Andy LaPlegua, founder of Norway’s Icon of Coil, launched Combichrist as one of the leading acts in the aggrotech style linked to electro-industrial music. The Atlanta-based American metal band centers on LaPlegua’s studio work, supported live by a shifting roster of musicians. Its sound sits between KMFDM and Ministry, beginning with the caustic 2003 debut The Joy of Gunz that fused piercing noise and driving dance rhythms. Later albums kept the violent, aggressive tone while growing heavier and darker, as heard on 2007’s What the F**k Is Wrong with You People? and 2010’s Making Monsters. After One Fire in 2019, the project navigated lineup and management shifts plus the global pandemic before returning with tenth album CMBCRST in 2024.
LaPlegua’s earlier Norwegian bands included Icon of Coil, yet he started Combichrist in 2003 with The Joy of Gunz on Germany’s Out of Line label. Everybody Hates You became the first release on American imprint Metropolis two years later. Issued deliberately on 6/6/6, the single “Get Your Body Beat” earned six weeks on Billboard’s dance chart, the band’s first entry there. It appeared on the 2007 breakthrough What the F**k Is Wrong with You People?, which also held club hits “Electrohead” and “Deathbed.” In 2008, a U.S. support run with Mindless Self Indulgence and the Frost EP: Sent to Destroy widened their reach. The year 2009 opened with a track on the Underworld: Rise of the Lycans soundtrack plus the album Today We Are All Demons. Tours followed with Wes Borland’s Black Light Burns and Rammstein across Europe, leading to opening slots on the German industrial metal band’s U.S. dates that included sold-out Madison Square Garden shows. The pulsing 2010 album Making Monsters contained LaPlegua compositions later featured on No Redemption, the Devil May Cry soundtrack.
We Love You, the seventh LP, surfaced in 2014 with extra electronic layers recalling dubstep while preserving prior crunch. Two years later, after announcing an eighth album, LaPlegua performed solo at Complex in Glendale, California, mixing rarities and remixes. Produced by Oumi Kapila of Filter and LaPlegua, This Is Where Death Begins arrived later that year and prompted an extensive tour. The 2017 single “Broken: United” resurfaced on ninth album One Fire, issued two years afterward. A retrospective drawing on ideas from across the group’s 15-plus-year history, it preceded several quiet years. The first post-pandemic release, the 2022 single “Heads Off,” eventually appeared on tenth full-length CMBCRST in 2024.
