Chimaira Almost Reunited for New Music in 2020

2020 was expected to be a year heavy on reunions but the pandemic shuttered or delayed a lot of those plans. One reunion that many didn't know about was the return of Chimaira, not only from a performance standpoint but also as a recording entity again.

During a chat with Pierre Gutierrez (which can be seen below), Chimaira guitarist Rob Arnold revealed that there had been some initial talks of recording new music to go along with a scheduled Chimaira Christmas show.

The group split in 2014 but got back together in 2017 for the Chimaira Christmas one-off and apparently a second show was set to be announced for this holiday season.

“We had the next ‘Chimaira Christmas‘ show, which was gonna be Christmas of 2020," explained Arnold. "[It] had been booked, but it hadn’t been announced yet. We weren’t gonna announce it until probably mid-summer. We had already even started talking about set lists and stuff like that."

He continued, "Then along with that came the talks of, ‘Hey, why don’t we start writing some music and just start putting some riffs together and sending them back and forth and that didn’t really get out of any infancy stage."

He added, "There aren’t any songs or anything yet that are in the archives or anything like that. That never really lifted off. Because right at that same moment is when COVID hit. And obviously everybody had to make huge adjustments right then. And just everything was put on hold. A few weeks later the show was cancelled.”

The guitarist says, “All I can say is maybe we’ll try for next year. Hopefully this time next year, everything that should have been happening right now will be happening, but I can’t say. No one can say.”

During their tenure the band issued seven studio albums, the most recent being 2013's Crown of Phantoms. Revisit some of the band's past videos and check out the chat below.