It’s been almost three decades since Coal Chamber, the Californian metal quartet, came screaming out of the dead zone of Hollywood in the early Nineties. When singer Bradley ‘Dez’ Fafara and Miguel ‘Meegs’ Rascón first met in 1992, these two hot-headed misfits first wrote songs under the name She’s In Pain, recruiting bassist Rayna Foss and drummer Mikey Cox. After renaming themselves Coal Chamber and honing a unique sound and art direction, the band broke through to public awareness with their gold-selling, self-titled debut album in 1997. A slot at the first Ozzfest and a management deal with Sharon Osbourne helped to propel the quartet to national level.

Over the next six years, Coal Chamber experienced several lifetimes’ worth of excess, making their trajectory both unpredictable and stressful. Tours with Danzig, Type O Negative, Megadeth, Pantera and many other artists built their reputation, but substance abuse nearly derailed the musicians and intra-band tensions almost destroyed them. Two more albums, Chamber Music(1999) and Dark Days (2002), came before their differing personalities finally drove them apart. Foss quit after Dark Days and was replaced by Nadja Peulen, and after 2003’s compilation, Giving The Devil His Due, no-one expected to hear from Coal Chamber again, especially after Fafara embarked on a second career with the successful DevilDriver. 

This made the 2015 comeback album Rivals all the more unexpected, reasserting Coal Chamber’s authority for a new generation of metal fans. International tours followed before the musicians went their separate ways, but eight years later still, Coal Chamber is returning for live dates in 2023. 

You literally could not make this story up, and yet the 30 years of angst and adrenaline that make up this band of survivors can be heard in every note on the albums in this collection. There’s a reason why the word ‘Loco’ is so closely associated with Coal Chamber—and the madness isn’t over yet.