The first thing you notice about Zane Havoc isn’t the tattoos covering both arms or the industrial-grade hardware piercing his ears. It’s the silence. For someone who built a career on sonic assault, he’s unnervingly quiet in person.
“I spent twenty years trying to be the loudest guy in the room,” he says, nursing a black coffee in his Nashville studio. “Turns out the interesting stuff happens when you shut up.”
At 47, Havoc looks like he’s finally made peace with something. Maybe it’s age, maybe it’s sobriety—he’s been clean for three years now—or maybe it’s just exhaustion from two decades of grinding his guitar through effects pedals like a garbage disposal.
His new album, Phantom Frequencies, drops next month. It’s nothing like what fans expect. Gone are the walls of distortion and mechanical drums that made his band Corroded Chrome a staple of late-night MTV2 in the early 2000s. What’s left sounds almost naked—just Havoc, an acoustic guitar, and the ghosts he’s apparently been carrying around since Ohio.
“I grew up in Youngstown,” he explains, picking at the label on his water bottle. “You know what Youngstown sounds like? It sounds like things breaking down. Factories closing. People leaving. That’s what I was trying to capture all those years—just the sound of shit falling apart.”
The irony isn’t lost on him. Corroded Chrome sold four million albums recreating industrial decay through Marshall stacks and Pro Tools. They toured with Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, and Ministry. Critics called them derivative. Fans didn’t care.
“We were angry about everything and nothing,” Havoc admits. “Bush, war, conformity, whatever. It was theater. Good theater, but still.”
The band imploded in 2018. The usual story—drugs, egos, money disputes. Havoc disappeared for two years, surfacing only in rehab intake photos that TMZ ran with gleeful cruelty. When he finally emerged, he’d sold his collection of vintage synths and effects units. All that remained was a 1964 Martin D-28 his grandmother had left him.
“First time I played it clean, no effects, I actually cried,” he says. “Sounded like a fucking human being.”
Phantom Frequencies chronicles that journey without getting preachy about it. Songs like “Rust Belt Lullaby” and “Exit 44” strip away everything but melody and memory. It’s disarming hearing that familiar rasp—the voice that once screamed about digital apocalypse—now whispering about his father’s lunch pail and his mother’s double shifts.
“People keep asking if I’ve gone soft,” Havoc laughs, and there’s still an edge there. “Like vulnerability is weakness. Man, it takes way more guts to play a song about your dad dying than to hide behind a wall of noise.”
The album’s first single, “Aluminum Ghosts,” drops tomorrow. Early reviews have been divisive—some call it brave, others betrayal. Havoc seems genuinely unbothered.
“I’m not trying to erase anything. That anger, that noise—it’s all still there. I’m just not feeding it anymore.”
He pauses, then grins.
“Besides, you can only smash so many guitars before it gets boring.”
