There's an obscure Chinese proverb that roughly translates as "There is one thing greater than money and power: Enthusiasm." While some of the more cynical bastards in the world would dismiss that statement as some kind of hollow fortune-cookie philosophy, that lesson is something the Cleveland-based metal outfit Chimaira have taken to heart. With four records and a decade of service in the trenches behind them, the band—singer Mark Hunter, guitarists Rob Arnold and Matt DeVries, bassist Jim LaMarca, drummer Andols Herrick and keyboardist Chris Spicuzza—have created The Infection, their second release for Ferret Music and their most ambitious recording yet.

Sounds like typical record-company bio nonsense, right? Doesn't every band tell you that their latest release surpasses everything they've done up to this point? How many times have you heard the words "maturing" or "progressing" as a rationale to deliver a crap album? For their fifth album, Chimaira didn't have any brushes with death, rehab memories or dalliances in musical genres that have nothing to do with "the rock" as we know it. Sounds crazy, but the truth is that the band have come around full circle, returning to the headspace that brought them together in the first place.

"Every album we've ever made has a back-story that made the creation of that album a pain in the ass," says Mark Hunter about his band's evolution. "When we made our first album [2001's Pass Out Of Existence], we were thrown into the studio for two months with a huge budget, a big producer and no songs. We just rushed through it. When we got the record back, we thought, 'this is not what we signed up for.' When it came to do the next record [2003's The Impossibility Of Reason], we felt like we had something to prove, so we were purposely writing songs that just put up a huge middle finger to everybody that steered us in the wrong direction. Andols had quit, and for the third album [2005's Chimaira], I hardly showed up to work on it. I'm usually working 12 hours a day in the studio; I went in, and did all my songs in four days and left. We got off of Roadrunner, got our old drummer back and signed to Ferret. Now people are questioning our stability and we're thinking we have to make the best record we've ever done because it could be the last one. The touring cycle for [our fourth album] Resurrection went well and we made tons of new fans.