“Ahhh, well, I can’t say much about it yet, but I know we’re coming to Canada in July,” Chimaira guitarist Rob Arnold said from the other end of the phone line.

“And that’s all I can say about it,” he teased.

The Ohio-based groove metallers recently announced a U.S. tour to start at the end of July, and since they’ve been out of the recording studio for a while now, they’ve got some time to kill.

What isn’t shrouded in mystery is the supreme metal awesomeness that is “The Infection.” The six-piece band’s latest album began spreading across the continent April 21, 2009, and sold a stunning 15,000 copies in its first week.

“People seem to be digging it. The word on the street is positive, and number 30 on the Billboard Charts for some suburban kids from Cleveland, Ohio is pretty good,” Arnold said, referring to the album’s impressive debut on Billboards Top 200, a rare accomplishment for any metal act.

And the fact that Arnold and vocalist Mark Hunter wrote the majority of the album on the back of their tour bus?

“It was the last tour of our “Resurrection” cycle, and Mark and I said, ‘This is the last tour. It looks like it’s time to write a new record. What do you want to do?’ And he said, ‘Let’s take advantage of the time we have on this last tour.’

“We pretty much just sit around all day until the show anyway, so we set up a studio and started firing out riffs and wrote the first seven or eight songs of “The Infection” on the back of the bus. And then we went back to the practice space after that tour was over.”

Are you and Mark the primary song writers in the band?

I contribute the majority of the riffs, but he throws in his riffs too. And then it’s basically us talking about the arrangements, what kind of melodies or harmonies we hear, whether a verse should come now or a chorus and how we should transition parts. Then, when we’re in the practice space, when everyone’s around, everybody puts their two cents in. Really, it’s just a lot of communication. We have a healthy chemistry and we see each other’s visions clearly because of how long we’ve been working together.

Is this how the band usually approaches song writing?

Our process has definitely evolved, but I’d say it’s different for every record that we’ve done, just because of circumstances or people’s mindsets or what the band is feeling at the time. For instance, some people may not be as gung ho and ready to go and write a new record as the others, so somebody might jump in and set the tone of the record by showing everybody a bunch of their riffs first. This particular time, it was Mark and I and, although we primarily do the same thing with all the records, this is the first time we jumped into it right in the back of the bus.

How conducive was that kind of environment to writing and inspiration?

It seemed to work really well, especially with the technology available today. We had a little ProTools LE [personal studio] system set up in the back of the bus with an Mbox and a guitar, and that’s all we needed. We could program drums to hear what they’d sound like, which was cool because when you’re writing as a band in a practice space, if you have an idea in your head you have to tell everybody what they need to play for this amount of time or whatever so we can hear what it’s going to sound like and then decide if we like it or not. And that’s a tedious process. With the ProTools and doing it on the computer we had on the bus, we were able to hear a bunch of different ideas, like what a drum beat would sound like under this riff, or maybe this one – you can easily just drag it over and listen to it under another riff, or even cut the riff in half to hear what it sounds like with that. A lot of times, it put such a new spin on a riff or a part altogether because it’s not something we would have thought of on our own or didn’t have to deal with getting everybody to learn it just to try it, so I’d say the whole process, in that respect, was very conducive.

What about the song that wasn’t written on the bus – how did that song come into being?

There’s only one piece that’s – it’s a clean intro to the instrumental track on the record, the last track, called “The Heart of It All.” That’s something I had been working on for a few months before we actually started writing for “The Infection,” and I didn’t even know if that was going to be something for Chimaira. It was just something I had been working on and when the band heard it they liked it and it just became part of it all.

Are you playing many of the songs from “The Infection” on tour?

Just two songs. We’re doing “Secrets of the Dead” and “Destroy and Dominate” every night and they seem to be going over really well.

What goes into your set list?

A million things. The length of time you’re given to play, what type of fans are going to be out there, what type of tour you’re on, how much you want to be promoting new material, what town you’re in – maybe it’s a town that you know knows your old material a ton and they want to hear it more. You need to take all those things into account and try to put together the best set you can that you think will be the most effective for the particular audience. You also have to go in knowing that you’re never going to make everybody happy either, so we just have to say we don’t care what people think and we’re going to do what we think is best.

What do you hope audiences take away from your shows?

I just hope nobody walks away disappointed. We put on a great show and put top dollar into our production, like lights, and make sure we have great people working for us running all those things so you can see a pro show, even if you’re not a fan of metal and hopefully we can change your mind about it a little.

What’s your favourite thing about touring?

Being on tour is the dream for any young musician. Playing metal shows in arenas, tour buses, backstage and just everything involved, and the fact that I’m doing what I dreamt of as a child with some of my friends… I’ve been blessed. And for a band like us, where radio and MTV and stuff like that doesn’t really help our career much, because we’re a band who’s success is based on word of mouth and constant touring, it’s just part of the gig and a cool part of it.