Credit: LeAnn MuellerCoheed and Cambria's third album, Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness, celebrates its 10th anniversary today, September 20. The album, which has since gone gold, was the band's first to chart in the top 10 on the Billboard 200, and featured two of their biggest songs in "The Suffering" and "Welcome Home."
"Oh, I have a lot of memories of that time," frontman Claudio Sanchez tells the U.K. magazine Metal Hammer. "But they aren't all necessarily good ones. There was a lot of in-fighting and drunken drama. We were basically falling apart."
One positive memory Sanchez does have is that Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume One was the band's first to be released on a major label, Columbia Records.
"That was exciting for us. Our first album on a major label," Sanchez says. "That was when people were still buying albums...buying CDs. I know it was kind of the end of that, but we did get to experience the whole mechanics of a major label in full effect for a while. Which, we have made no secret about, we loved. We grew up on pop and we didn’t feel that we compromised our sound or ethics at all by having that."
With the album's unwieldy name and its big, operatic sound -- not to mention that it's a concept album -- Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume One did in some way open the door for other bands of Coheed's ilk, though Sanchez doesn't feel that his band started a "scene."
"Did I feel like there was a scene or a groundswell of acceptance of this type of music? Not really. Not a scene, no," Sanchez says. "I mean, we noticed that more people were coming to our shows. And it was different people too. We were used to a lot of the hardcore guys coming to see us, and I guess we were their attempt to branch out into new stuff, but suddenly we had people of a variety of different ages and who were all quite hard to pinpoint as one particular thing."
Coheed and Cambria's next album, The Color Before the Sun, will be released on October 16. It will be the band's first non-concept album.
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