Nu-metal trailblazers Coal Chamber will hit Australia for the first time since 2012 next February when they team up with fellow genre icons Mudvayne for a massive package tour.
One of the first bands to weave detuned guitars, noisy textures, white knuckle intensity, hardcore punk, and hip hop, the innovative Los Angeles outfit exploded onto the scene with their self-titled debut in 1997. Coal Chamber bridged the gap between heavy metal power and industrial groove at an infectious tempo delivering the classics, Loco, Sway, Big Truck, and Oddity.
A freight train powered by an intense, cult-like following, Coal Chamber’s live shows in that era became the subject of legend. Avoiding the dreaded second-album syndrome with Chamber Music in 1999, they dominated every festival stage for another three years, solidifying themselves as a classic band with 2002’s Dark Days.
The Coal Chamber thrill ride came to an abrupt, albeit ultimately temporary end in 2002, with the band embarking on distinctly different paths. Returning with Rivals in 2015, a record that did not so much press the reset button on their career as much as smashed the thing with a hammer, Coal Chamber seemed again lost to the universe forever when they parted ways again, only for the world to unexpectedly sway back to life in 2022 to the delight of an evergrowing legion of fans.
Returning to a world where everything nu-metal is hitting hard with a new generation, Coal Chamber will drop a healthy dose of nu-stalgia on an expectant audience when they make their way down under for the first time in twelve years in March.
Ahead of the tour, we caught up for a chat with frontman Dez Farfara who gave us the lowdown on what inspired their reunion, why he feels the band is better than it has ever been and what it feels like to see kids in JNCO jeans in 2023.
Going ‘Loco’ with Dez Fafara of Coal Chamber
Dez, Coal Chamber are headed to Australia with Mudvayne next year. That’s pretty exciting for nu-metal fans. Are you equally excited to hit these shores again?
“Very excited to be coming down with Mudvayne. We did a tour with them this summer in amphitheatres, it was incredible. The band is playing like never before. I mean, just like fucking firing on 110 cylinders. It's just it's amazing. So yeah, we are excited. Definitely. Australia to me is always a really special place. I’ve got a lot of a lot of friends there. We're putting together a setlist now, we were actually on the phone last night putting together the setlist”
Your band has had a real revival of late. People are super psyched to see you out touring again. The same can be said for a lot of the bands of your genre and era. It does feel like nu-metal is experiencing a cultural renewal. Has it felt refreshing for you?
“I mean, bands of our genre, right? I mean, you're talking corn Deftones, Disturbed, System of a Down? Like did they ever go away? No. What it is is that there's a faction of younger fans that are finding this thing they call nu-metal. I’ve never shied away from that term. We were there in the beginning before a lot of those bands that I just mentioned were later bands. I find that music to be interesting and different from standard metal. I mean standard metal, every band can talk about dragons and what have you, it’s all fine, they can all sound the same. In nu-metal everybody sounds different. We don't sound anything like the Deftones, we don't sound anything like Disturbed, we don't sound anything like Static X, we don't sound anything like System, we don't sound like Korn who has more of a hip hop thing to them. So what we do is different.”
“There is a definite revival man. We saw it on tour this summer when we were doing meet-and-greets. I’m looking at a 22-year-old kid with face piercings and JNKCO pants on, and I’m like, ‘You could easily be from 1993, and you're 20 years old! You weren't even born when we broke up, like, what the fuck is going on?’ You know, so it's incredible to see. Some of those bands from that scene are some of the best bands on the fucking planet when it comes to delivering a live show doing something different, injecting something different. It's, it's fantastic to see. And I feel blessed by it, man.”
Now you've put the band back together twice in the last few years. Most recently, 2022. Is it a different experience walking back into the band, this time to what it was previously? Have you noticed a distinct difference in the response to the return?
“Absolutely. Not just in the response. But the band itself, right? I haven't sipped alcohol since 2016. They're off of hard drugs. All of our families get together, all of our wives know each other, and all of our kids talk to each other. It's something that it never was. It's like we're just starting now, and we are. We're supposed to go down to be the main support to Slipknot in New Mexico. It's just starting for us really, I think the next 10 years are going to be fucking huge for Coal Chamber, not only because the music is coming back around, but because I think we play good music and it's different than a lot of other bands. When the four of us come together it's like a fucking combustion engine just charging out the gate.”
“We were always the band that threw down and had crazy pits and we had to stop shows and there was violence. We weren't just this artsy nu-metal thing, right? It was violent you know? We had a lot of South Gate crew from LA, which is gang territory coming to see us. There was something different about Coal Chamber shows. My guitar player is Mexican. I am covered in Mayan artwork because I was the only white kid at my school as well. So we grew up in and around a Hispanic type thing. Thus the song logo, and that's what charged us out of Los Angeles. It was this deadly, ‘Oh shit, what is the night gonna bring if this band plays tonight?’”
“It's exactly like that now within our headspace. We want to come fucking deliver for Australia. We want to come down and bludgeon the system. Like that's it, I'm coming for that. I think when a band is playing at the top of their form, which we are, and is charged emotionally like we are, you get nothing but the best from it, and then you throw in the Australian fans of course, they're going to fucking put the boot in like no tomorrow.”
What's the experience of hanging out with Mudvayne again been like? Are the two bands getting along well on the road?
“Yeah, great guys, great crew. Everybody passes each other in catering or whatever and says hello, I mean it's fucking great. They’ve got no drama inside their camp that I know of. If they did, I didn't see any of it. All the crews got along fucking well. It was great, it was just good to see everybody gelling and we were out for blood and I think they were too. There's a fucking gaming instinct man within nu-metal,l you got to know that a lot of these bands have game, we got game, and we’re coming to get it the fuck on.”
That's sick. I'm looking at some setlist to be of your recent performances and it is a pretty interesting balance of songs that people know they're going to hear and songs that maybe they didn't expect to hear. What are you enjoying playing live the most out of your current touring sets?
“I enjoy playing it all, but when we hit the first note of Loco, there's a 23 or 24-year-old kid inside me that fucking ignites! I love playing Rowboat, coz it’s so far away from what I do with DevilDriver. If you see us playing it live, it's because we've all said we want to play it live, which is basically saying we want the emotion of playing it live, right? So I think the setlist is going to be great. Coming down with Mudvayne is going to be a fantastic thing, you should get your fucking tickets before they're gone, the shows are 100% going to be sold out, and many of them are close to it now. Later on down the line, we're going to be launching meet and greets as well. We've got to find a significant charity in Australia to partner with. So when we find that out, we'll launch the meet and greets.”
That's awesome, that's a cool thing to do. There are a lot of bands out there pocket that money to help them live, but it’s cool that you’re able to gift it to charity and give something back to the scene you’re visiting.
“I don't want to I never just come down to a place and just take, you know, I like to give and I do that a lot of DevilDriver actually when we play a lot of the Navajo reservations and stuff, I come down and do a special shirt, they keep all the money for the elementary school kids and stuff. So if I can, I like to give back to the culture in which I'm coming in. I don't want to just come in and be a locust, you know, and take. I'm at a point in my life when I don't make any decisions based on money. It's neither here nor there for me now. I mean, I could have retired a long time ago. So if I can give back, I'm certainly going to do that.”
Have the industry changes impacted Coal Chamber? I’m also curious, do you think it's harder for younger bands sort of to break through at the moment in any meaningful way?
“There’s not been that many changes other than downloading and Spotify and everybody’s had that fucking argument. Is it harder for bands now? Here’s what I think I think that if you’re good, if you’re original, if you’re doing something from your heart, you’re going to crack quick. You’re going to pop quickly. Look at Lorna Shore, right? I listen to a lot of metal, I know it all from the beginning to bands just coming up now. If you’re good, if you’re authentic and you’re doing it from your heart, you’re going to crack open pretty quick. I mean look at that Oliver Anthony guy, he sang a song in his backyard and now he’s the biggest fucking thing on the planet. There’s a medium here with the internet, use it. The only place where this medium is fucking up is that I think downloading and everything else is making it very hard for bands to earn money by releasing records.”
“To be honest, you know, Willie Nelson said it best. ‘I never thought I'd be going on tour to make merch money.’ Meaning you know, he makes the predominant money in his career off of merchandise or shows, not his records, which was certainly not the past for a guy like that a huge writer, but I try to embrace it all. I tend to embrace a lot of shit. You know, a lot of guys my age, want to talk about downloading, all day long, and what it's done to the industry. To me, some 22-year-old kid just found my music today, because it was on a fucking playlist, and now he's coming up to the show and he's bringing three of his friends. They’ll love the show, then there’s 10 of them at the next show, then there's 20 of them at the next.”
If you could have any song play when you enter the room what would it be? What's your walk-out song?
“Well, first of all, I was never the guy who liked the attention. I'm just in a band. The only reason I want attention is so you fucking listen to my music and buy my records, right? Other than that, I don't want the attention. But if you're gonna play something, I'm Italian play The Godfather soundtrack, because that's how I fucking run my life. I got my word and my balls and I don't break either, you know, either of them for fucking anybody.”
We recently ran a poll on Maniacs asking people who used the sample from The Roof Is On Fire the best. If it was Coal Chamber, Rancid or Bloodhound Gang, you might like to know that Coal Chamber won that poll by a huge margin.
“Check this out. We were in New York and received a gold record, and we're sitting taking photos with our gold record with a label at a show at a huge show in New York City. Guy came up and handed us a fucking envelope, suing us for $10,000 for using ‘The Roof Is On Fire, coz he was the guy who wrote it in the ‘70s. We gladly paid him, we became friends with the guy. But it was pretty crazy ‘Look I got a gold record!’, ‘Oh we’re getting sued’. It was magic. You can only write about shit like that.”
“From that scene, we always had a lot of goth influence, but we’d also always loved old-school funk, like Parliament, the Gap Band, funk. So that's why we use that is because while we were listening to Bauhaus and Rob Zombie and Fear Factory, we were also all listening to like, the Gap Band and fucking Burn Rubber On Me and Party Train and shit like that, like at parties, that was our playlist. So we heard that one time and I said ‘fuck, we need to use that, and I just used it at the beginning of a song as a measure to start the song, and we ended up using it live one night, and then it stuck. But it was just in rehearsal for me to keep a measure of what we're going to do, but we ended up keeping it, you know? And that guy made 10 grand, and probably a lot more money actually after that. It’s good for him. He wrote it.”
I’m assuming he made a lot of money out of Bloodhound Gang too!
I'm sure of it, I'm sure. I believe in business, you have to be fair, right? If somebody writes something, you pay them. If somebody does something for you, you pay them. I’m Italian, if somebody does something for you give them a vig, you know? You may have driven from LA and brought me something and then I'm just going to send you off with a Coca-Cola? Fuck no! I'm going to stick a $100 bill or a $50 bill in your pocket. To say ‘Thanks, man. I appreciate you.’ That's just that's the way things roll. So he wrote that he got paid. All good. You know what I mean?’
Kicking off on February 14 in Brisbane at the Fortitude Music Hall before heading for dates at Sydney's Hordern Pavilion, Melbourne's Festival Hall, Adelaide's Hindley Street Music Hall and Perth's Metro City, the Mudvayne and Coal Chamber tour will bring two powerhouses of '00s metal down under. Tickets on sale now via ThePhoenix.AU
Mudvayne and Coal Chamber
Australian Tour 2024
February 14: Fortitude Music Hall, Brisbane
February 16: Hordern Pavilion, Sydney
February 17: Festival Hall, Melbourne
February 19: Hindley Street Music Hall, Adelaide
February 21: Metro City, Perth
Listen to Coal Chamber
