and myself’s collective eye, I took one of the shittiest jobs of my life, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, my boss was a colossal bastard on a massive ego trip, the kind of asshole who was completely incapable of saying anything to his employees without insulting them. But I needed the job, so I had to put up with it; and so every day, before I took a deep breath and entered the office for my upcoming ten-to-twelve hours of total misery, I would listen to “Pure Hatred” and/or — of course! — “Power Trip.” I sincerely believe those songs kept me out of prison for assault that year.
R.I.P. Chimaira. I’ll be first in line for the reunion.
