COVID nearly killed him. Cancer hit his family. The world shut down.
Now Dez Fafara is stepping back onto Australian soil with DevilDriver — and something’s changed.
Watch the full interview below
There’s a moment in every good metal story where the noise drops out and something real crawls up through the cracks.
Not riffs. Not image. Not the illusion.
Something human.
Sitting across from Dez Fafara, you realise pretty quickly—this isn’t a man selling a tour. This is a man who’s walked through fire and decided to come back swinging.
Before the world collapsed in 2020, he was out there telling people to chase something—dreams, aspirations, whatever you want to call it. Light the fuse and don’t look back.
Then the fuse hit water.
COVID. Silence. Isolation. The kind of stillness that forces you to either build something… or disappear.
For some of us, that meant creating. Building studios out of nothing. Rewiring our lives just to feel like we were moving forward.
For Dez?
It was war.
His wife battling cancer—twice.
Himself nearly dying from COVID.
A complete teardown of everything he thought was stable.
And here’s the part that hits harder than any breakdown riff—he didn’t come out of it talking like a rockstar.
He came out of it talking like someone who had to rebuild from zero.
“You can’t give of yourself if your well is dry.”
That’s not a lyric. That’s survival.
Now fast forward. Coal Chamber stepping back onto a stage at Sick New World, drummer Mikey Cox returning after beating cancer. Real life bleeding into the spectacle.
And suddenly, this whole thing—this loud, chaotic, beautiful mess we call heavy music—feels less like entertainment…
…and more like proof that people can come back.
Not the same.
But stronger. Sharper. Hungrier.
With Strike and Kill landing and an Australian tour with Cradle of Filth looming, this isn’t just another run of shows.
It’s a return.
Not to where things were….
…but to what they’ve become.
This is the gospel.
I bit crowd surfers.
Killer.
