"Jonathan was just bugging out. So we thought, ‘That may work out if Chester sang on the verse’”: The unreleased Korn album we’ve been waiting 20 years to hear – complete with Chester Bennington collaboration

Metal’s enormous, subterranean vaults are full of albums that have never seen the light of day. From NIN spin-off Tapeworm to Lemmy’s fabled solo record, unreleased albums by some of music’s biggest names are just sitting there gathering dust alongside The Ark Of The Covenant and other forgotten artefacts.

One of the most famous of these mythical albums is by Korn. It’s a record that dates back 20 years, and has been the subject of endless rumours and speculation ever since. Its title? Korn Kovers.

The Bakersfield band have never been strangers to the cover version. They’ve given the Korn treatment to all manner of songs, from their knockabout take on Cheech And Chong’s ramshackle stoner anthem Earache My Eye on 1998’s Follow The Leader to their banging update of Cameo’s 80s funk classic Word Up!.

So it made sense when rumblings were first heard in late 2004 about a full-fledged album of Korn-fed covers. A leaked tracklisting suggested the record would feature the previously released Word Up! and their version of Pink Floyd’s Another Brick In The Wall (Parts 1, 2 & 3), alongside a host of newly recorded covers.

Some of the leaked track names included Shout At The Devil by Mötley Crüe, Faith No More’s We Care A Lot, Ozzy Osbourne’s Diary Of A Madman and Prince’s Erotic City. They‘d apparently even roped in a few famous buddies, with rapper Xzibit pitching up on a version of Public Enemy’s agit-rap classic Fight The Power and Deadsy’s Elijah Blue Allman appearing alongside Korn singer Jonathan Davis on The Psychedelic Furs’ 80s post-punk track Love My Way. Most mouth-watering of all was the rumour that Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington made an appearance on Nine inch Nails’ Head Like A Hole – something confirmed by Korn guitarist Munky.

"Jonathan originally sang the verses and he just was bugging out because he wasn't enunciating the way [Nine Inch Nails mainman] Trent Reznor, on that song, does the original,” Munky told Point Music News of Head Like A Hole. “It was really just kind of difficult for him to do it. So we thought, 'Well, you know what? That may work out if Chester sang on the verse and it comes out good, that would be great.’”

So far, so intriguing. A release date of April 2005 was mooted but never confirmed. That came and went with no sign of the album, and Korn returned to the studio to make See You On The Other Side.

Korn Kovers may have been parked, but it didn’t feel dead just yet. In 2007, Jonathan told Billboard magazine that they still intended to finish it.

“We’ve already done, like, Love My Way,” he said. “We’ve done We Care a Lot from Faith No More, Head Like a Hole. Those are already recorded. We just gotta get in and do some more.”

Sounds great, right? Except once more, the Korn Kovers album never materialised. Over the next decade, it would become the subject of endless speculation. They’d apparently recorded covers of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, 80s club classic Lookout Weekend by Debbie Deb and, intriguingly, brooding God Of Emptiness by death metal pioneers Morbid Angel.

But the more we learned about it, the further away it seemed. The band themselves were evasive about it in interviews, suggesting they were working on it without ever committing to anything so trivial as hard facts.

Tantalisingly, some of the songs they’d recorded have actually emerged. The Xzibit-augmented version of Fight The Power was released on the soundtrack flop action movie XXX: State Of The Union, while Metal Hammer pulled off a coup when we snagged a recording of Faith No More’s We Care A Lot, which took centre stage on our Decades Of Destruction tribute disc for the magazine’s 30th anniversary in 2016. But beyond that? Nada.

Korn - We Care A Lot (Faith No More Cover) - YouTube

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That didn’t stop the band dropping crumbs of information about Korn Kovers whenever they were asked about it. In 2019, while promoting their latest album, The Nothing, Jonathan and Munky revealed that they were still stockpiling songs for the record.

“There’s a handful of cover songs that nobody’s ever heard before,” said Munky. “We recorded a couple of more for this [The Nothing sessions] and put it aside, and no I’m not telling you what they are.”

In July 2020, the band released cover of the Charlie Daniels Band’s outlaw-country anthem The Devil Went Down To Georgia, prompting speculation that the album would follow. Not so.

Since then there’s been nothing. Thing shave been complicated by the situation with bassist Fieldy, who has been on hiatus from the band since 2021.

So, should we keep on holding our breath for one of the most mythical albums of the 21st century? Apparently so, according to Jonathan Davis.

“it’s been a work in progress for a long time,” the singer said in 2019. “But whenever we get a little free time, we go ahead and do a couple songs. One day it’ll see the light of day.”

One day? Maybe. But we stopped holding our breath a long time ago.