CHIMAIRA Frontman Offers Songwriting Update

Cleveland, Ohio's CHIMAIRA have commenced the songwriting process for their follow-up to last year's "Chimaira", tentatively due in 2007 through an as-yet-undetermined label. The band's vocalist, Mark Hunter, has issued the following update via the group's MySpace profile:

"In February me, Matt [DeVries, guitar] and Rob [Arnold, guitar] wrote a few songs while we were on break and we recorded them into ProTools and emailed them to each other. We were really stoked on the songs back then but we thought that it's been so long, maybe we are all in a different headspace and those songs don't represent us anymore. So for the first day of writing as a band we decided to start with all new ideas...

"Monday Rob played a riff that was kind of left-field for us. We all went with it and spent all night working on it. It didn't seem like Matt or Andols [Herrick, drums] were into it at all...then dinner afterwords they expressed pure hatred for it...I think I hear some potential in it, but good luck getting those two to work on it again!

"So Tuesday started with a fresh mind and after we rocked the old February tapes and heard some pretty killer stuff, we decided to go back and explore the demos we worked on.

"The first track was full of riffs Matt wrote and it's pretty goddamn heavy. We all worked on it together and made it so fucking badass I can't wait to start working on it with vocals. The difference from the demo is night and day and everyone contributed to the song, which is pretty rare for us this early in the game.

"We spent Wednesday tightening up the new jam and started working on another.
This time it was one of Rob's jams from February. We wound up tightening this song up on Thursday.

"So far this song has my favorite CHIMAIRA riff ever in it. I fucking love this one. We didn't change much from the original version he wrote so it went pretty quick getting it all together. Andols and I have jokingly named this song 'Lucifer's Beard' as it is one of the most complex and tough songs for him to play.

"Friday was spent tightening up 'Lucifer's Beard' and then we started working on another one of Rob's songs from the February sessions. This one is a slower song for us, but pretty heavy. It needs some work still and it needs to be played a lot tighter before i am 100%."

CHIMAIRA's self-titled effort, which was issued last August, was the band's final release for Roadrunner Records. "Chimaira" was recorded at Spider Studios in Ohio with producer Ben Schigel. Mixing duties were handled by Colin Richardson (MACHINE HEAD, FEAR FACTORY, NAPALM DEATH).