Few bands can legitimately lay claim to pioneering an entire new genre, but Korn are one of them. With their self-titled 1994 debut album, the band from Bakersfield, California single-handedly ushered in the nu metal movement which would go onto dominate the rest of the decade and the start of the next one.

But nothing exists in a vacuum, and even trailblazers need inspiration. For the members of Korn, their sound was shaped by a melting pot of metal, hip hop and funk. But there was one classic late 80s alternative metal album that did more than any other to open up the future Korn members’ minds to different styles and sounds.

Speaking to Metal Hammer in 2019, Korn guitarist Brian ‘Head’ Welch looked back on the late 80s – a time when the burgeoning alternative scene was sneaking up behind the all-pervasive glam metal movement. Head admitted that, a few years before he co-founded Korn in 1993, he was still enamoured with late 80s hard rock.

“I didn’t want to let go of Whitesnake and all these bands that had huge guitar parts, because I was a guitarist too and I loved all that stuff,” he confessed.

But there was one album that changed everything for him and his future bandmates. Formed in San Francisco in 1979, Faith No More had cycled through countless members and styles before settling on the post-punk-inspired proto-funk metal style of their self-titled 1985 debut album and 1987’s Introduce Youself. But everything changed when the band replaced singer Chuck Moseley with 20-year-old wunderkind singer Mike Patton in 1989. The first album the new line-up made was 1989’s The Real Thing – a genre-mashing alt-metal classic and the album Head said changed his and his Korn bandmates’ lives.

“All the guys in Korn changed after they heard The Real Thing,” Head told Metal Hammer. “It turned them from being the Mötley Crüe guys into something more alternative. Hearing Faith No More for the first time though, I really felt something. It was darker than other bands you’d hear at the time like Red Hot Chili Peppers, but also had this incredibly cool bass sound that really got me to let go of the old and embrace the new. I caught the vision for where music could go and where we could go later even though it came out long before Korn were a band.

“They didn’t fit in completely with anybody,” he continued. “Sure, they’d got the alternative thing going on, but they’d also got these thrash metal guitars they’d picked up being around the scene with bands like Metallica. That’s what I loved about it – it was guitar focused, but there weren’t too many leads getting in the way.”

Thanks to singles such as early rap-metal anthem Epic and the keyboard propelled From Out Of Nowhere, The Real Thing got Faith No More onto MTV. Along with fellow mavericks Jane’s Addiction, FNM would crack open the door for what would soon be christened ‘alternative rock’, allowing it a way into the mainstream – something that exploded with the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind in 1991.

Korn themselves never hid the influence The Real Thing had on them, taking Faith No More’s funk-inspired grooves and hip hop swagger and putting a darker, more angsty spin on it.

“Even now, if I had to explain what influences go behind what we do in Korn, I’d pick a song like The Real Thing, 100 per cent.” said Head. ‘The way the song starts, with that opening drumbeat and those keys, really reminds me of Blind. And that vocal line! Its perfection, man. All minor music with this bright vocal – ‘I know the feeling/it is the real thing’ is just perfection to me. I’m sad that I’ve never met those guys – I know James [Munky] and Jonathan [Davis, Korn singer] have. We were supposed to go on tour with them before COVID hit and I really hope we actually get to do that some day.”

The nu metal explosion of the late 90s and early 00s was unlike anything heavy music had ever truly experienced before. From its wild array of colourful characters to its near-total invasion of the mainstream, you could barely move for seeing Korn waltzing down an MTV red carpet or Fred Durst hanging around major pop stars. 

As the New Millennium dawned, nu metal's big guns were hitting peak form and superstars-in-waiting like Linkin Park, Disturbed and Papa Roach were about to officially announce themselves to the world. And yet, nu metal's history remains littered with one-hit-wonders, also-rans and promising breakout bands that looked set for stardom, yet never quite got there. In that spirit, here are ten bands from the nu metal era that could have achieved greatness, but either just missed out, were hit by horrendous bad luck or just disappeared altogether.

American Head Charge

Championed by Slipknot architect Clown - who appeared in their classic Just So You Know video - signed to Rick Rubin's star-studded American Recordings label and nabbing tour slots opening up for the likes of Rammstein, American Head Charge had the backing and the platform to reach millions of millennial metalheads. Their breakthrough sophomore album, The War Of Art, is rightly heralded as one of the most underrated gems of its era, its gritty melding of nu metal groove and industrial grind still standing up over two decades later. Sadly, lineup turmoil, drug addiction and label squabbles upended their considerable momentum, and by the time follow-up record The Feeding arrived in 2005, the world had moved on. 

Drowning Pool

Producing one of metal's all-time great club night bangers in the irrepressible Bodies, Drowning Pool's 2001 debut album Sinner marked them out as a band with all the tools to make it big. Their appearance on the 2001 Ozzfest tour - where they were eventually promoted up the bill by Sharon Osbourne - saw their popularity explode, while their patronage by WWE put them in front of millions of viewers (the Dallas mob performed at Wrestlemania in 2002 and even got to release their own version of Triple H's Motörhead-penned entrance theme, The Game). Of course, tragically, we all know what happened next: frontman Dave Williams was found dead in the band's tourbus while on another Ozzfest trek in August 2002, and Drowning Pool's destiny would never be fulfilled. 

Spineshank

Having previously been best known for their entertaining but ultimately ill-advised cover of The Beatles' While My Guitar Gently Weeps (what was it with nu metal bands covering beloved classics in this era?!), Spineshank properly announced themselves as one of their generation's most promising young bands with the release of the thoroughly decent The Height Of Callousness in 2000. Released on powerhouse label Roadrunner and packing two absolute worldie singles in New Disease and Synthetic, the stage was seemingly set for great things. While 2003 follow-up Self-Destructive Pattern was a step down, lead single Smothered did bag a Grammy nomination, but the departure of frontman Jonny Santos the following year would spell the end of Spineshank's push, and they'd all but disappear for the better part of a decade.

Chimaira

Perfectly bridging the gap between the nu metal boom and the rise of the New Wave Of American Heavy Metal that followed in its wake, it's a mystery as to why Chimaira didn't go supernova. 2003 opus The Impossibility Of Reason positioned the Ohio six-piece near the very top of the mid-00s metal pile, but where the likes of Killswitch Engage and Lamb Of God would graduate into metal's big leagues, Chimaira just never quite seemed to scale the same heights. In 2014, following a still respectable career, the band officially broke up, reuniting only for a couple of celebratory shows since.

Static-X

Having already put themselves on everybody's radar with 1999's class Wisconsin Death Trip album, Static-X polished up their nu-industrial sound and dropped the similarly brilliant Machine two years later, right into the middle of a scene utterly besieged by nu metal. The Californians had it all: killer songs, larger-than-life personalities and an instantly iconic frontman in the turbo-haired Wayne Static. Despite all this, while they'd go on to forge a very solid career from thereon in, inner-band politics meant they never quite boarded the hype train in the same way again. Wayne Static would sadly pass away at the age of just 48 in November 2014. His bandmates would pay tribute a few years later by...erm...dressing up Edsel from Dope as an undead Wayne to resume touring. Weird.

Kittie

Despite its qualities, nu metal certainly had its downsides, and one of its most glaring was that the scene could be something of a misogynistic wangfest. When Kittie emerged in 2000 with debut album Spit, they felt like a breath of fresh air: an all-female four-piece writing feminism-powered ragers that flew in the face of the self-pitying angst and braggadocios groin-grabbing that had begun to dominate nu metal by that point. Their initial success proved too much for the band's young members, though, and a combination of lineup troubles and constant battles against an industry not ready for them meant Kittie never managed to scale the heights they seemed set for. 

Mushroomhead

In case you haven't heard it a million times by now: Mushroomhead were doing the mask thing before Slipknot! It's a shame that their feud with Iowa's most successful metal export has all but defined their career, because Mushroomhead really did deserve some spotlight of their own accord. 2001's XX collection - repackaged and reissued by Universal Records towards the end of the year - introduced the band to a whole new, much wider audience, its newly produced video for Solitaire / Unravelling blowing up on music video channels. In 2003, Universal also released the band's next 'proper' album, XIII, and it looked like Mushroomhead might finally hit the big time. While the album did well, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, the eight-piece didn't quite cross over in a major way, and this was about as big as it got for them. 

The Union Underground

Mixing nu metal stomp with splashes of groove and industrial metal, in the space of a couple of years The Union Underground got signed to a major label, put out a well-received debut album in An Education In Rebellion, were hand-picked by Marilyn Manson to join him on tour and even wrote the new theme song for WWE's flagship weekly show, Monday Night Raw. For whatever reason, though, the Texans just weren't long for this world, and disbanded before even recording a second album. Strange, given their potential wide appeal and the fact that they were packing an image and style that could have easily survived nu metal's eventual implosion.

Snot

The tragic story of Snot is well-worn, but it doesn't make it any less of a shame. In the same year that Limp Bizkit arrived on the scene as nu metal's great young hopefuls, Snot put out a similarly promising debut album in Get Some, mixing influences that incorporated everything from Korn and Pantera to Sublime and Deftones. In Lynn Strait, they also had one of the scene's most electrifying frontmen, and epic things looked certain for their future. Until, that is, Lynn died in a car accident just a year after the release of the album. The rollcall of special guests on Snot's 2000 tribute album Strait Up showed just how admired he was: Fred Durst, Corey Taylor, Max Cavalera and Serj Tankian were among them. What could have been.

Sunk Loto

In their native Australia, Sunk Loto were signposted for stardom. They signed to Sony Music before they even released their first EP in 1999, then the following year’s debut album, Big Picture Lies, landed at number 30 in the Australian charts. Despite not selling as well, 2003 follow-up Between Birth And Death won producer Paul McKercher an ARIA Music Award (AKA an Australian Grammy) for Engineer Of The Year in 2004. It was also wildly inventive, folding nu metal, post-hardcore and prog music into what’s still an unsung masterpiece. Sadly, behind-the-scenes bullshit and a loss of momentum necessitated Sunk’s breakup in 2007, although they later reunited in 2022.

Metal has long been a male- dominated space, but was arguably never as testosterone-driven as during the late 90s/early 00s nu metal goldrush. When Kittie released their debut album, Spit, in January 2000, it cut through the baggy pants bravado like a knife.

Not only did it go harder and more aggressive than any nu metal album doing the rounds, with shades of death metal cutting through mountainous Korn-esque grooves, but it also had thought-provoking and defiant songs like Choke and Suck, and sought to subvert gender expectations. And with Brackish, the band hit upon nu metal’s only genuine anthem of empowerment.

Yet, when the four then-teenagers headed into EMAC Studios in Ontario to record Spit in the summer of 1999, they had no expectations. After playing a showcase at Canadian Music Week a few months earlier, Kittie had been signed by NG Records, a small, independent punk label kicking up dust out of NYC, on a four-album deal. But even then, the band cheerfully admit the magnitude of the situation was lost on them.

“I remember signing the deal, but it wasn’t like the golden magical pen like, ‘Hey, you guys got your big record deal’,” says vocalist Morgan Lander. “It felt very low key. We were so young, we were just here for the ride. We thought this would be a fun summer project. We were going to press 5,000 copies of Spit and that was going to be it.”

Given the band were still in high school, the Spit recording sessions, with Rage Against The Machine producer Garth Richardson, took place over nine days with the band doing their homework between takes.

One song that would emerge from the sessions as particularly special was Brackish, which, with its jittery opening, brash, skittering electronic undercurrent and huge chorus, sounded worlds apart from anything else in the scene at the time. It would eventually become Spit’s first single and launch the band’s career, but it almost never saw the light of day.

“I’d call that song an afterthought,” says Morgan’s sister and the band’s drummer, Mercedes. “We weren’t even going to record it for Spit at all.”

“There is no video or audio recordings pre-recording of Spit that have Brackish in them in its current incarnation,” adds Morgan. “The song we played before that was in a different key and the song structure was the same, but it was very basic. There was no melody, there was just a talking part during the verse and then the chorus there was nothing but was a scream before the [main riff]. We recorded it but then we weren’t sure if we were going to put it on the album or leave it as an instrumental.”

Frustrated that the song was still plateauing, the band asked their sound engineer to bring in a friend who could DJ to take things to the next level. “We paid him a case of beer to play us some cool jungle,” laughs Mercedes. “The beats elevated [the song] to a place where the music stood out, but there still wasn’t a vocal melody that matched that elevation.”

Brackish’s now-iconic chorus wouldn’t come together until a few weeks later, when Morgan returned to the studio to lay down additional vocals. “I remember sitting on the floor in the vocal booth writing the lyrics down, it was right at the very tail-end, like, ‘I have no idea what I’m going to say here. I’ll just think of something.’ The chorus then the screaming part underneath that, I wrote on the floor. We spent one day, and I banged it out.”

Spit was originally released in November 1999 but was quickly pulled from the shelves and reissued when NG was bought out by Artemis Records at the end of the year. Around the same time, original bassist Tanya Candler left the band and was replaced by Talena Atfield, completing what many still believe is the ‘classic’ Kittie line-up along with lead guitarist Fallon Bowman.

Together, the band filmed the video for Brackish during New York’s CMJ music festival at a gig supporting Biohazard. “[Renowned music video director] Floria Sigismondi wrote this incredible treatment with car crashes,” remembers Morgan. “But the label didn’t want to pay the price it would have cost, so we ended up doing a live video.”

“We were being heavily played on K-Rock and had started to build a following,” adds Mercedes. “At that point, we actually had Kittie fans turning up to our shows, but the crowd was [mostly] industry people, which is hilarious because there’s definitely some push mosh going on.”

With Brackish on constant rotation on music video channels, things escalated quickly and in January 2000, Kittie were booked to support Slipknot on the Iowans’ first headline tour.

“We left for the tour, and I just never went back to high school,” says Morgan. “Those first 5,000 copies that we thought we were only going to seek for the entirety of our career flew off the shelves in a couple of days when Spit was released and then it started to sink in, the true size of what was to come.”

That July, just a year after being signed, Kittie played the second stage at Ozzfest. Opening for headliners Soulfly, they were the youngest and only female band on the bill.

But rapid success also had a downside, and from the outset, the band found themselves exposed to the rampant misogyny of the 00s metal scene, and locked in a constant battle to be taken seriously.

Reviews of Spit at the time of its release unanimously refer in astonishment to the fact the band were women. On a prominent US chat show a suggestion that they were “Britney Spears meets Slayer” was greeted by stony expressions and palpable annoyance. Meanwhile, during gigs, men would peek behind their amps, so certain they would find a bloke back there actually playing the guitars.

“Being a young person and having that around you really hurts. It sucks,” says Morgan. “There were suggestions made [by our label], ‘Maybe you can hire a songwriter to help you’ and we were like, ‘Fuck that.’ We were so defiant looking back, maybe it was detrimental with our relationship with the label.

"We said no to many things – I’m pretty sure Calvin Klein asked us to do [an advert] and we were like, ‘Fuck you, no way.’ That would have been huge! We were so much in control of our career and direction, we didn’t want anyone to question the validity of our songwriting skills or our abilities as musicians. No one could tell us what to do. We wanted to blaze our own trail and that is baked into Brackish and also the whole album.”

Saying that, in early interviews Kittie’s messages were mixed, engaging in gender politics while at the same time denying they were feminists. Rereading the lyrics to Brackish, it’s easy to forget just how young its creators were when they were written (Morgan was 17 and Mercedes was just 15).

Penned about a friend in a toxic relationship with a “gross” older man (‘You know he can’t guide you / He’s your fuckin’ shoulder to lean on / Be strong’), the song clearly comes from a place of youthful angst and heightened emotion, yet there’s an underlying theme of independence and knowing your self-worth that still resonates 21 years later.

“I don’t think we thought far about that narrative and the wider meaning and how empowering the song actually is,” considers Mercedes. “I think a lot of our insecurities around feminism back in the early days of our career had a lot more to do with not understanding fully what being a feminist means,” adds Morgan.

“We were afraid of the negative connotation that can often come with it, from people who also don’t understand what it means. We have always represented equality - even our existence challenged equality in the music industry. We fought for equal treatment, equal airtime and equal pay as women. We represented those things then, and still do now, even though we didn’t realise that’s what it meant to be a feminist.”

On their second album, 2001’s Oracle, Kittie veered away from nu metal, choosing instead to explore their more extreme influences, although they never again did reach the heady heights of their debut.

And although the band’s 2018 Origins/Evolutions 20th anniversary documentary brought Kittie back into the conversation, Spit is still something of a lost nu metal gem that deserves more props than it gets. Yet the album’s true legacy is its message, which burns just as bright now as it did back then.

“To this day, people come to us and say, ‘Your music is so empowering, I’ve never heard a woman scream like this’,” agrees Morgan. “To me, that’s the biggest testimony to the music – it’s almost timeless. There’s something magical about Spit in general. It has this raw power that transcends the box nu metal was in. It radiates out. You can feel our youth, our anger, all these emotions that made Kittie who we were back then.”

Originally published in Metal Hammer #352

Nu metal band Nonpoint have turned to their fans for help writing their next album.

On Wednesday (February 19), the Florida five-piece, best-known for 2005 single Bullet With A Name and their metallic take on Phil Collins’ In The Air Tonight, took to social media, asking for their following to suggest potential song titles and lyrical themes in exchange for a shout-out in their next record’s liner notes.

“Want some new music from the Nonpoint squad?” the band asked. “We just so happen to be writing. Give us some ideas for titles and subject matter you’d love to hear in the comments. If we pick yours we’ll give you a shoutout on the album credits thanking you for the inspiration!”

So far, responses to the request have varied wildly, with one fan asking for lyrics about sleep paralysis while another suggests covering Chicago by Michael Jackson. Have your say by commenting on the embedded Instagram post below.

Nonpoint were formed in Fort Lauderdale in 1997 by vocalist Elias Soriono and drummer Robb Riviera. They debuted with 2000 album Statement, which reached number 166 on the US Billboard 200 charts. 2002 follow-up Development is currently their highest-charting record, having reached number 52 on the Billboard 200.

In 2004, Nonpoint’s version of In The Air Tonight cover reached number 3 on the US Bubbling Under Hot 100 singles chart. Bullet With A Name later found crossover appeal when it appeared on the soundtrack for WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2007.

The band’s latest album, X, came out in 2018. Soriano declared his intention to start writing their next release last year. “We’re creators, and we’re constantly creating, so we’re sitting on a ton of music,” he told DJ Force X (via Blabbermouth). “It’s just about which ones kind of work together and kind of fit together and we wanna finally put together into a body of work.”

It’s September 11, 1999, and Slipknot are on top of the world. Hot off a game-changing self-titled debut album, the masked nine-piece are in Cleveland, Ohio, taking part in the enormous Livin’ La Vida Loco tour. They’re there as part of a stacked bill headlined by Coal Chamber and also featuring Machine Head and Amen. It should have been another magnificent night of what had been a hugely successful trek.

Except it wasn’t. At a gig in Cleveland, Slipknot found themselves facing an unexpectedly aggressive audience.

“People came down and threw everything but rocks at us,” Slipknot singer Corey Taylor remembered of the set his band played that evening, discussing it years later at one of his solo concerts. “They hit Paul [Gray, bassist] in the face with a fucking padlock the size of my fist, while we were onstage!

“When we got done playing, we took all our shit off and went into the audience,” he continued. “There were a lot of them, but there was all nine of us, there was Machine Head and all our friends in Amen. Let’s just say, we fucking handled it right there.”

“Me and Jim [Root, guitarist] jumped offstage and took our masks off and started swinging at people at the end of one song,” Gray told Revolver. “When we were done with that set, everything came off. One of the guys in our crew got maced by the cops and arrested.”

The gig-turned-brawl was the Iowans’ first time in Cleveland: a city that happened to be the hometown of Mushroomhead, a band with whom Slipknot had more than a little in common. Both wore masks and boiler suits. Both even had a bassist that dressed up like a pig. Corey Taylor and co, however, were the newer of the two – and they were already bigger. Much bigger. And that was the problem.

Mushroomhead released their first album in spring 1995, more than four years prior to The ‘Knot. Despite this though, the latter were an immediate breakthrough after June ‘99’s Slipknot, eclipsing the Ohio troupe in a minuscule span of time. In frustrated fans’ eyes, a very close imitation had not-so-subtly ripped off the genuine article and ridden their coattails for a quick buck, leading to the violent boiling point that was Cleveland in September 1999.

That one night was the height of the Slipknot versus Mushroomhead feud, which would go on to become one of the biggest talking points of the era. For years, loyalist fans would cling tightly to their respective favourites, while on-and-off mud-slinging consumed the rock ‘n’ roll press. Everyone else stood on the sidelines, wondering what they hell it was all about.

The stage for the rivalry was set in mid-1998, when Slipknot signed an extremely enviable seven-album deal with Roadrunner Records. A year beforehand, the label had been interested in signing Mushroomhead, but the band turned them down. “Roadrunner had a guy shopping us,” ex-frontman Jeff Hatrix said on a podcast in 2018. “And, at the time, we were making more at local shows than they were offering us in advance, and they wanted all of our merch… The money just didn’t make any sense.”

Hatrix had previously claimed outright that Slipknot were a homemade imitation of Mushroomhead. “They are Roadrunner-invented clones of us, and everybody knows it,” he said in 2007. Drummer Steve “Skinny” Felton was more aggressive towards the alleged rip-offs, when he ranted that Slipknot “traded a platinum record for dignity, honour and respect”: “Corey Taylor says, ‘You cannot kill what you did not create.’ Maybe so – but I guess you can sure as fuck sell what you stole.”

Local magazine Cleveland Scene reached out to Roadrunner’s A&R director to get their side of the allegations. “I honestly [couldn’t] care less about your article and I have nothing to say,” came the reply.

Although Slipknot’s 1999 Cleveland show was the only time the debacle came to physicality, the two bands would trade vicious verbal barbs through the 2000s. In the May 2002 issue of Rock Sound, Taylor accused Mushroomhead of encouraging their fans to violence on that night. He brutally added, “I’ll fucking go to fucking Cleveland and grab every fucking one of them by their stupid fucking masks and I will put a knee to their faces until they pass out from loss of blood!”

Hatrix later admitted that he was indeed involved in orchestrating the events in 1999. “I know all the people who did it and I did personally paint [their] ‘Cleveland Supports Mushroomhead’ and ‘Slipknot Go Home’ signs. But I wasn’t there and I didn’t know the complete extent of what they were going to do. But, hey, these guys are men, right? […] Welcome to Cleveland, bitches!” The singer also accused Slipknot and their touring crew of harassing his girlfriend for wearing a Mushroomhead t-shirt near the venue earlier that day.

Hatrix et al. aggravated things even further in 2005, going so far as to perform concerts in their home state that mocked Slipknot. The eight men (together with one of their touring crew) dressed as The Nine onstage, playing samples that repeated, “The whole thing, I think it’s stolen” – a parody of the words that open their debut album.

“People started chanting, ‘Fuck Slipknot!’,” one concertgoer told Blabbermouth. “Waylon [Reavis, vocalist] then screamed, ‘Come on, don’t be afraid to say it,’ which made everyone start the chant back up. The crowd was brutal and I loved it.”

By 2007, Mushroomhead were still continuing their crusade, slinging insults such as “straight-up frauds” and “the NSYNC of heavy metal”. However, they hadn’t been met with any further response from their rivals, who were becoming the mainstream face of a generation of rock music. Slipknot’s latest album, Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses, had climbed to No.2 on the American charts, while Mushroomhead’s most recent release, 2006’s Savior Sorrow, had reached No.50.

By that point, Slipknot themselves were traying to take the more diplomatic route, refusing to add fuel to the fire. “I’m tired of it,” Taylor said in a 2005 radio interview. “We’ve tried everything that we could to squash this between ourselves and Mushroomhead. I’ve even come out and said I wish them nothing but luck. I don’t care. It’s not that big a deal to me.”

The decade-plus-long tensions seemed to have finally come to an end by 2010, as Mushroomhead, both publicly and privately, sent their condolences to Slipknot after the tragic death of Paul Gray. Since then, Taylor has expressed interest in performing alongside his band’s former nemeses, wanting to curate a tour that will see the duo share stages with fellow masked rockers Mudvayne and Gwar.

Speaking to Metal Hammer in 2023, Mushroomhead’s Steve ‘Skinny’ Felton could look back at with a sense of perspective. “A bit of it over time has been inflated,” he told us. “I wasn’t there personally and I’ve heard 20 different versions over the years. And let’s not forget that it was popular in that era to have beefs in bands and stack people against each other. It was huge with the West Coast and East Coast rappers. The media fuelled it and fans bought into it.”

Asked if Slipknot stole his band’s thunder by signing with Roadrunner after Mushroomhead didn’t, Skinny was equally measured. “No, because there were lots of people signing lots of bands in the day. It wasn’t like we got the exact same offer by the same guy who signed Slipknot. And I have a lot of compassion for them, because they’ve put up with a lot of bullshit just to make music and art, and they’ve lost good people. I commend them for everything they do and it just goes to show that I wasn’t that far off many years ago that this type of thing was going to be bigger than we even knew. I wasn’t wrong. It just wasn’t my band.”

More than 20 years after it all kicked off in Cleveland, the sustained Slipknot/Mushroomhead rivalry remains one of the 90’s most talked-about discords. It was the Metallica versus Megadeth of the nu metal era, escalated by fistfights, arrests and the internet. Today, both bands try to dismiss their past skirmishes as fan- and media-driven, each trying to downplay their own involvement in what was the most over-the-top feud in nu metal.

Papa Roach Frontman Jacoby Shaddix sets the scene prior to the veteran Californian nu metallers playing three 25th-anniversary UK shows in celebration of their multi-million-selling breakthrough album Infest, with support from American metalcore band Wage War.

Back in 2000, Papa Roach spoke about the fortitude of the roach (“cut off its head, it can survive until it starves to death”). How come you’re really still here and selling out arenas?

This was the goal all along. We didn’t just wanna be a flash in the pan. We wanted to be a band that had a career, a legacy. It’s been a journey, and I truly believe 2025 will be another high point.

For a band playing to just thirty people in a New York Club, it’s pretty wild that 2000’s Infest went double-platinum within a couple of months.

It was our time. We had spent several years crafting and honing our skills and refining who we were as musicians and as artists. Infest really struck a chord with the youth culture. Its honesty and vulnerability were received and celebrated.

How did its apparent overnight success affect you as a person?

I had no idea how to handle fame. I just partied my way through it. Eventually the dust settled, and I had to change my ways if I wanted to have a career.

Will you be playing the album from front to back, or dropping in the songs as you go along?

I have no desire to play the entire album from front to back. But we are gonna go into some deep cuts, throw in some old-school tracks and some re-imagination moments of the old-school era. We definitely want to celebrate it, but we have so much going on now that we want to celebrate that as well. It’s gonna be a journey through the years.

All this time later, how do you think Infest stands up?

It stands like a skyscraper in the Papa Roach landscape of music.

In presentation terms, what kind of a show are you planning in these huge venues?

This will be our biggest show to date. The production level is going to be elevated like Papa Roach fans have never seen before. We are so over-the-top excited.

Tell us about the validity of nu metal.

It got a raw deal at the time, but the charts don’t lie. There were a lot of polarising personalities in that genre. Love it or hate it, it was a massive movement. The reality is we all sounded so different from each other. I’m just so grateful that that era and music is having a resurgence with the youth of today. Not a lot of genres get to have a second time in the sun. Nu metal definitely is having a moment right now. We are definitely going to seize this moment.

You’ve been sober since 2012. Is rock music wrong to glamourise alcohol and drugs the way it does?

Rock definitely glamourises the self-destructive lifestyle. I was part of it. I’ve lost friends and family members to it. I guess that’s what made me want to change. All I’ll say is that I’m grateful that I put the bottle down back in 2012 for good. My life is forever changed. I was headed down a path to utter self-destruction.

What’s the best rumour you’ve heard about yourself?

There was a rumour that I had a secret underground water park in my backyard. That’s some funny shit right there.

Papa Roach are preparing a twelfth studio album, to be released in 2025. What should we expect?

We’re picking up where we left off with our album Ego Trip [2022], but some of the songs on this new one are a bit heavier.

Might we get to hear a song or two at the shows?

You’ll have to come to the show to find out.

Papa Roach's UK dates include London’s Wembley Arena on February 7, Nottingham's Motorpoint Arena on June 8, and Liverpool's M&S Bank Arena on June 9. Tickets are on sale now.

Ex-Slipknot drummer Jay Weinberg has released pro-shot footage of a clinic he held in Paris last October, which includes him playing two songs from the Iowans’ 2019 album We Are Not Your Kind.

The clinic, which took place at the venue Le Trianon on October 27, saw Weinberg perform the tracks Spiders and Solway Firth. It was the first time he played songs by the band in public since he parted ways with them in 2023.

Watch footage of the performances below.

Weinberg joined Slipknot in 2014, replacing late founding drummer Joey Jordison. He appeared on three of their albums – 2014’s .5: The Grey Chapter, 2019’s We Are Not Your Kind and 2022’s The End, So Far – before his exit.

The drummer’s departure was announced by the band in a social media statement which described the parting as a creative decision. Percussionist Shawn ‘Clown’ Crahan explained further in March 2024, saying that Weinberg’s dismissal was not due to personal reasons.

“There’s many reasons for it,” he told Knotfest Australia. “It’s not to be confused. It doesn’t matter what the situation may seem like. Unless you’re in the band and understand – there’s no hard feelings; there never was. We just went our way. There was really no bad things. That’s as much as I can say.”

Weinberg issued a statement of his own shortly after news of his Slipknot departure broke, saying that he was “heartbroken and blindsided”.

In July, the drummer revealed that he had entered counselling to “process” his 10-year Slipknot tenure and his exit.

“I’m at kind of a point where I’m not quite yet really ready to talk about it,” he said. “And that’s not to dismiss the conversation, but I’ve spent time, and [am spending] time, just processing the entire experience. And the experience not being the last six months, but really the last 10 years [of playing with Slipknot]. And finally, in a way, processing all of that.”

After his Slipknot stint ended, Weinberg joined crossover thrashers Suicidal Tendencies. He played the California band’s songs Freedumb and Cyco Vision during his Paris clinic.

The drummer also performed tracks by Norwegian metal band Kvelertak, whom he toured with in 2013, and the Bruce Springsteen song Candy’s Room. Weinberg is the son of Springsteen’s longtime drummer, Max Weinberg.

As well as drumming for Suicidal Tendencies, Weinberg is currently working on solo music.

Shavo Odadjian has been waiting nearly 20 years to release an album. More specifically, he’s been waiting nearly 20 years to release a System Of A Down album. But, with his main band in a state of creative exile – although they still play shows on a semi-regular basis – Shavo finally decided enough was enough and assembled his own project: Seven Hours After Violet. 

“It just felt so good to make heavy music again,” he admits, speaking to Hammer from his home in LA. “I like waking up every day and knowing I’ve got a place to create music again. People are like, ‘Why don’t you just get together with System?’ If I had it my way, I’d just get together with the guys. But the band isn’t working right now, so do you want me to just sit around on my own and just wait?” 

The seeds for Seven Hours After Violet were sown in 2022, when Shavo met producer and guitarist Morgoth at a house party. Bonding over their love of music, they decided to meet up again and jam. The pair soon realised their songs were more than just a mere fuckaround. 

“They got good,” Shavo admits with a grin. “We were actually gonna sell the songs to other artists at first, but that’s actually pretty difficult because it always ends up sounding like System – that’s just my vibe, you know?” 

Sure enough, the songs on Seven Hours After Violet’s self-titled debut album bear the hallmarks of Shavo’s SOAD connection. From the bouncing riff of Alive to the soaring, Armenian-folk inflected melodies of Radiance, there’s a direct link to his past. But there’s also a force and heaviness to the likes of Paradise, Go! and Abandon that colours the band in decidedly contemporary hues. A big part of that comes down to vocalist Taylor Barber, recruited after Morgoth showed Taylor’s deathcore group, Left To Suffer, to Shavo. 

“At first I was like, ‘Ah, this guy can only do heavy’, but it was like, ‘Nope!’ His range is incredible,” enthuses Shavo. “We flew him in from Atlanta, where he lived at the time, and then Morgoth brought in Alejandro [Aranda, guitarist/vocals]. I didn’t know him – I don’t watch American Idol [Alejandro was a runner-up on the show in 2019] – so I was expecting some preppy guy covering songs in the style of somebody else. Then he showed me who he was online and it was like, ‘I know this kid! I’ve seen him pop up a bunch of times.’ We’ve got two singers – I love that, I love the harmonies – and we got the whole thing recorded in two weeks.” 

Although the album came together quickly, it evolved immensely as Shavo and Morgoth discussed ideas. An early plan to get different vocalists to sing on each track – “Maybe Serj [Tankian], maybe some other guys,” Shavo says nonchalantly – was quashed when the pair realised this was a project with legs that could tour. 

In addition, Shavo says working with younger musicians has reinvigorated his interest in modern metal. 

“Morgoth and I send playlists to each other and it’s like, ‘I don’t like this pop punk, but this deathcore is the shit!’” he laughs. “I like Lorna Shore – they are dope and do some crazy things. The first time I heard them, all those animal noises, it made me feel a bit uncomfortable, like, ‘What are they doing?’ Then I saw them at Sick New World and it was like, ‘I get it!’” 

While Seven Hours After Violet is the heaviest thing Shavo has lent his skills to, there’s always been an element of extremity to his music. “My inspiration was Cannibal Corpse, Obituary, Suffocation, Malevolent Creation…” he says. “Obituary was the one that really got me – Slowly We Rot and Cause Of Death… Oh man. You can kinda hear that in System too – it’s in those bouncy riffs.” 

Shavo expects Seven Hours After Violet will spend much of 2025 touring, but his enthusiasm means a follow-up album might come sooner rather than later, particularly given some of the songs he and Morgoth worked on didn’t make it to the debut – including their first composition together, Thrash God. 

“It’s the heaviest song we wrote!” he admits with a cackle. “We have six or seven songs that we’re saving for the second record. There’s another song called Breakdown, because it has an insane breakdown! Ha ha! I know a lot of kids love them now, but I’ve loved them since the days of thrash – that middle bit of Angel Of Death, Raining Blood, Dead Embryonic Cells… We need those little moments, y’know?”

 Shavo adds that the idea of featured artists might return for their second outing, but he warns not to count chickens just yet. “The second album is a good place for them,” he muses. “We kinda know who we want to do what. When it was going to be all features, I was going to work with Jonathan Davis and told somebody that. Next thing I know, that news is everywhere and then the record changed so we never actually used it! 

He did a verse on Paradise and it sounded fucking great. But it didn’t make sense [for this record]. So we wanted to make sure when we do use Jonathan, it’ll be the absolute fucking best.”

Seven Hours After Violet is out now via Sumerian. The band play Download Festival in June. 

Whether you're a drummer or not, Drumeo's YouTube channel, which features tutorials, masterclasses and guest appearances from some of the world's finest musicians, is well worth a subscription. One of the channel's most entertaining regular features finds Drumeo Content Director Brandon Toews playing well-known rock songs to drummers who've never heard the songs in question before, and challenging them to play along with the track. Nowhere else on the internet will you find former David Lee Roth sticksman Greg Bisonette playing along to System of a Down's Toxicity, Megadeth's Dirk Verbeuren creating new rhythm tracks for hit songs by The Killers and Paramore, or Red Hot Chili Peppers' drummer Chad Smith brilliantly reinterpreting songs by Bring Me The Horizon and Thirty Seconds To Mars.

The latest episode of this highly-entertaining series features The Police's legendary drummer Stewart Copeland. And the song that he is challenged to play along to, having never heard it before, is Limp Bizkit's Rollin’ (Air Raid Vehicle), a number one single for Fred Durst's band in the UK and Ireland back in January 2001.

"Lucky for you, I don't know shit, I don't know any song," the 72-year-old Virginia-born drummer jokes at the start of the episode, but his inimitable gifts soon shine through as he puts an entirely new slant on the beats originally recorded by John Otto.

When Copeland learns whose track he's been playing along to, he tells Loews, "I like those guys in concept", but admits, "I'm not that familiar with their music."

Watch the episode below:

"We’re in it now, dude!” says Jacoby Shaddix, happily walking along a Los Angeles sidewalk with a full plate of street tacos, a sugary Mexican bottle of Coke in his hand. He’s here with the rest of his band, Papa Roach, all of them celebrating the end of another work day with an impromptu meal.

A few minutes ago, Jacoby was just another customer in line for food, but then a little girl ahead of him looked up at the singer with the tall, spiky brown hair, the face tattoos and chains around his neck. She was with her family, and told her dad this guy behind them looked like a rock star. “Actually, that’s my gig,” Jacoby admitted, when asked by her astonished parents. “I sing for Papa Roach.”

The singer is in a good place tonight, still youthful at 48, as the band mingles with locals at this popular taco spot. Tomorrow, Papa Roach will be back in the studio to record an acoustic version of a new song yet to be revealed. Then for Jacoby it’s a quick flight back home to Sacramento to the wife and kids.

His craziest, most dangerous times are now well over a decade behind him, and the days when Papa Roach might have been dismissed as an MTV flash in the pan are a similarly faded memory. Almost a quarter-century after the band broke big with their multi-platinum second album, Infest, they are steadier than ever, with a multi-generational audience and full control of their destiny.

“I had a conversation with somebody,” says bassist Tobin Esperance. “They were like, ‘You know what your problem is? You guys just never went away.’”

Papa Roach have rarely succumbed to simple nostalgia, though they’ve continued playing the hits on the road, while producing an ongoing stream of new music over the years. However, 2025 will see them engaging with their past via with The Rise Of The Roach tour, a series of dates that marks the 25th anniversary of Infest, including a run of arena shows in the UK.

“I like to play the hits. I’m that guy in the band,” Jacoby says of marquee songs Last Resort, Broken Home and Between Angels And Insects, but he does appreciate the album’s deeper tracks such as Snakes and Binge, on which he can hear his early aspirations as a songwriter. Not every track got there.

“There’s a couple of moments where I feel like we totally fell short. But then, who am I to judge? It’s just a snapshot in time.” The Rise Of The Roach tour will include that snapshot, but the singer says it won’t be defined by it.

“It’s a cool way to celebrate the old, but it’s also about the new, and where we’re going,” he says. “We’re not the type of band that needs to just rely on the early tunes to connect with our fans. We’ve got 11 albums.”

A few hours before the tacos, Jacoby and Tobin plus guitarist Jerry Horton and drummer Tony Palermo (who joined in 2008, replacing original sticksman Dave Buckner) are in a Los Angeles photo studio, taking turns in front of the camera. A soundtrack drifting from Bob Marley to Billy Idol fills the air.

When Jacoby isn’t having his photo taken, he sits at the bar of the lounge. He mostly drinks flavoured sparkling water, though Tobin eventually brings him a fresh espresso in a paper cup. It’s the one substance that gets the singer going these days. “Oh, I love caffeine,” he says between sips. “That’s my drug of choice.”

By the time Infest was released in April 2000, Papa Roach had been a band for seven years. Forming in Vacaville, California, they self-released a pair of EPs (1994’s Potatoes For Christmas and the following year’s Caca Bonita) and a debut album (1997’s Old Friends From Young Years). They planned to slowly build up their audience through hard work on the road.

That changed with the runaway success of Infest, and especially its first single, Last Resort. The song found Jacoby singing and rapping lyrics of defiance and frustration: ‘I never realised I was spread too thin / ’Til it was too late and I was empty within / Hungry, feeding on chaos and livin’ in sin / Downward spiral, where do I begin?’

The song was an international hit and helped Infest sell more than three million copies within its first year alone. As it was happening, Papa Roach were on the road as the support act for Korn. Jerry Horton remembers Korn bassist Fieldy pulling them aside, not only to congratulate them, but to make sure they understood that this kind of success represents a great moment, not the way things will always be.

“Fieldy said, ‘Look man, how this is happening for you guys is not normal,’” Jerry recalls. “‘You’re going to think that it’s going to always be this way, but it’s not.’ That was kind of a wake-up call. It wasn’t until the end of that cycle where we were able to take stock of everything that happened. I think it messed with our heads, because we were so far into it that we didn’t even realise what was happening until after.”

At least he heard the warning, unlike Jacoby. “I was on my own trip, marching to the beat of my own drum,” he recalls now. “I had it all figured out, and I soon found out that I didn’t have it all figured out.”

It was an era when a metal band could play Ozzfest and also MTV’s pop countdown show TRL (Total Request Live), appealing to both metal fans and pop kids. It was during a stop on TRL that the band met up with pop superstar Justin Timberlake, then a member of million-selling boy band NSYNC.

“Justin pulled up on us and he’s like, ‘What’s up guys?’” Jacoby remembers. “Part of me is like, ‘Oh, these are the fuckin’ pop guys. Fuck them.’ And they were just cool as fuck. He looked at me, and he’s all, ‘This like the WWE, dude. We’re musicians, you’re musicians. We’re out here chasing our dream, you’re chasing your dream.’ And I was like, ‘You’re right, dude.’”

Papa Roach’s success hit as nu metal neared its peak. It had been brewing since the release of Korn’s self-titled debut album in 1994, gathering pace throughout the decade thanks to the subsequent success of Limp Bizkit, System Of A Down and Korn themselves. The young Jacoby had connected with the movement instantly.

“It was an amalgamation of all the things that I was loving simultaneously smashed together,” he says. “Whether the critics thought it was cool or not, we were on a wave that hadn’t been ridden before. This is uncharted territory, let’s keep going.”

Still, Papa Roach became concerned about being identified exclusively with that movement. Jacoby is certainly aware that not everyone loved his band because of it. “I’m sure there’s a million metalheads that think my band is trash, and that’s fine,” he adds.

“If I read all the message boards and really dove into all of that, it would hurt my heart. But at the end of the day, I can look at myself in the mirror and be proud of the creator I am, the man that I am, the musician. I’m proud of our story and our walk, but the rock and metal community, man, there’s something powerful in it. It’s an inclusive culture. It’s freaks, geeks and weirdos – come as you are. Kurt Cobain was saying that back in the day: ‘Come as you are.’”

More than two decades on from that heyday, a nu metal renaissance is in full swing. Many of the bands who helped turn the scene into such a huge cultural force first time around are still here. According to Jacoby, there’s a residual camaraderie between them.

“When we see each other out in the world, it’s brothers – it’s, like, we’ve survived the era,” he says. “We have lost friends, to ODs, suicide. And we see each other out there still holding it down.”

There were times when it looked like Papa Roach themselves might not survive the era. As the Infest tour rolled on, Jacoby lost control of his partying. That began to show itself during the making of the follow-up to Infest, 2002’s Lovehatetragedy. His drink of choice was straight vodka and he liked it a lot.

“I wasn’t as sharp as I could be,” he says. “When we wrote Infest, I was like a laser. And then when we wrote Lovehatetragedy, I was blurry. I was drinking every day.”

At the same time, he and the band still had creative aspirations. They ignored advice to write 12 more songs exactly like Last Resort. Jacoby stopped rapping, determined to prove himself as a rock singer. But Lovehatetragedy sold only 500,000 copies in the US, a disappointment compared to Infest. After rocketing up to the stratosphere, Papa Roach had come crashing back to Earth.

As Papa Roach got to work on their fourth album, Getting Away with Murder, the partying only accelerated for Jacoby. He made an attempt at sobering up, or at least slowing down.

“I found myself calling a friend, going, ‘Dude, I need help. I gotta get cleaned up’,” he says. “I was a fucking wreck. I don’t want to fuck my shot up here. Not that I don’t want to be who I am, but I want to be the sharpened, refined version of this band.”

Matters weren’t helped by pushback from people around them. They’d written a yearning, melodic ballad titled Scars, but neither Getting Away With Murder’s producer Howard Benson nor their label were impressed with it. The band were pressured into re-recording it so it sounded closer to Staind’s brooding, heavier It’s Been Awhile.

That version was never released in the end, but it suggested that confidence in Papa Roach was ebbing. When their label, DreamWorks, was sold to Universal, Papa Roach were moved to Geffen. According to Jacoby, when Geffen’s president, Jordan Schur, was handed a pre-release copy of Getting Away With Murder, he threw it against a wall, yelling: “What the fuck am I gonna do with this dead band?”

His view of Papa Roach may have been harsh, but it wasn’t unfounded. By 2004, the nu metal bubble had burst, its profile overshadowed by garage rock bands such as The White Stripes and The Strokes. This much was evident on tour. When Papa Roach played The Double Door in Chicago in July 2004, a month before Getting Away With Murder was released, fewer than 200 people showed up.

“We got back on the bus after that and we were like, ‘Whoa, is this over?’” Jacoby recalls of the dismal turnout. “I’m like, ‘No! I cannot go back to stripping and waxing floors.’”

What followed was unexpected. That November, Scars dropped as the album’s second single and caught fire. Not just with existing fans, either – the song peaked at No.15 on the Billboard Hot 100. If the early 2000s had seen shows like TRL leaning towards rock, this was Papa Roach leaning towards pop, experimenting with a more melodic sound. It had paid off.

Flush with the success of Scars, Geffen threw their weight fully behind the band. Papa Roach persuaded the label to rent the Paramour Estate, an elegant Spanish Mediterranean mansion built in 1923 and located in LA’s hip Silver Lake district.

“We got to live out our Led Zeppelin dreams,” recalls Jerry of the album they made there, 2006’s The Paramour Sessions. “That was a crazy time, because we were coming right off of that high again. It was a lot of fun.”

The Paramour Sessions was their last album with Dave Buckner. The drummer was having his own issues with substances, and checked into rehab in 2007. He was temporarily replaced by Tony Palermo, but in early 2008 it was revealed that Buckner wasn’t returning. He sued the band, claiming he hadn’t received his full share of earnings (the lawsuit was settled in 2009).

Any lingering acrimony has since been resolved. Dave rejoined his old bandmates at Aftershock festival in 2013 to play Last Resort. Earlier this year, he reunited with Papa Roach again, this time on US TV game show Family Feud, where they faced off against the band Daughtry. Papa Roach won, though both teams pledged their winnings to the American Foundation For Suicide Prevention.

“We’re actually super-close friends again,” Jacoby says. “It’s been really healing through the last 10 years of he and I building a relationship back together.”

The healing of the singer himself didn’t occur until the making of 2012’s The Connection. At first, he was still locked into a life of boozing and pills, which fuelled serious depression when he came back down.

“I was the life of the party until the party was over,” Jacoby explains. “Then I was alone at the end of the night and crying in the fucking bus going, ‘Band meeting! We gotta have a band meeting!’ I had a flair for the dramatic and the over-emotional.”

The first half of The Connection was made while Jacoby was still abusing himself. Then halfway through, he experienced a revelation and stopped. He hasn’t had a drink since. “I just struggled off and on for so long, mental health-wise, depression, anxiety, alcoholism, addiction,” he says. “It was intermittent 2004 to 2012. It was sober for a bit, off the wagon for a bit, sober for a bit, off the wagon for a few days. It progressively just got gnarly until The Connection.

“Booze – there is a demon in there that wants me dead, and I refuse to allow that to be the thing that will chip away at my spirit. I’m free from it. I never have the urge. I can go into a bar and people are drinking, and I’m having a good time.”

The band never came close to breaking up because of their frontman’s bad habits, in part because he always showed up for the gig. But there were definitely plans for an intervention more than once.

“We probably wouldn’t even be a band right now if Coby hadn’t gotten sober,” Tony Palermo admits.

“He’s still loud and obnoxious without it,” offers Tobin. “So it’s kind of cool that he’s still himself. It’s just a way better version.”

Before I Die, a song on The Connection, describes a turning point for Jacoby. In 2012, his high school girlfriend-turned-wife, Kelly, kicked him out of their home, tired of his boozing and his lifestyle, leaving him contemplating suicide. ‘Maybe I pushed you way too far / To pull you back from where you are / But if I can, I swear that I / Will live for you before I die,’ he sings on the track, a man lost in personal darkness, looking for a light.

“I wanted this version of myself to die,” Jacoby says quietly. “I wanted to physically die. That was rock bottom for me. My wife, my kids are in our house, and I’m over living at my brother’s in a little 10-by-10 room.”

In the same song, Jacoby sings: ‘Begging on my knees / Is there a god to save me?’ Today a small cross hangs around his neck. It’s not some heavy metal affectation, like the crucifix he got tattooed on his arm two decades ago. In the midst of his self-destructive behaviour, he turned to Christianity.

Prior to that, he’d sought spiritual direction through Eastern mysticism, Buddhism, Taoism and Stoicism, some of which he still carries with him today. Religion, he says, helped him get sober back then, and helps keep him sober today. He kisses the cross, and his voice gets shaky.

“It’s restored my family,” he says. “That’s the heavy stuff. I’m learning to treat myself better. And the disciplines and obedience that I implement into my life only yield positive things. I’m like, I gotta keep pressing in on this. I started on that walk 12 years ago and it’s something that’s grown and evolved.”

He and Kelly managed to salvage their relationship – they’ve been married for 27 years. Jacoby jokes that their longevity comes from simply never wanting to get divorced at the same time.

“She’s been a rock, man,” he says. “She’s the person that sees the good in me when I don’t see the good in me. I’m so grateful for that woman. And she’s a great mother. She’s a great friend.” He sniffs back a tear. “Man, I’m getting emotional talking about this woman!”

Just as important to Jacoby as the survival of his marriage is the survival of Papa Roach themselves. The era of big label deals are long gone. Their most recent album, 2022’s Ego Trip, represented a new era for them, as owners of their own indie imprint: New Noize Records.

The timing was good. Nu metal has come back and the band have learned to embrace the category. They’ll be celebrating Infest on these upcoming UK dates.

“We are a few tickets away from selling out Wembley Arena – we’ve never sold out Wembley Arena once in our career,” says Jacoby. “We just added two more shows in the UK because it’s popping.”

Proving their continued success is no fluke, they notched up another hit earlier this year with a new version of Ego Trip song Leave A Light On (Talk Away The Dark), reworked as a duet between Jacoby and country-pop star Carrie Underwood. The track found the vocalists trading verses, singing of finding hope amid despair: ‘It’s not like me to worry / But when I see you fading in the dark / I’ll leave a light on for you.’

Proceeds from the song once again went to the American Foundation For Suicide Prevention. “It’s always been: Let me take this pain and funnel it into something that feels purposeful and purpose-driven,” says Jacoby. “And that story is the story that connects me with my brothers in the band, with the man on the street, with the lady on the street, that connects with our music. That’s the through line – pain to purpose.”

Papa Roach's UK tour starts February 7 at Wembley Arena. For the full list of tour dates visit their official website.

Few people have had such a rollercoaster career as Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst. One of the biggest stars of the nu metal era. he was equally loved and hated by fans. When the bubble burst in the early 2000s, it seemed like it was over for the man in the red baseball cap – but the last 10 years have seen an astonishing resurrection for Fred and his band. In 2013, just as the Durstnaissance was getting underway, he sat down with Metal Hammer for one of his most candid interviews ever.

What is Fred Durst actually like? Take a second to think about it. You might think he’s the goofy, laugh-a‑minute clown prince he portrays in his videos. You might think he’s the unruly troublemaker he comes across as on stage, causing chaos wherever he goes and always bringing the motherfucking ruckus. The reality is something far more sobering and out of left-field. Hammer spent some time getting to know nu metal’s most recognisable figure in order to get the full Limp Bizkit story from his perspective. From Britney to Woodstock, from the gutter to being one of the biggest stars in rock history, this is Fred Durst’s nu metal journey.

What did you think when you first heard Korn?

Fred Durst: “It was really dark in a cool kind of way but that was down to Jonathan [Davis]. It was something I related to and had been waiting for. I thought, “Where have these guys been my whole life?’”

Did hearing Korn make you want to succeed in a band from that moment?

“We were already Limp Bizkit at that point. I was in several bands before that, rapping over old Metallica-style riffs and Vulgar Display Of Power shit, but Korn influenced us. Them, Rage Against The Machine, Urban Dance Squad… there were a few bands mixing it and Korn brought the heavier element that I’d been missing and we were doing, and we could relate to them. Jonathan wasn’t rapping but it came from the same place as me because he’d been bullied and that was something I could feel and relate to.”

Do you remember the first night you met them and you tattooed Head?

“Perfectly. Korn played with Sick Of It All and they were on really early and just ripped it up. There must have been about 40 people there but after the show they just came out in the crowd and were hanging out drinking beers. I offered them a tattoo and gave them my demo tape, and 16 beers later, we’re at my house all fucking wasted. It was me, Reggie [Fieldy] and Brian [Head], and I gave Brian a tattoo and our friendship started from there. I followed them around in my car the next time they came to town. I gave Fieldy another demo tape, he gave it to Ross Robinson and he liked it so we worked with him from there.

When you gave Fieldy your demo tape, did you expect anything to come of it?

“Not especially, but when we got in the studio and worked with Ross, you could feel it. There was a moment in the studio where things weren’t quite coming together and we just pulled our shit together and came out with the record that you have today. It was a good time recording our first record [Three Dollar Bill, Y’all].”

Did you and all of the bands breaking at that time feel a connection with each other?

“I did. I always looked up to the Deftones and Korn like they were our bigger brothers. It felt like we were changing things and people that didn’t understand what we were doing were pulling us closer together… to me at least. Nu metal was a ‘love it or hate it’ thing but I had a lot of respect for all of the bands doing it at that time.”

It always felt like Bizkit’s place in nu metal was that they brought a sense of fun.

“There was always a lot of pain in my life. Mental and physical abuse happens regularly in my life. I’ve been bullied my whole life but I also love having fun and getting crazy and being silly and outrageous. We always had that in our band and a lot of people didn’t understand that.

“A lot of our songs are ferocious and original and it was a reaction to a life of being bullied. It was also a celebration of fun sometimes, and a lot of the metal world didn’t understand that. A lot of the metal world would be thinking, “What is going on with that band and what the fuck is with that singer? What the fuck is he doing?” I didn’t know either! I created that monster. I’m Doctor Frankenstein.

“I created this thing and people wanted to interview me and put me on television and the label were calling and telling us we had hit songs on radio. They’d say, ‘You wanted to be a film-maker. Go direct a video!’ and I was just like, ‘What?!’ And it keeps going.

“At some point you have to think, ‘I can’t do this all the time. I can’t be this guy all the time. This is just a creature I created. How do I feed this thing all the time? It’s not who I am 24/7.’ But when I became that Tyler Durden guy, there were just no rules. It was like shooting up. The needle’s in, I’m fucking going… not literally, because I’ve never touched drugs. It was crazy. Everywhere I go, I’m there in person, but I was carrying around this giant person behind me on a chain.”

Did it feel like people only wanted to write about the ‘Tyler Durden’ side of Fred Durst?

“Absolutely, man. When you’re in that moment and you’re a simple person from a simple background and you’re thinking, “How did I become a rock star? Why do people care what I do?” it’s a wild thing. The more they focused on me, the more they fed that beast. I can’t kill the beast, I can’t get away from it and that persona ate me up. I was homeless and I was tortured before being in this band so I’m not complaining because I know what the bottom tastes like, but I was not a happy boy.”

It must have been a whole lot worse when the mainstream tabloids wanted to suck the blood out of you when you were associated with the Britneys and Christinas of the world.

“I didn’t know how to deal with it. Wherever you went, it felt like eyes were on you and like your life isn’t your own any more. I hung out in Hollywood but I never cared who was cool and who wasn’t. I didn’t think, ‘I’ll talk to you because that will make me cool.’ I just hung out in those places because it was easier to hide there. I was just relating to other people who were in a similar situation and then you meet a girl and everybody starts flipping out. You sort of think, ‘Fuck all these people.’ If people had to find out every last detail of your life and what you jerk off to at night, people might hate you too. It’s none of anyone’s business.

“I didn’t know how to feel apart from disappointed. I was young and wanted to have fun and I had to not let the outside world bend me into the paper clip that they wanted me to be.”

Was it crazy to go from nothing to having everything in the palm of your hand? Did it make you go for it more because it was like your wildest dreams came true?

“I didn’t say no. I said yes to everything. I was just a kid from a farm in North Carolina and I wondered how I was sitting in Hugh Hefner’s office. I never said no to anything but drugs. Everything else, I said yes. No girls ever liked me and so when the girls started coming, even though it was superficial, I said yes. I said, ‘Bring it on!’ I couldn’t believe that all of these girls would sleep with me and not care about how boring I am. It was just yes, yes, yes to everything but drugs.”

Was it a bummer when the bands you’d grown up with were all turning on you? It felt like when Bizkit blew up on Significant Other, the bands you’d come up with were quick to take pot shots.

“I’ve been bullied my whole life so it wasn’t different for me. I never retaliated. I couldn’t. I had nothing to defend. I’m just a guy living this crazy life and I just wondered why everyone cared about my life so much when they had great lives of their own they could have been living. It bummed me out and if I think about it, it still bums me out. Every now and then, I’ll see a guy and he’ll just come up to me and say, ‘I thought all of your shit sucked apart from Three Dollar Bill. Can I have a picture with you and can you talk to my sister on the phone?’ Dudes are fucking crazy. It happens more than you’d ever imagine. I’ll just be walking with my kids and someone will come up and say, ‘Did you really fuck Britney Spears?’ Every other day, someone will say, ‘Where’s your red cap at?’ Even to this day that shit happens. It’s weird, man.”

Did you ever think the red baseball cap would become such an iconic thing? It was as recognisable as Superman’s outfit. People will always think of you when they see someone flipping a red baseball cap backwards.

“No way. You never want to think that you’re going to have a clown costume that everyone’s always going to want to see you in but that’s what it was. I got a red cap back in the day, it was my good luck hat and I just wore it. The next thing I knew, I saw tonnes of people wearing the hat and you don’t have control of who wears it. I would see bullies who were misinterpreting the whole thing. I would see them from the stage in their red caps, beating up other people just there to have a good time and they were dressed like me! That killed me. I took it so personally. I’ve been trying to shake off the responsibility I felt for that for years. I’m not responsible for how people act but I felt that way and it cut me so deep.”

Did it make the Woodstock riots that little bit harder to take? It felt like people were misinterpreting what Bizkit were about on a grand scale.

“For us, we turned up and expected people to know what we’re about. We’re about having fun and when I say, ‘Break your fucking face tonight,’ I don’t mean it literally. It was a song for people to stand up for themselves against bullies and bad people. If I had known to make that clear, I’d have done that from the very beginning, but I didn’t.

“The whole thing exploded after we did what we normally do at every one of our concerts – bring fun. They built the whole thing around nu metal and 300,000 strangers from different backgrounds got together and to us, it was this awesome thing and everyone loved it. We get offstage and they removed us from the premises and we were just going, ‘Why?’ They tell me the plywood I was surfing on had been ripped off buildings and I’d incited a riot. We couldn’t fucking believe it. We really didn’t know, dude.”

You must have been crushed to discover the riot broke out during your set.

“I couldn’t believe it. I just wanted to go back out there and I wanted to say something to tell them to calm down and they wouldn’t let me. They gave people peace candles the next day and they used them to burn the place down and they blamed that on us too. Kurt Loder [MTV presenter] was on TV talking shit about us and we couldn’t believe it. That picture of me on that plywood is going to haunt me forever.”

Did you personally feel like rock’s most hated figure, either at that time or at any point?

“I’ve tried not to focus on what anyone says about me. It hurt me for a long time because I would see and hear bad things and I couldn’t see it any more because it was so negative and that became really hurtful. I felt like I was a target. Public enemy number one. If you focus on that, it makes you spiral the wrong way and I’m already damaged enough. I’m just trying to be happy and grateful for all the things I have.

Even after Woodstock, Chocolate Starfish was a massive success. Did it feel like no matter what happened, people were still with you and Limp Bizkit?

“It felt like we just started to poke fun at what people thought we were and embrace that. That’s why we made the Rollin’ video. There were red caps everywhere and look at Wes at the beginning of the video with his grills in. How the hell did people not realise we weren’t being serious? We thought it was hilarious.”

How did the Rollin’ dance come to fruition?

“I figured it out with the dancers on the day! I needed a dance I could actually do so we came up with the cheesiest dance ever. Right, left, right, left, pull down. Simple!”

How did it all fall apart from there?

“It just got too big. The label milked us to death and we all started living success in our own ways. Wes realised that he was an eclectic artist – Limp Bizkit got too huge and he’s always been more indie. He left and we sort of looked at each other wondering what happened. After a few years we got together again and realised we both had a void, and we missed the humour in the band and we’re actually friends who hang out now. It was never like that back then. We’re all so grateful for each other, I can’t even tell you.”

Is it fair to say it was never really the same without Wes in the band?

“I don’t want to disrespect anybody but Wes is a genius. You’re always going to miss someone with his gift and talent.”

Being in Limp Bizkit in 2003 must have been like being in Def Leppard in 1992 after the grunge movement. Limp Bizkit didn’t change but the world around you had.

“And I still rock out when Def Leppard come on too! It was nice to get a bit of my life back without feeling like everyone wanted to know how my shit smelled that day. It was a time for personal evolution. I’m happy because it allowed me to get my life into a better place.”

How do you look back at the band’s nu metal years these days?

“Nu metal was left of centre, man. Nu metal was that moment in life when the walls were breaking down between genres and the emotions were high about that. People were either high on the emotion of things being fresh and exciting in terms of new sounds and urban music coming into heavy music in a big way, or they were rebelling against that. People who liked different kinds of music got what they wanted for the first time. It was that one moment in time when the planets lined up and we all got to share that moment together. That moment meant something to a big group of people who had never been heard before. That’s what it was. People were searching for a new outlet and maybe that will come around again. It was a special moment.

“It was the moment like The Beatles and rock’n’roll and Led Zeppelin happened, and they were all new waves that spoke to people who hadn’t been heard before. All of these bands shared their pain with people who felt the same way. Nu metal let people open up and it meant something to people. It really did.”

Can nu metal have a revival?

“I think so. It’s like a volcano. It’s always there and it’s gonna erupt once in a while. It’ll be done in a new way but the essence of nu metal is always gonna be there. I want to hear it myself.”

Is it weird for Limp Bizkit to be considered a classic band in 2014?

“I appreciate that. If people are saying that, I’m grateful for that feeling to be out in the world. When you’re in the middle of a war, sometimes it’s hard to see what you’re fighting for. If, when the dust settles, people can look back and realise we were about bringing fun and our intentions were good and we were cool dudes who got lucky and we did it our way, that’d be awesome. We didn’t do it as gracefully as others, or as ungracefully as some, and we’re still standing. For better or for worse, we have always just been Limp Bizkit. That’s all we’ll ever be.”

Originally published in Metal Hammer Presents Nu Metal, January 2014

As we all know, nu metal has well and truly returned. With bands such as Limp Bizkit, Korn and Linkin Park readying themselves for more globe-spanning performances, meanwhile there's a newer generation revisiting the same kind of tumultuous riffs and rap-inspired vocals that gave the sound its distinctive, rebellious edge. The only thing we're missing is a new wave of questionable fashion trends and unimpressed mothers.

In fact, a 2023 study found that the genre is more popular now than it ever has been when compared over the last 20 years.

Though it might have been well-adored, nu metal was also highly criticised and scarcely taken seriously, often by musicians belonging to other movements and subgenres, such as My Chemical Romance's Gerard Way and Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong, to name a few.

Ironically, Tom Morello was one person who was far from impressed with the type of bands coming out of the early noughties' nu metal boom, despite the fact that Rage Against The Machine were arguably the blueprint for the entire thing.

In 2021, the guitarist apologised for birthing the genre, which he believed was conceived from Rage's short hiatus following the successful release of their 1996 album Evil Empire. Fans were looking to fill the RATM-shaped hole in their lives, and bands were looking to their brand of anarchic rap-rock as a sonic springboard, albeit one without the same political intent as Morello and co. embraced within their own music. Instead, the perfected rap-rock amalgamation was taken and reshaped into something which Morello believed to be both somewhat enjoyable, and at its worst, "fratty".

While in conversation with Loudwire, he explained: "For better or worse, Rage Against the Machine seemed to have planted the seeds for the genre that sprung up known as nu metal. My apologies.

"Rage Against The Machine created a genre and a total fanbase that we did not serve. We made records every four years. In that gap, labels were like, ‘How can we get a band that sounds like Rage but sang about girls and showed up for video shoots?'”.

He continued, "Low and behold, a genre was born. We've never considered ourselves to have anything to do with that genre. There's a lot of great music within that genre, a lot of great musicians in it, but the ethos of it tended to be much more kind of misogynist in nature, anti-woman and fratty. Whereas there was political and intellectual content to Rage Against The Machine".

Check it out below:

As they sit on the cusp of new album From Zero coming out, Linkin Park have released another single.

Two Faced offers one last snapshot of the nu metal giants’ comeback record ahead of its release tomorrow, November 15, and is a pretty scream-heavy preview. Watch the song’s music video below.

Two Faced is the fourth track Linkin Park have put out since they returned from inactivity in September. The band, who put themselves on ice following the death of longtime singer Chester Bennington in 2017, announced their reunion with the release of The Emptiness Machine, as well as the announcement of From Zero and a 2024 world tour. Said tour finishes tomorrow in São Paulo, Brazil.

An in-depth review of the band’s comeback tour concert at London’s O2 Arena is available in the new Metal Hammer. Editor Eleanor Goodman attended the extravaganza and said, “When they return, they’re gonna need a bigger venue.” Read the full appraisal in the new issue, as well as features on 25 years of Papa Roach’s Infest, the return of Linkin Park, the greatest nu metal deep cuts and more. Order it now and get it delivered directly to your door.

If you missed Linkin Park, now with Dead Sara singer Emily Armstrong on vocals and Colin Brittain on drums, during their 2024 shows, fear not! Multiple venues appear to be teasing a world tour for next year, posting billboards with the words “Counting From Zero” onto social media. Among them is London’s 90,000-capacity Wembley Stadium. An official announcement will be made today, November 14, at 12pm GMT.

From Zero is receiving mostly positive reviews ahead of its release. Metal Hammer’s Merlin Alderslade awarded it four stars out of a possible five. He wrote, “Linkin Park have crafted a genuinely great album worthy of their canon.”

Rising New Delhi metallers Bloodywood have unleashed an absolute worldie of a new single to celebrate signing to a new record label and confirming an upcoming European and UK tour. The track, titled Nu Delhi, is another slice of Indian nu metal fury and, as the title suggests, is directly inspired by the band's hometown.

"Nu Delhi is our love letter to New Delhi, the city that raised us, where we grew up dreaming of doing exactly what we are now," they explain. "It’s a city of vibrant chaos, filled with love yet quick to set you straight if you overstep. It’s not just a city, it’s a game of chess."

Bloodywood will officially sail into their next chapter with Fearless Records, marking the end of an era in terms of the way they've released music so far. Their last album, 2022's Rakshak, was self-released. "We’ve always been DIY to the core, figuring things out ourselves rather than relying on others," they say. "The success we achieved with Rakshak, all on our own showed us what we’re capable of. But now, we’re ready for the next chapter. Now we wanted to see what a label could bring to the table. We wanted a partner who’s as passionate and committed to our music as we are. We found that partner in Fearless Records, and we’re excited to kick off this collaboration with the release of our first single from the new album."

Finally, Bloodywood have also announced that they will return to the UK and Europe next year for the 'Return Of The Singh' tour.

 "Our very first tour back in 2019 kicked off in Europe, and we've always felt an incredible amount of support from both Europe and the UK," the band note. "It’s like a second home to us. We're thrilled to be back, bringing intense riffs, hard-hitting beats, and a ton of new material, along with the classic Bloodywood energy you know and love." 

See the video for new single Nu Delhi below, and the full list of Bloodywood tour dates for 2025 just below that. 

Bloodywood UK and European tour dates 2025

21.02.25 - Amager Bio, Copenhagen - Denmark
23.02.25 - John Dee, Oslo - Norway
24.02.25 - Debaser, Stockholm - Sweden
25.02.25 - Plan B, Malmo - Sweden
27.02.25 - Proxima, Warsaw - Poland
28.02.25 - Huxleys, Berlin - Germany
02.03.25 - Docks, Hamburg - Germany
03.03.25 - Melkweg, Amsterdam - Netherlands
05.03.25 - Trix, Antwerp - Belgium
06.03.25 - Live Music Hall, Cologne - Germany
07.03.25 - Batschkapp, Frankfurt - Germany
08.03.25 - Longhorn, Stuttgart - Germany
09.03.25 - Täubchenthal, Leipzig - Germany
11.03.25 - Roxy, Prague - Czech Republic
12.03.25 - Backstage Werk, Munich - Germany
14.02.25 - Gasometer, Vienna - Austria
15.03.25 - Legend Club, Milan - Italy
16.03.25 - Complex 457, Zurich - Switzerland
17.03.25 - La Rayon, Lyon - France
19.03.25 - Bataclan, Paris - France
20.03.25 - L'aeronef, Lille - France
22.03.25 - O2 Institute, Birmingham - UK
23.03.25 - SWG3, Glasgow - UK
25.03.25 - O2 Ritz, Manchester - UK
26.03.25 - O2 Academy, Bristol - UK
27.03.25 - O2 Kentish Town Forum, London - UK

Back in 1994, heavy music was in a transitional stage. Grunge had either wiped out or significantly dented the popularity of much of the thrash and glam bands that dominated the previous decade (although that scene was about to suffer its own traumatic fall from grace with the death of Nirvana’s iconic frontman Kurt Cobain). Plus, the emergence of gangsta rap, with its genuine sense of danger and a multitude of larger-than-life personalities, dragged several eyes toward it and away from guitar music.

During this time, the metal bands that did succeed were the ones that adopted something that felt at least partially connected to the zeitgeist; Pantera and Sepultura were both clearly heavy metal bands yet brought in a sense of groove that traditional 80s metal lacked. Tool and Life of Agony shared Nirvana’s emotional fragility and sensitivity. Machine Head and Biohazard were supremely heavy whilst borrowing the aesthetics and mannerisms of hip-hop. 

Metal was changing in incremental steps. But then, five oddballs from the arse-end of Bakersfield, California decided to shatter the blueprint of what a metal band was and re-build it in their own, twisted image. In the process, they created a debut album that was utterly unlike anything anyone had ever heard, changing the look and sound of the genre forever and setting in motion metal’s last true assault on the mainstream. 30 years later, Korn remains one of the most important albums of all time. 

Jonathan Davis was 18 when he was kicked out of his parents' Bakersfield home, enrolling in mortuary college before getting a job working in a morgue.

“I thought it would be so cool to see dead bodies and cut them up,” he told Kerrang! in 1996. “At first I was queasy; I’ll never forget the sound of a scalpel cutting a body open.”

Davis’ troubled childhood and the traumatising effects of a constant close proximity to death meant he needed some kind of outlet - something he found in music. Joining the band Sex Art in 1991, he admitted that “singing in a band helped me to get all this shit out.” The band were rudimentary funk metal, but Jonathan’s creepy, part-whispered, part-howling vocals stood out.

During a Sex Art show in 1993, the members of LA band Creep, all former Bakersfield natives, were in attendance and were hugely impressed by Davis’ unique voice. They immediately asked him to join the band; soon he was quitting the morgue, relocating to Huntington Beach and Creep had changed their name; to Korn.

The band, composed of Jonathan, guitarists James ‘Munky’ Shaffer and Brian ‘Head’ Welch, bassist Fieldy and drummer David Silvera, had immediate chemistry. Jonathan later suggested his arrival made them darker and more evil sounding, the odd mix of his pained wails, the juddering, hip-hop-like rhythms and thick, staccato, seven-string riffs set Korn out from the pack.

“When we played these songs, at the time for very few people, they were kinda like blown away,” Fieldy told Metal Hammer of Korn’s early shows. “You could see the expressions on people's faces. Even the other bands, we could see them on the side of the stage and they kinda had their jaws on the floor.”

During one of their early locals show, Paul Pointus of Sony affiliate label Epic/Immortal saw the band and offered them complete creative control to sign to his label. Korn now needed to find a producer who understood and could capture their sound. Texan native Ross Robinson was not an obvious choice to take on the job. His sole production credit was some unreleased Fear Factory material and an engineering credit on a W.A.S.P. album, yet he was the man that Korn turned to. Robinson was immediately keen on the strange young band.

“The feeling coming off of their music was so intense,” he told the Garza Podcast in 2021. “Their performances were so heavy in an internal way that you couldn’t deny it. It was special.”

It may have been a risk, but the pairing was a perfect match; Korn were creating a twisted new form of music that was both sonically and thematically unheard of in metal at that time, while Robinson truly understood the depths of emotion and levels of intensity he needed squeeze from the band to make the record work. Little did they know as they entered Robinson’s Indigo Ranch Studio in March of 1994, that they were about to experience one of the most infamous recording sessions in the history of music.

Robinson’s methods have gone into legend at this point, pushing his bands both mentally and psychically to the point of exhaustion in an attempt to drag the realest, rawest and most honest performances from them. In Davis he had an individual who was malleable and willing to exorcise the demons in his songs. They were the perfect pair: the results were magic, but Davis paid a price for them.

“He’s a fucking sadistic bastard, that motherfucker,” Davis told Rolling Stone in 2014. “I love him, though; don’t get me wrong. He had his way and was digging into me and pulling shit out. I was already writing stuff about it, but to get the performance out, he really just poured salt on the wound.” “It was simply 100 percent belief in everything he was saying.” Robinson retorted.

The most extreme example was the album's closing track, Daddy: a song that is widely regarded as one of the most intense and devastating in metal. Davis wrote the song about abuse he suffered as a child, and his sobbing, screaming, anguished cries that close the track showed a vulnerability and emotional openness that had never been expressed so candidly on a metal record.

"I just went up to him and held his arms, looked straight in his eyes and said, ‘You need to do it,’ and he goes, ‘I know,’ and that was it.” Robinson later told Metal Hammer. “And I still, to this day, haven’t been able to get that deep of a performance from anybody. His heart was exploding, and I think we made musical history."

“In the studio I was properly freaking out and bawling,” Jonathan told Hammer in 2014. “I had no idea Ross was getting it all on tape until I came back a couple of days later and he said, ‘Listen to this…’ I couldn’t even listen to it.”

Daddy was extraordinary, but it wasn’t alone; nearly every track on Korn felt like it was heavy metal from an alternate reality. “Man, we were weird, these songs are kinda weird,” Fieldy told Metal Hammer in 2014. “Weird structure and tempos.”

That’s an understatement. Be it the bagpipes that open the nightmarish Shoots and Ladders ("Jonathan is an amazing bagpipes player, and the first time we heard him play we were like, 'Holy shit, we have to put this on the record!'" said Munky), the scatting, Tasmanian Devil chorus of Ball Tongue, the crushing, tag-teaming, bowel-loosening guitars or Fieldy’s constant clicking, clacking, percussive low-end bass lines, Korn were impossible to pigeonhole.

The key song, though, is opening track Blind. Starting with nothing but a tickling cymbal, it builds slowly until Jonathan’s iconic “Are you ready!” introduces the world to an entirely new genre of music. “This was just a stream-of-consciousness thing; it was all over the place,” Davis told Metal Hammer. “I think it’s about being blind to your reality; blocking the shit out that you don’t want to see or hear. Every single fucking time we start this up and see how the crowd reacts, it’s incredible.”

Released on October 11 1994, Korn began life as nothing more than an interesting curio, taking 18 months before it entered the US Billboard Top 200 at a meagre 72. But when the band began to tour, opening for everyone from Sick of it All to Megadeth, many of their peers began to sing Korn’s praises, the likes of Sepultura’s Max Cavalera and Machine Head’s Robb Flynn being two particularly notable devotees. “Musicians are the hardest people to satisfy,” Jonathan told Kerrang! In 1996. “So when someone like Robb gives you a compliment, it’s the best.”

With that backing and an album of such quality, it was inevitable that Korn were eventually going to succeed, and their reputation began snowballing. The small audiences they had been playing to at local shows became, in Davis’ words, like “watching fucking rabbits multiply.” 

It all came to a head on August 17 1996, when Korn headlined the second stage at the annual Donington Park Monsters of Rock festival. Added to a bill that included Kiss, Ozzy Osbourne, Sepultura, Type O Negative, Fear Factory and more via a fan vote, Korn received over twice as many votes as the second placed artist and stole the day with a career-defining performance. It may have taken two years, but Korn had finally clicked with listeners.

From that point on, Korn became one of the most influential and talked-about bands on the planet, ushering in the nu metal era, kick-starting that movement's ascension into the mainstream and earning them the unshakable tag of  'Godfathers of nu metal'. It was a turn of events that, for an album this dark and harrowing, would have seemed impossible upon its release.

“Changing the face of metal back then, I still can’t wrap my head around it to this day,” Head told Hammer back in 2014. “We’re grateful for the chance to do what we’ve done.”

Three decades after its release, Korn remains a stunningly potent record; undeniably honest, unquestionably brave and, even with the sound of a million and one imitators ringing in your ears, utterly unique. Every bit as important to the sound, story and evolution of heavy metal as Master Of Puppets or Black Sabbath, Korn remains the most important metal record since that revolutionary period. Today its legacy is set in stone as a seismic, needle-moving masterpiece, far outliving and outlasting all of the bandwagon hoppers that came in its wake.

Disturbed have announced a stacked North American tour for 2025, making 25 years of their debut album The Sickness.

The Chicago metal heavyweights will play two sets each night, one of which sees them perform the album in full while the other is composed of greatest hits. Three Days Grace, Daughtry, Sevendust and Nothing More will offer support at various dates. Details are below and tickets will be available from October 18 at 10am local time.

UK and European shows are also to be announced soon.

Disturbed released The Sickness on March 7, 2000, to commercial success and generally positive reviews. It topped the US Top Catalog Albums chart and reached number 29 on the Billboard 200. In the UK, the album made number nine on the Rock & Metal Albums rankings.

The Sickness’s success was furthered when lead single Down With The Sickness was released on October 31, 2000. The track became a nu metal mainstay and charted in America and the UK. with almost 800 million Spotify streams, it’s Disturbed’s second-most popular song, behind their 2015 cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s The Sound Of Silence.

In January 2020, Disturbed announced a tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of The Sickness, with support coming from Staind and Bad Wolves. However, the dates were postponed to the following year as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The rescheduled dates were then cancelled, again as a result of the pandemic.

Earlier this year, vocalist David Draiman explained where the iconic Oh-wah-ah-ah-ah! sound at the start of Down With The Sickness came from. He told The Jesea Lee Show: “I just, one time, improvisationally just tried it! And, literally, the guys stopped the song. They didn’t know what I was doing. They all looked at each other, like, ‘Is he OK?!’ Like [I was having] maybe a seizure or something.”

Disturbed’s latest album, Divisive, came out in 2022. Guitarist Dan Donegan said in July that there won’t be a new Disturbed album this year, and there may not be one next year either.

System Of A Down frontman Serj Tankian has named the greatest nu metal album of all time (in his opinion).

The 57-year-old, whose band became stars of the nu metal era around 2001 album Toxicity, reveals his pick in a new interview with Revolver, naming Korn’s debut album as the genre’s masterpiece.

“I’m gonna have to say Korn’s first record,” Tankian says, “because it seems like that was the time that the term ‘nu metal’ was created. I actually think people don’t think of System Of A Down as nu metal. But Korn, for sure.”

Korn’s self-titled debut, released in 1994, is frequently described as the first nu metal album by observers. Such scene stars as Slipknot, Limp Bizkit and Soulfly all named it as a key influence.

Metal Hammer journalist Stephen Hill wrote of Korn in 2022, “More than a quarter-century after it was released, Korn’s debut album instigated a seismic shift in metal. From the moment [frontman] Jonathan Davis asked us if we were ready on Blind, he changed our scene forever. They drew on the influence of Faith No More, Rage Against The Machine and hip-hop, but turned it into something brand new.”

In the same interview, Tankian also reveals the concert that he’s ever played. “One of my worst shows was in Atlanta with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra,” he remembers. “In fairness to them, orchestras in the U.S. don’t get a lot of prepara-tion time for modern compositions. Whereas in Europe, they give you some time to actually work through the material, so it turns out way better. But we did the Atlanta show with just a soundcheck, and they just couldn’t get it down. It was a fucking disaster.”

Tankian continues to perform with System Of A Down, though the band haven’t released a new album since 2005. The singer released a memoir, Down With The System, earlier this year and recently also put out an EP of solo material called Foundations.

Nu metal revivalists and purveyors of the beefy riff Tetrarch have released their first new music since 2021.

The L.A.-based quartet’s single Live Not Fantasize was unveiled today (September 19), with an accompanying music video. Listen to the track and watch the clip below.

Lead guitarist Diamond Rowe comments: “We are extremely excited to release Live Not Fantasize to the world. We had a lot of fun writing this song because of how heavy and aggressive it is, while still having a big catchy chorus that gets stuck in your head.”

Rowe goes on to explain the themes of the new single. “This song is about never letting the negative feelings and thoughts in your mind define who you are and doing everything you can to get through tough times to find peace within yourself – so that you can live instead of dreaming of something better."

Tetrarch were formed as a thrash metal band by Rowe and singer/guitarist Josh Fore in 2007, while the pair were still in high school. After veering towards a nu metal sound, they self-released their debut album Freak 10 years later and received moderate radio airplay in the US, as well as the backing of such metal musicians as Jamey Jasta (Hatebreed) and Dino Cazares (Fear Factory). The band signed to major metal label Napalm ahead of 2021 followup Unstable, which received critical acclaim.

Metal Hammer journalist Dannii Leivers gave Unstable an 8/10 review. She wrote, “The ripping solos from future guitar hero in waiting Diamond Rowe take their cues from Kirk Hammett and Mark Morton rather than Brian ‘Head’ Welch or Brad Delson. The furious title track and Negative Noise are an evolution of the band’s thrash beginnings, while Addicted pulls from pure metalcore anthemia.

“No doubt, Unstable sometimes veers a little close to homage, but it’s executed with confidence and energy that elevates it way beyond a slavish throwback.”

Press materials for Live Not Fantasize say, “Big news coming soon,” potentially teasing the announcement of Tetrarch’s third studio album.

Rising nu metal stars Vended have announced their self-titled debut album. The band – featuring vocalist Griffin Taylor and Simon Crahan, sons of Slipknot members Corey Taylor and Shawn “Clown” Crahan – will self-release the record on September 20.

Vended have also announced a string of North American dates for the autumn, with support coming from Wristmeetrazor and Lie. The tour will follow the band’s US run with Slipknot and Knocked Loose in September.

Metal Hammer caught up with Vended while they were in the studio readying their first full-length statement. Read our interview with Griffin and Simon below. You can also find details about the Vended album and all the band’s planned tour dates underneath.

This is your first album after an EP [2021’s What Is It//Kill It] and a few singles – did you have to get in a different headspace to deliver it?

Simon: “Our EP was like a mini-Lego set, but the album was like one of those giant fucking castles that takes 30 hours to complete. We did the EP at my home. It was comfortable – I could take a nap if I wanted. For the album we were in a sketchy part of California. It was like, ‘Don’t go outside, you might get shot.’”

What was the vibe like in the studio?

Simon: “I’d say ‘brotherhood’ is the best way to explain it. We were all very connected, very into each other’s lives and it just felt right.”

It seems like Vended are more a military outfit than a group of lads dicking around…

Simon: “We want this to be our lives. You can have fun onstage, but there’s no fucking about in the studio. If you want to release something good, you take it seriously. We’re at the lowest point on the food chain, so we have to take it seriously in order to get to the top.”

Griffin: “We’re young, hungry, and we want to punch people in the balls. It’s pretty much, ‘Listen, motherfucker, you may think you know us, but we’re gonna drag you into our world and show you what the fuck is up.’”

What’s gone into the record, beyond the desire to punch us in the nuts?

Griffin: “A lot of rage. We’re discussing mental health, we’ve got philosophical viewpoints and there’s a hint of jaded, I’m-over-your-shit mentality.”

Simon: “We’ve got young fans who haven’t had their voices heard, and we know that’s a shitty feeling. I feel like this album is a good outlet for that.”

What do you think is going to surprise people when they hear the album?

Simon: “The live energy. It’s us in the room, slamming. Nothing is sat down, nothing is sampled. The drums are real, Griffin’s vocals are real, nothing’s fucked with.”

Griffin: “It’s all highly fucking raw and passionate.”

Have you surprised yourselves?

Simon: “Yeah, I mean… you are in that zone, everyone’s moving like a fucking train, then you listen back to it and you’re like, ‘We did that?!’”

Your dads made a serious splash when they dropped their debut album. Did they have any advice for you?

Simon: “My dad has this expression – it’s literally the word ‘on’. As in, when you hit the light switch, the lights go ‘boom’ immediately. So when we sat down to record there was no fucking about, it was just, ‘One, two, three, let’s fucking GO!’ But our parents know they need to stay out of it. They want us to fuck up on our own – they want us to go through the bullshit and figure it out.”

How close will this album take you on your quest for world domination?

Griffin: “Pretty damn fucking far.”

Simon: “I’m going to be cocky because I’m the number one cocky motherfucker, but I think this is going to send us to the top. If you’re not a fan, you can suck it. I know I’m going to get a couple of death threats in my Instagram for that, but…”

Griffin: “We use your fucking death threats for toilet paper!”

Simon: “It’s time to be cocky and full of ourselves. It’s middle fingers to the sky, so whoever’s not with us, fuck right off. Whoever is with us, come along for the ride.”

Vended is out on September 20.

Vended – Vended track listing:

1. Intro
2. Paint The Skin
3. The Far Side
4. Am I The Only One
5. Going Up
6. Nihilism
7. Pitiful
8. Serenity
9. Disparager
10. Where The Honesty Lies
11. Ones’…
12. Downfall
13. As We Know It

Vended North American 2024 tour dates:

Sep 01: Pryor Rocklahoma, OK
Sep 06: Vancouver The Pearl, BC

Supporting Slipknot and Knocked Loose:
Sep 07: Auburn White River Amphitheatre, WA
Sep 08: Ridgefield RV Inn Style Resorts Amphitheater, WA
Sep 11: Nampa Ford Idaho Center Amphitheater, ID
Sep 13: Inglewood Intuit Dome, CA
Sep 14: Inglewood Intuit Dome, CA
Sep 15: Phoenix Talking Stick Resort, AZ
Sep 17: Austin Moody Center, TX
Sep 18: Dallas Dos Equis Pavilion, TX

Sep 21: Des Moines Knotfest, IA

Headlining:
Sep 22: Chicago Beat Kitchen, IL
Sep 23: Detroit El Club, MI
Sep 24: Pittsburgh Crafthouse, PA
Sep 26: New York Mercury Lounge, NY
Sep 27: Richmond Canal Club, VA
Sep 28: Greenville Radio Room, SC
Sep 29: Atlanta The Masquerade (Altar), GA
Sep 30: Nashville The End, TN
Oct 02: Houston Warehouse Live, TX
Oct 05: Los Angeles BMO Stadium, CA (supporting Korn)
Oct 06: Anaheim Chain Reaction, CA
Oct 07: San Diego Brick By Brick, CA
Oct 09: Santa Cruz The Atrium, CA
Oct 10: Reno Cypress, NV
Oct 11: Sacramento Aftershock, CA
Oct 14: Salt Lake City Metro Music Hall, UT
Oct 16: Denver Marquis, CO

Kittie spent a lot of years trying to avoid a moment quite like this one. As a band of teenagers hitting the club scene at the beginning of the new millennium, the four-piece exploded out of London, Ontario, with metal that was raw and raging, while dodging excruciating puns about cats and kittens and their furry brethren. But the truth was, these young rockers in spiked collars and studded loved the little felines as much as anyone.

So now here they are, grown women back to lead a new chapter of the reunited Kittie, gathered inside a Los Angeles cat café and posing for pictures with a litter of laidback kitties. Right now, singer and guitarist Morgan Lander, clad in black leather and tights, piercings and copper-red hair, is cradling a tuxedo-coloured cat in her arms.

“All the cat puns finally died down and we’re like, ‘Alright, now’s our moment! We’re gonna do a photoshoot with cats!’” she says with a laugh, already imagining the headlines. “Something like, ‘Kittie Scratch Their Way Back!’”

As she poses with the cat, her younger sister, drummer Mercedes, stands behind the photographer and waves a sparkly toy to help inspire a reaction from the beast on-camera. Also here is guitarist Tara McLeod, taking in all the feline décor. Taped to one wall are Polaroid pictures of recent adoptees held by their new human owners. On another is a glowing neon light spelling out the words ‘You’ve got to be kitten me.’ Bassist Ivana ‘Ivy’ Jenkins is home in Michigan with family obligations.

The cat café is located between a waxing/spray-tan boutique and an insurance office on stylish Melrose Avenue, and is just one stop for Kittie in a whirlwind two-day trip to LA. They are here doing interviews and pictures, and hosting a launch party at the famous Rainbow Bar and Grill on the Sunset Strip to celebrate the coming release of a new album, Fire, before returning to Canada.

The three bandmembers are soon posing shoulder-to-shoulder on a bench covered by a fuzzy white blanket, each holding a cat as the camera snaps away. Then Mercedes gasps, and releases her cat to the floor. “Oh no,” she announces. “I’ve got poop on me!”

Fire is Kittie’s first album of new material since 2011, and its arrival in 2024 is a surprise not only to their fans, but to the bandmembers themselves after a long period of inaction. The title song kicks off the album with a muscular blast of fury and finesse, churning riffs and slamming beats, as Morgan’s layered vocals go from ominous whisper to a scream. The sound is catchy and aggro, and arrives just in time for the current nu metal resurrection.

Kittie were junior partners in that movement, an adolescent all-female unit following a path first charted by the likes of Korn, System Of A Down and Limp Bizkit. Kittie sang songs of real teen rage that quickly connected with their peers in the audience.

“There is something very primal and visceral about the music we made when we first came out,” says Morgan. “Our very first songs were reflections of the feelings we were having, the emotions and teenage angst that was coming out of us at that time.”  Only three years after they began, things started happening for Kittie, who managed something more than simply recreating the sounds of their idols. “We had no idea the lasting impact being in this band would have,” says Morgan. “When you’re young, you don’t think that far in the future. Everything felt very in the moment.”

There was no context for what they were doing, with only a few examples of earlier generations of female hard rockers to look to, from The Runaways to L7. And if they hadn’t fully experienced misogyny in their teenage lives back home, on the road it was a daily challenge.

"The whole time, of course," says Mercedes. "And if it wasn't the other bands that we were touring with, it was people in the industry – journalists especially.” She remembers the band once kicking a female reporter from a national magazine off their tour bus after she asked if they were still virgins. “One thing that we were really good at was telling people to fuck off. I actually wish we did it more.”

For Kittie’s next chapter, new songs were sketched out online among the now-scattered bandmembers, then worked out at Mercedes’ 150-year-old farmhouse about 45 minutes outside of London, Ontario, with amps and drums crowded around her fireplace. With no neighbours close enough to be affected, Kittie could play loud, their only audience the drummer’s many cats. “They’re all deaf, so it’s all right,” explains Tara. “They scatter. Mercedes hits very hard.” 

For the album, Kittie worked with producer Nick Raskulinecz, a proven force in the studio with a long history of working with many hugely influential artists – Foo Fighters, Alice in Chains, Mastodon, Deftones, Korn and Code Orange among them. He heard Kittie’s demos and immediately wanted to work with them, and created what Mercedes describes as “a modern take on an old-school production”. That meant capturing the band as they sounded live, with real drums, not programmed beats.

They recorded in Nashville at a studio on Music Row, and then at the producer’s home studio, where Nick acted both as fan and enthusiastic coach. “We were tracking and he’s playing air-guitar the whole time, headbanging. He’s like a big kid,” says Morgan. “He was very invested in the music and in the band in general, just being like, ‘I want to see you girls win!’ – which is really nice to hear.”

The result is an album of heavy, raging tunes, offering Kittie as not only a mature force, but arguably stronger than ever. The first song released as a single was Eyes Wide Open, delivered with a music video of the band performing amid deep vampiric shades of red and black. A deeper cut is Falter, a song Morgan wrote about human bungling and the coming end of the world. On the song Vultures, things get more personal, touching on Kittie’s earlier struggles.

“I don’t sing about love,” Morgan insists. “That’s just not what Kittieis, you know I would never bear my soul in that way in a song.” But, she adds, Vultures does include “some relationship history in there, and [music] industry kind of yuckiness”.

Kittie had been through a lot to get here. And having another chance at a career wasn’t something they thought much about. “Everybody grows up. The industry is a harsh place. Young people come together and fall apart and are no longer friends,” Morgan recounts. “Those are real-life growing pains and those happened while we were in the public eye.”

By the middle of 2012, Kittie’s time as an active recording and touring act came to a premature end, following a grinding period of fatigue and disappointment. Most of them were still in their 20s, but Kittie saw only diminished returns ahead as the band played to shrinking crowds on a final, 46-date spring tour with Blackguard and The Agonist. 

"Some of those shows were a little defeating," says Morgan, who now remembers a couple of those last tours as travelling in a van and drinking too much Crown Royal. “When you’re playing to, like, 50 people – sometimes more, sometimes less – it was just like, ‘Ugh.’ It was tiring. And it’s not like we sat down and had a conversation of, ‘Alright guys, this is it. We’re breaking the band up.’ It was just a natural organic, ‘Let’s come home and just take a step back.’”

Kittie went on an unannounced hiatus, as bandmembers scattered to other projects and, in the case of Morgan and Mercedes, normal jobs for the first time in their lives. Back home in London, Ontario, the Lander sisters ultimately found careers at a local software company. It was an adjustment. 

“It took a long time to adjust to not being a weirdo musician,” Mercedes says with a laugh. “I work with engineers. When we’re all sitting around at a work function and everybody’s throwing around their own stories, I am like, ‘Wow, I have so many stories that are absolutely fucked’, and everybody would be like, ‘You’re crazy! What are you talking about?!’ There’s a lot of instances where – and we call them ‘normies’ – normal people don’t really understand what it’s like [in rock]. I know I’m not normal.”

There were occasional signs of life in Kittie, including a one-off show in Toronto in 2013. The band also maintained a presence on social media and successfully raised funds for a documentary, Kittie: Origins/Evolutions, accompanied by a 2017 reunion concert at London Music Hall with virtually every line-up of the group (notably and obviously minus bassist Trish Doan, who had tragically passed away earlier that year), all to celebrate their 20th anniversary. There were no plans for Kittie beyond that.

Then, in 2021, Kittie received an email from Live Nation offering a gig playing the following year’s When We Were Young Festival in Las Vegas, sharing a bill with a massive line-up that ranged from My Chemical Romance to Knocked Loose, Black Veil Brides to Poppy.

“I remember when the When We Were Young offer came in to our email, I took a screenshot of it and I sent it to Morgan. I was like, ‘What do you want to do about this?’” recalls Mercedes. Her sister wasn’t sure, but the rep at Live Nation didn’t wait long before sending the offer again.

“It was a really great offer, something that was almost like, you can’t say no to that,” Mercedes adds. “The guy that was offering us the show was very persistent. It’s his fault that we’re doing a record now. But you know what, I’m glad for his persistence, because I don’t think that would’ve ever happened if he hadn’t.”

Other offers soon followed, including another major Vegas festival in 2023, Sick New World, headlined by System Of A Down, Korn and Deftones. After a decade of very little activity as a band, and with no signs of a real comeback ahead, Kittie were suddenly in demand again. One major factor was a nu metal revival that caught the band – and many others – by surprise, reintroducing them not just to original fans but also teens drawn into nu metal and putting Kittie songs on TikTok.

At When We Were Young, Mercedes ran into Ash Avildsen, founder of Sumerian Records, who had also been their booking agent many years earlier. A few weeks after the festival, he offered them a record deal.

“He was like, ‘I want you to really think about it. I’d love to put a Kittie album out’,” Morgan says. “He was like, ‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t have any music yet.’ And we were like, ‘Good, because we don’t!’ This was not on our bingo card. We did not plan this. Everything sort of spiralled from there.”

Kittie got to work, and at Sick New World they were able to debut Vultures live as their first new song offering in 12 years. In that time, some things had changed, at least a bit.

“There is a lot more representation of women in metal,” Morgan says. “We were sort of the lone women in modern metal or nu metal for a really long time. While I don’t think that has solved all of the problems of misogyny and all of those things most women in the music industry experience, representation certainly helps. It’s a slow crawl to that equality thing, but there’s a lot of incredible female talent out there, and I love to be a part of it.”

On their last night in Los Angeles, the women of Kittie are having a party. They were still teens when they first came to the Rainbow, and can remember their first times seeing Lemmy and David Lee Roth at the bar, grappling with the arcade machine. Tonight they’re upstairs to give a crowd of invited guests an early preview of Fire, now blasting out of the PA, while friends and followers dine on pizza and the band’s new non-alcoholic beer, KittiePIG, brewed in Calgary.

“It’s sort of like a coming-out party, isn’t it? It’s a way for us to be like, ‘Hey, we’re back’ in real time, and see people’s faces as they’re reacting to the songs,” says Morgan.

Among the guests tonight is Fear Factory guitarist Dino Cazares. Fear Factory’s new singer, Milo Silvestro, is also here. Back in 2001, Kittie and Fear Factory toured together, and Dino always showed the teenage band real respect.

“Dino and I hit it off – and so did the rest of the band,” recalls Mercedes of Kittie during that tour. “I really liked Dino and I really liked their old singer Burton. The other guys, uh, they weren’t so great, but...”

Mercedes does not elaborate, and she maybe doesn’t need to. That was 23 years ago, and things were different then. Kittie were still kids new to the road, and not every player they met along the way was a gentleman. They survived dramatic highs and lows to get here.

“Maybe we’re still a little scarred from all the things that have happened in the past, but it feels like a second chance and a new opportunity,” says Morgan with a smile, as the party winds down. “And if that’s the kind of positivity that we’re dealing with, then like, we’re unstoppable.”

Fire is out now via Sumerian. Order your exclusive Kittie t-shirt and Metal Hammer cover via the official Metal Hammer store

Back in the 1990s, National City wasn’t the kind of place you read about in the guide books. A mere stone’s throw from the touristy enclaves and glittering sands of San Diego’s Coronado Island and Imperial Beach, and a 20- minute car ride from Tijuana, across the border in Mexico, the area’s nickname reflects its notorious past: Nasty City. “It’s nothing to brag about, but in 1994 this area had a higher crime rate than New York City,” says P.O.D. guitarist Marcos Curiel.

Today, taquerias, strip malls and residential neighbourhoods buzzing with vibrant Mexican culture dominate this sweeping region south of downtown San Diego. It’s here that we’ve arranged to meet one of the city’s most successful and durable musical exports for a tour of their hometown and the places that have shaped them. 

Marcos is first to arrive, greeting Hammer with an electric smile and an enthusiastic bro hug. Bassist Traa Daniels, originally a Cleveland native, is next, reaching out with a handshake and a grin, the quiet man of the band. Last to turn up is singer Sonny Sandoval. Humble but prone to laughter, he’s a world away from the spitfire figure conducting the mayhem at P.O.D. shows. 

The band are gearing up to release their 11th album, Veritas. It’s their first in six years, and their excitement is palpable. The title is the Latin word for ‘truthfulness’. “We decided we were going to write an old-school style, P.O.D. rock and metal record,” says Marcos. “That’s what ‘veritas’ is to us.” 

P.O.D. have been inextricably linked to San Diego – a city of 1.4 million residents, pristine beaches and mouthwatering Mexican cuisine – since their formation in 1992. Their 2001 song Boom included a shoutout to the town they called ‘The Big SD’. Fittingly, our first stop is their old rehearsal space, Sweetwater, an anonymous, three-storey building tucked away in a commercial park a few miles off of Highway 54. The band rehearsed here from 1992 until 1998, paying $500 a month for the privilege. 

“This is the scene,” says Sonny, gesturing to the building with a flourish. “All the South San Diego bands use this rehearsal spot.” 

Inside, Sweetwater is a labyrinth of modest rehearsal spaces — glorified storage rooms with padlocks and soundproofing. It’s here that they spun the raw material of their rough ideas into something pulsating with power and purpose. Marcos eyeballs the bulletin board on the first floor where P.O.D. and the other bands would post gig flyers. 

“This is the first time we’ve been back in a minute,” says Sonny. “It’s completely changed. It’s corporate now. I mean, it’s still ’hood but everything is clean. We thought we’d come back to sticky floors and jacked holes in the wall.” 

During their time here, P.O.D. released three albums – 1994’s Snuff The Punk, 1996’s Brown and 1997’s Payable On Death Live – via their own Rescue Records, funded by original drummer Wuv Bernardo’s father. Then, as now, the band made no secret of their Christian faith, and during that time they built up enough of a buzz to draw a tidy $100,000 offer from a Christian label. Life-changing money for four kids holding down day jobs, but they turned it down. 

“We’d been approached by a lot of indie Christian labels and stuff,” says Sonny, “but we never felt like that was our scene. We didn’t want to be a Christian band. We weren’t trying to be the poster child for Christian rock.”

“Nothing against those bands,” adds Marcos, “but it wasn’t what we were called to do.”

It’s time to head to the next stop, Tribal Clothing, the iconic San Diego streetwear brand whose fortunes are intertwined with those of P.O.D. “I’ll drive,” offers Marcos, as we pile into his truck, a dark grey pick-up with two decals on the rear window: a brown and gold decal of the state of California with the letters ‘SD’ in the middle (the colours are those of the local baseball team, the San Diego Padres), and an image of Iron Maiden’s Eddie. 

San Diego is a city of contrasts. Along with its chilled surf culture, it’s also a military stronghold, surrounded by battleships, fighter jet training bases and a massive armed forces population. Political divisions run deep, as do the cultural divisions across San Diego County, including the music scene. P.O.D. represented one corner of the city’s musical triangle. 

“The North was Blink-182,” says Marcos, “the East was [funk-edge punks] Sprung Monkey and we represented the South Bay.” 

P.O.D. are one of the few bands to get huge and stay in San Diego. We park on a side street of San Diego’s gritty East Village and pass through a retractable wrought iron gate into the courtyard of Tribal Streetwear, where a grinning, dreadlocked man with a spliff the size of a carrot greets the band with big hugs. 

“Tribal is a San Diego based streetwear brand,” explains Sonny, who is wearing an on-brand Tribal zip-up jacket today. “They’re huge. They’ve always been good to us, even as a local band coming up, and you’d see that Tribal logo on Cypress Hill and a lot of West Coast groups. You started seeing them on Korn and Limp Bizkit, but because we were homegrown, they were always throwing shirts our way and they always hooked us up, so we were always rocking Tribal.”

Indeed, P.O.D. returned the love via Tribal, the slamming hardcore rap track on their fourth album, 1999’s The Fundamental Elements Of Southtown. Inside Tribal, Beyoncé’s Texas Hold ’Em bumps through the PA. Every wall is arrayed with dazzling graffiti and street art. There’s a small stage, offices and a bar downstairs, while 15 different tattoo stalls are located upstairs, along with a DJ booth and founder Bobby Ruiz’s office. 

Sonny’s son Justice tags along and, using his iPhone, films the band giving shoutouts to the cities on their upcoming US tour. As Sonny films a promo, Marcos and Traa munch Cheetos, drink Cokes and make fart noises, accomplishing their goal of making Sonny laugh. 

Although P.O.D. pre-dated nu metal, they caught the updraught. Mashing up metal, punk, hip hop and reggae, The Fundamental Elements Of Southtown was their breakthrough record. The first P.O.D. album to be released on major label Atlantic, it went platinum in the US, selling more than a million copies.

“I don’t think we make a conscious effort to mix this or that genre,” says Marcos. “That’s just who P.O.D. is. When we start writing, these types of songs just kind of come out.” 

That success escalated with follow-up Satellite, a record that defied the longest of odds. It was released on September 11, 2001, the day of the deadly terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington DC. By rights, the album should have been dead in the water against that backdrop, but its underlying message of positivity connected with a nation in turmoil. 

“[Satellite’s first single] Alive was already out,” explains Sonny, “and it was heading to No.1 on radio and it was No.1 on MTV’s TRL [Total Request Live show], it was giving people hope. When 9/11 happened, that song just stood out. It gave people hope and, with all of our music, it doesn’t matter how heavy it is, we always want to be hopeful.” 

That sense of hope was evident in the album’s other marquee song, Youth Of The Nation. It was inspired by a school shooting in March 2001 in Santee, San Diego, in which 15-year-old Charles Andrew Williams killed two of his fellow students and wounded 13 more. P.O.D. were in a nearby studio at the time, writing songs for Satellite. 

“We were two blocks away from Santana High School when the shooting happened. All of a sudden we see ambulances and helicopters and we turned on the news, because there were no smartphones, and we see what’s going on.” 

Propelled by Alive and Youth Of The Nation, Satellite rose above the tragedy that fed into its creation, going on to sell more than three million copies in the US. Both songs remain central to their setlist to this day.

As we poke through t-shirts at the skate shop, a spirited debate erupts: where should we get tacos? Being from North County, Hammer’s input is roundly rejected. Eventually, the band settle on a place in the Gaslamp district, a few blocks away. We arrive at Taco Centro, a bright blue and white taqueria in the middle of the Gaslamp, where a girl behind a tall glass window lays out homemade tortillas on a grill and intoxicating spices arrest the senses. 

Marcos immediately takes point, stepping up to the register and taking everyone’s order. “I’m going with the ‘Mar y Tierra,’” he says as Hammer pulls up to the counter. “That’s the surf and turf. You won’t be disappointed.” 

We opt for the bean and cheese burrito. “Vegetarian, huh?” he correctly guesses. “They got nopal here – cactus. It’s really flavourful.” 

Sadly, cactus is a plant too far for Hammer. As the cashier rings us up, Marcos waves away our attempt to pay. He treats the whole group. One person who is conspicuously absent today is Wuv Bernardo, the band’s original drummer and co-founder, and Sonny’s cousin. 

According to P.O.D.’s Wikipedia page, he hasn’t been a member of the band since 2021. Raising the subject elicits a brief but heavy silence. “Wuv is not currently in the line-up and he may return or he may never return,” says Marcos, making no attempt to hide his sadness. “We’re still family, but we’re not currently working together.” 

They won’t be drawn any further on the matter (Wuv’s place on Veritas is taken by studio drummer Robin Diaz). Still, all three core members are understandably enthused by the new album. “Circles was written in a more of an alternative metal/poppy sense,” says Marcos, referring to their last album, released in 2018. “We made a decision to be more heavy rock on this.” 

Previous P.O.D. records have seen them collaborating with everyone from Hatebreed’s Jamey Jasta to Bad Brains frontman H.R.. They’ve hit the contact book again for Veritas. Lamb Of God’s Randy Blythe appears on opening track Drop, while Jinjer’s Tatiana Shmayluk guests on Afraid To Die. 

“Everybody’s like, ‘What does that mean?’” says Sonny of the latter song’s title. “Afraid To Die means that I’m standing up for myself and willing to die for what I believe in. And that’s true, but the next line actually says, ‘Not only am I not afraid to die, I’m not afraid to live.’ I’m not afraid of life. So it’s really more encouraging and trying to empower people.” 

Faith has been central to P.O.D. since the beginning. They wear their spirituality on their sleeves, infusing their songs with messages of hope and redemption without succumbing to the preachiness that sometimes characterises other bands who identify as Christian. It’s this delicate balance that has allowed them to reach a broad audience, appealing to both secular and religious audiences. Still, the ‘Christian band’ tag has sometimes been more hindrance than help over the last 30 years. 

“We were never Christian enough for the institution of Christians,” says Sonny, “but we were too Christian for the secular world. If someone’s interviewing me and they ask, ‘Do you believe in Jesus?’, I’ll say, ‘Of course!’ Because in my neighbourhood, that’s not a bad thing. That’s not a shameful thing. Dude, we’re a rock band! We love God and we love people. People just want a poster child, but you’ve gotta live your own life, man. We’re not choirboys.’’

Wrapping up for the day, we walk past Taco Centro again, where a Mexican family are eating on the patio outside. The father immediately clocks P.O.D. and runs over to shake their hands and ask for a photo with his family. Sonny, Marcos and Traa are happy to oblige – amid beaming smiles and booming laughter, photos are taken, fists are bumped and hugs dispensed. 

We turn to leave, heading up the block towards the cars before we realise that Sonny is MIA. Turning around, we see him back at Taco Centro, removing his jacket and draping it across the father’s shoulders. He whispers something to him and, before the man can get up, Sonny jogs back over to us. It’s proof of just how enmeshed San Diego is in P.O.D.’s DNA – and vice versa. 

This city made them, and in return they’ve been repping The Big SD around the world for more than 30 years. Home? Sure, but more than that. “This is where we built our character on all fronts,” says Marcos. “Culturally, spiritually and artistically. It’s part of a culture – the Hispanic culture. A lot of people around the world don’t understand it, but it’s part of day-to-day life. It’s part of the sound! How could we ever leave when that’s what we are?”

Veritas is out now via Mascot. 

All the way from its meteoric rise in the late 90s and early 2000s, nu metal continues to strum up mixed reactions from music fans. At its most hated, the genre is framed as an unfortunate footnote in musical history, but for many, it offers great nostalgia, marking a time where heavy music was at a peak in popularity and more accessible than ever. 

Heralded by a storm of bands who are still waving the flag for nu metal today on immensely successful tours (Korn, Limp Bizkit), nu metal has been ushered into the spotlight once again, helped by a swathe of scene newbies (Tetrarch, Wargasm, Tallah, Employed To Serve, Poppy, Nova Twins), channelling the genre's most recognisable characteristics of floor-filling, fiery riffs, high energy vocal hooks and rap and edm elements.

Canada-based metallers Kittie, who were one of the most promising bands to emerge in the nu metal era but unfortunately failed to reach greater success following lineup issues, label troubles and tragedy, have shared their thoughts on its renewed popularity, as well as why it might have been not taken seriously by some during its formative boom.

In a recent interview on the The Ex-Man Podcast hosted by Doc Coyle, guitarist Tara McLeod notes: "It just seems like every time there's a shift in music, everyone hates it at first. A big, popular shift, everyone has to hate it at first. 

"And I think with nu metal, it's like a simplified form of music, but that doesn't make it a lesser-than form of music. And I think that oftentimes it takes a little bit of growth and perhaps some years for some of the music fans to catch up and look back and realise, like, 'Wow, okay, that was super catchy. And actually writing those riffs and the hooks and the vocals, that's actually not simple.' They're, like, simplified; it's not simple."

Drummer Mercedes Lander adds: "Honestly, go and listen to any of [Limp Bizkit guitarist] Wes Borland's playing. That's not easy. Also, [Limp Bizkit drummer] John Otto, the GOAT. Have you ever watched John Otto play drums? He's amazing.

She continues: "I think a lot of people confuse busy playing with good music. 'Cause there's a lot of busy songs that I'm, like, 'This song sucks.' It doesn't have to be super busy or shreddy or whatever, it doesn't have to be like that to be good. 

"It's the same thing as I like to say — just 'cause you can play fast, it doesn't mean that you should… Giving yourself that space can provide you with so much more. Keeping your music kind of simplistic even, and giving yourself that space, you can do more vocally or whatever the case might be. Less is more sometimes."

In a recent interview with Metal Hammer, Kittie rejected the idea that the band's comeback was purposely launched in the wake of nu metal's renewed popularity. 

"We're not a nu metal band, and we never will be again," vocalist/guitarist Morgan Lander declared. "We're not trying to recapture something that is long gone for us. There might be a riff or an idea that harkens back to who we were in the past, but that is married with the more modern ideas of Kittie as well."

Kittie's new album, Fire, is due out on June 21 via Sumerian Records.

Watch the full The Ex-Man episode with Kittie below:

In 1999, Ontario, Canada-based nu metal four-piece Kittie put out their well-received debut album, Spit. Spearheaded by popular, bullish lead single Brackish, the album positioned the quartet as one of the most promising young bands of the era, going on to become certified Gold in the US with sales of over 600,000.

Sadly, Kittie would experience a mixed bag of a career from thereon in, with a combination of lineup issues, label troubles and brushes with tragedy (the band's bassist, Trish Doan, died in 2017 at the age of just 31) all stalling any further momentum. 

Earlier this year, however, Kittie announced that they had signed with Sumerian Records and would be releasing their first full-length studio album for 13 years. The band's latest single, Eyes Wide Open, is a crushing, grinding slab of groove metal that promises great things for their next chapter, and in a brand new interview with Metal Hammer, the band reveal that they feel the climate is finally right for them to step into the spotlight once again. 

“I just think that the world is ready for us now,” says frontwoman Morgan Lander. “A lot of the things that we were doing 25 years ago were still... I don’t want to say controversial, but they seemed so new. It definitely has a lot to do with a shift in thinking and acceptance and representation in the years since the very first time that Kittie came out. Sometimes it just takes the world a bit of time to catch up and appreciate those things.”

“I think the best way to describe it is we just sort of overstayed our welcome,” adds the guitarist/singer when discussing why Kittie's career ultimately petered out. “We were doing a lot of headlining shows, constantly touring, and never really seemed to gain much footing or interest.”

“There were some nights on some of those tours in the very last few years where 50 people would show up to a show,” she adds. “That’s a hard thing as an artist to grapple with. I do remember having conversations where it was like, ‘I don’t feel like I can do this anymore. I need to try new things.’”

Speaking of the new album, titled Fire and expected at some point later this year, Lander says that Eyes Wide Open is a good indication of what to expect, but notes that there'll be plenty more going on that fans can look forward to getting stuck into. 

“There’s a lot of variety,” she says. “I think the kind of variety that you will expect from Kittie. If you listen to the production of Eyes Wide Open, that kind of visceral, raw, but very modern sound is prevalent throughout all of the songs. The songwriting is definitely next level.”

Read more from Kittie's exclusive interview in the brand new issue of Metal Hammer, out now. 

It's one of the most instantly recognisable moments in all of metal and made David Draiman an instant icon of the nu metal era. Just over thirty seconds into the song that made Disturbed famous, 2000 floor-filler Down With The Sickness, the frontman lets loose a bizarre but unforgettable 'OOH-AH-AH-AH-AH' monkey noise that'd become synonymous with him, his band and the wonderful ludicrousness of the nu metal explosion in general.

In a new interview on The Jesea Lee Show, Draiman opens up on the spontaneous moment that gave birth to a legend, revealing that his Disturbed bandmates were dumbfounded the first time they heard the cry come out of the singer's mouth.

"It was just improvisational, man, you know," he explains. "The first time we ever started writing the song, at first, when we first came up with it, that first section where that first 'Ooh-ah-ah-ah-ah' began, was just a pause for dramatic effect. It was just dead space before the whole band kicked in, and that beat, the rhythm, that primal, tribal vibe that it had, I just, one time, improvisationally just tried it! And, literally, the guys stopped the song. They didn't know what I was doing. They all looked at each other, like, 'Is he OK?!' Like [I was having] maybe a seizure or something. They all looked at me like, 'What are you doing?' I'm like, 'I don't know! But just humour me, there's something to it.' And it stuck, and after all these years, I think my only fear is that when I am finally laid to rest, on my headstone it's gonna say, 'Here lies David Draiman, Ooh-ah-ah-ah-ah!'"

Draiman goes on to reveal that while the 'Ooh-ah-ah-ah-ah' noise was entirely of his own making, his willingness to experiment with his voice was very much inspired by some other heavyweight vocalists of the nu metal generation.

"All the little noises came after me being a part of Disturbed," he continues. "The rhythms. And there were so many people in the genre - Jonathan Davis in particular, who, ever since I heard that first Korn record, there are so many parts of his beatbox-ish kind of, gibberish rapping that he does, that were very inspirational to me. Him, Chino Moreno from the Deftones, their first couple of records were incredibly inspirational and seminal for me. Just understanding what more could be done with rhythm, and how the voice could end up becoming a rhythmic instrument in of itself. It really just helped me focus myself in that direction."

Down With The Sickness has amassed over 700 million streams on Spotify, while its parent album, The Sickness, released in March 2000, has been certified five times platinum in the United States for sales of over five million copies.

Watch Draiman's interview below.

As music trends come and go, we often find ourselves looking back on popular musical eras with either disdain or a heavy sense of nostalgia. When the rise of nu metal peaked in the late 90s, it saturated itself into the zeitgeist with such effect that for the first time, alternative music was...kind of cool. Following its eventual dip into semi-obscurity in the noughties, nu metal became out of fashion, but in recent years, its made its rightful return, with bands such as Limp Bizkit putting on massive tours and Las Vegas' Sick New World Festival drawing in fans by the thousands. Even newer, more modern bands are looking back to the genre for inspiration.

With nu metal back in business and Y2K fashion flying off the shelves (baggy pants and chains are a thing again, apparently), like most of us, we seek out the younger generations for guidance on what's popular, or at least, er, what's "down with the kids".  So, is nu metal actually cool again now? 

We're not entirely sure, but YouTube series REACT has tested a group of Gen Z youths on their knowledge in the genre, and to capture their thoughts on what they make of classic nu metal hits, including songs by Limp Bizkit, Korn, System Of A Down, Disturbed and more. 

Overall, while it seems that the group are split down the middle when it comes to their familiarity with the musical era, the songs are well-liked by most, with one girl even declaring that she'd like to pick up the guitar or go to a concert after hearing Disturbed's Down With The Sickness. 

It also appears that multiple of the listeners were already familiar with the songs due to internet memes; one Gen Z-er performs a Korn scat - a trend that found its way on TikTok last year, while another had recognised the iconic Down With The Sickness introduction also through memes posted online. Elsewhere, the host asks a pair of Gen Z-ers to describe what the name "Limp Bizkit" could mean. In response, they suggest it could be a "sad lumpy body part". A wonderful image, indeed. 

Songs included in the video include Linkin Park's In The End, Rage Against The Machine's Killing In The Name, Korn's Freak On A Leash, Limp Bizkit's Nookie, System Of A Down's Chop Suey and more. Check it out below:

Inter-band feuds were a major part of the metal landscape at the turn of the millennium. While Fred Durst threw stones at every musician who gave him a funny look, Slipknot and Mushroomhead were at each other’s throats and System Of A Down were being lambasted as “the shittiest band of all time” by Oasis. It was also reported during the genre’s dying days that even nu metal B-listers Sevendust and Coal Chamber were having a bit of a spat. That venom seeped into the public eye with the release of the ’Dust single Enemy, taken from the band’s 2003 record, Seasons.

Singer Lajon Witherspoon certainly sounded incensed. ‘Step up to me! You want to be a big-time player? It’s not to be!’ he spat, over thunderous riffing and imperious percussion. ‘Actin’ like a wise ass, I’ll fuck up your face and you’ll never look back!’ It didn’t take long before members of the metal press began hypothesising that those lyrics, written by drummer Morgan Rose, were targeting Coal Chamber frontman Dez Fafara. Morgan’s then-wife, Rayna Foss, had recently parted ways with Dez’s band, and the aftermath was rumoured to be acrimonious. However, talking to Hammer two decades years on from Enemy’s release, Lajon downplays the notion of a Sevendust/Coal Chamber shit-slinging match back in the day.

“I think that got taken out of context,” the frontman says. “People just ran with the whole Morgan and Rayna thing, and no one came out and said, ‘No, that’s not what it’s about!’ I think that [rivalry] was more just for the hype of it; the whole Dez thing was fun for the magazines.”

Since Enemy’s release, there have been conflicting statements over the feud. Although Lajon always kept his nose out of any public bear-poking, MTV reported that Morgan had some spiteful words for Dez in 2003. The drummer apparently stated that Enemy was at first called Pez, a derogatory nickname Morgan had for Coal Chamber’s leader.

“We called him that because I used to say, ‘I want to take this dude’s head and pull it back and rip his tongue out of his neck,’” he was quoted as saying. “He’s a horrible human being and he fucked my wife over real bad.”

Dez never retorted, however, commenting that he and Sevendust had always been friendly with each other. Morgan and Rayna’s daughter, Kayla, has since added that the mudslinging was the result of shoddy journalism.

“My dad and Dez are friends and have been for a long time,”she wrote in a 2022 Instagram post. Instead of being about Dez, Lajon explains that Enemy had more to say about Sevendust’s ambitions of conquering the musical landscape.

“That song was about the fact that we were going up against the whole world,” he says, “and it was for anyone who had an enemy or enemies and wanted to overcome.”

A testament to that world-beating manifesto, Sevendust were one of the few nu metal acts to hold their own as the genre slipped out of the mainstream in the early 2000s. Although their 2001 album, Animosity, saw them slump in the charts slightly (it reached No.28, down from the No.19 position of predecessor Home), they enjoyed several high-profile multimedia appearances. A clip of the band’s video for Waffle appeared in the Chris Rock movie Down To Earth that year, and in 2002 they went on The Late Show With David Letterman and entered into a partnership with pro-wrestling juggernaut WWE, covering the theme song of former world champion Chris Jericho for the company.

“It was such an exciting time for us,” Lajon remembers. “At the time that Enemy was being written, the band had so much excitement for our careers. It was the start of something that we thought was going to be very big.” Behind the scenes, though, the spectre of death loomed over Sevendust. Drowning Pool singer Dave Williams, a friend and former tourmate of the band, died as a result of cardiomyopathy on August 14, 2002. Then, on November 9, Lajon’s younger brother, Reginald, was shot and killed in Nashville, Tennessee, aged just 23. Sevendust were halfway across the United States in Minnesota that day.

“We were on tour with 30 Seconds To Mars opening for us,” Lajon says. “I remember, before my father called [to say that Reginald was killed], I couldn’t get out of bed that day. Something was going on, I knew it, but I didn’t know what it was. When my father told me what had happened to my brother, I couldn’t believe it, but he told me, ‘You do the show tonight, then you get on the plane and get here.’ I did three songs and couldn’t do anymore. I was rushed to the airport. I remember being on that plane, thinking, ‘Why couldn’t it have been me? Why did it have to be my baby brother?’”

Lajon and Reginald were extremely close. The singer had previously written the song Prayer, from Sevendust’s self-titled debut, about the pair praying together. The Animosity track Shine is about Reginald as well, and Lajon continues to dedicate the song to his late brother at live shows.

“I feel like his energy is still around us now,” he says. “I can continue his legacy by talking about him and never forgetting him.” Lajon denies that the ferocious lyrics of Enemy are actually targeted towards Reginald’s killers, explaining that they are meant to savage “bad people” in general. However, he acknowledges that the “shadow” of his brother and Dave’s deaths impacted the tone of the track. “It was very unfortunate the way that Dave passed away, and then my brother was executed,” he says. “So Enemy definitely touches base with things like that.”

When it came time to record, Enemy - along with the rest of its parent album, Seasons – was tracked with future Green Day and Pink producer Butch Walker in Ruby Red Studios, Atlanta. Lajon recalls that, off the back of Sevendust’s snowballing momentum, the production “was at a different level, a different scale”.

“I remember recording the last song on Seasons and this big, beautiful, white bus pulling up outside the studio to take us on tour,” he recalls. “It was the first time we had TVs in the bunks and we were like, ‘Oh my God! We’ve really made it now!’ We just knew that the future was bright.”

Enemy was released as the first single from Seasons and became Sevendust’s most successful single at the time, reaching No.10 in the US Mainstream Rock Tracks chart. In turn, Seasons became the band’s then-highest-charting album on its release on October 7, 2003, climbing to No.14 on the US Billboard 200. The single also continued Sevendust’s hot streak of mainstream support. WWE made the song the official theme tune of their September 2003 pay-per- view Unforgiven, before then using it in the marketing for the videogame SmackDown! Here Comes The Pain. Wrestler Chyna even had a starring role in the Enemy music video, portraying a bully character called Lu Lu who tries to fight a young, armless man.

“The director of the video [Adam Pollina] just came to us and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got the perfect thing: I have this little skit that I did with Chyna, the wrestler,’” Lajon explains. “Of course, we all loved wrestling back then – and the kid, the fighter, was also incredible.” He laughs: “That’s how you know the song didn’t have anything to do with Dez, because you’d have seen him getting beat up, too!”

Two decades on, Enemy has become a Sevendust mainstay, a song that seldom leaves their live sets. And even after all those years, Lajon still considers the song to be appropriate to his life today.

“[When I play Enemy] it conjures up emotions about the state the world is in right now: the people that think they know right from wrong but are just idiots,” the singer says. “I just turned 50 years old and I’ve realised there are a lot of people in my life

I never need to talk to again and I’ll be fucking perfectly fine.”

However, Lajon wants the track’s ultimate legacy to be that it helps empower his fans to stand up for themselves against whatever’s trying to keep them down.

“The nicest thing someone could say about Enemy is that it gave them the courage to stand up to a bully,” he says. “I’d hope that someone would say, ‘That song helped me be strong or pulled me out of a depression and let me know I can be something.’”

Originally printed in Metal Hammer #383

You know where you were when you first heard about Collision Course. Whether you first saw Chester Bennington and Jay-Z rapping together on MTV, or crammed into the backseat of your mate’s Ford Fiesta to blast Numb/Encore through its tinny speakers, the 2004 collaboration was the hot topic on everyone’s lips. True to its name, Collision Course was a head-on cultural clash of titanic proportions. 

Regardless of whether you were into hip-hop or metal, the news of the Collision Course union was unavoidable. When the world’s biggest rapper and the world’s leading rock band join forces, people are going to talk. And that’s no exaggeration: with seven number-one records under his belt, Jay-Z was hot shit, and Linkin Park had also sky-rocketed to global fame, 2003’s Meteora having topped charts globally, selling over 810,000 copies in the first week alone.

When MTV came a-knocking, asking Jay-Z to feature on the first episode of their new series Ultimate Mash-Ups, the rapper had only one artist in mind: Linkin Park. Co-frontman Mike Shinoda wasted no time proving that it was the right call.

“My first response back was to send music,” Mike later explained to Montreality. “He already had [2003’s] The Black Album acapella available, so I just grabbed his acapellas and my laptop… and I just threw together a few tracks and I sent those back.” 

MTV were floored, with Jay-Z simply responding with an “Oh, shit!” What no one had known was that Mike was a seasoned mash-up maestro: mash-ups had essentially been his gateway into production.

“I had been doing mash-ups for easily five, six years… That’s my shit. That’s what I do,” he told SiriusXM. “I was literally learning to make beats by taking samples of Nine Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins and Rage Against The Machine and putting Mobb Deep over the top of it and, like, a breakbeat.” 

Watching Chester and Jay-Z performing together for the initial Ultimate Mash-Ups, it’s clear that MTV would have never topped it. Opener Dirt Off Your Shoulders/Lying From You is immediately electric, the band and the rapper fluidly navigating their way through the Frankensteinian rap rock beast. Everything just works, be it a softer Linkin Park tune or girthy, frazzled basslines adding an extra bite to Jay-Z’s bars. The performance feels like the 2000s’ answer to the Run-DMC/Aerosmith Walk This Way collab: a combination that feels so obvious in retrospect, yet so incredibly groundbreaking at the time.

Mike was quickly reluctant to let such sonic gold stop at just one MTV special. Speaking to Fuse, Chester insisted that Collision Course, the EP Linkin Park and Jay-Z released together in 2004, would never have been what it was “if it wasn’t for Mike”. Mike made it his mission to blow any potential future Ultimate Mash-Ups tandems out the water.

“We were all saying, ‘We’re gonna make this something they can never follow up,’” Mike said.

Interestingly, the Ultimate Mash-Ups show calls each track X Vs Y, rather than the eventual X/Y titles that the Collision Course EP would opt for. That different perspective is arguably what led to Linkin Park and Jay-Z interacting so successfully: it was never a battle to them. From Jigga What/Faint to the Grammy-winning Numb/Encore, every track felt like it elevated each artist’s sound, culminating in something entirely unique.

Speaking to Aftonbladet, Jay-Z explained the collaborators’ approach to the project: “I’m not trying to be Linkin Park. I’m not trying to be Jay Z. We’re just here to bring [our respective talents] to the table… and we have fun with it.”

The pair’s Collision Course would continue to thrive through multiple shows, including an appearance at 2005’s Live 8 extravaganza, a monumental Grammys performance of Numb/Encore featuring Sir Paul McCartney in 2006 and their historic double-header at Milton Keynes Bowl in 2008, adding yet another exciting new texture into the innovative rap rock sound. 

While it had its naysayers back in the day – NME begged, “Please god, someone make it stop” – when reflecting on Collision Course 20 years on, there’s no denying the EP was a groundbreaking moment for nu metal. The Guardian’s one-star review claimed that “on a musical level, nothing works”, yet the sonics of Collision Course continue to flourish in rap rock and metal circles to this day. The EP continues to lure fans in, even going double platinum in 2017.

Regardless of your stance, there’s no denying that Collision Course was truly lightning in a bottle. While modern artists certainly knock out unconventional collabs, like Ed Sheeran and Bring Me The Horizon, never again have two such high-profile, global artists pulled off a collaboration on Collision Course’s scale. Like most infamous music landmarks of the early 2000s, we have MTV to thank for the collab, but the days of MTV being top-dog are long gone.

With a lack of a truly centralised music media, it’s uncertain whether anything will happen like this again. So let’s raise a toast to this divisive yet adored EP – and admit that Points Of Authority/99 Problems/One Step Closer goes so, undeniably hard.

Baggy jeans. Wallet chains. Spiky hair. One-hit wonders. The nu metal era is (in)famous for many things, and bizarre covers of classic hits is most certainly one of them. In fact, there was a time in the late 90s where you could barely move for nu'd-up versions of vintage hits, be it Limp Bizkit taking on George Michael, Machine Head doffing their cap to The Police or Dope honouring Dead Or Alive. Some of those worked a treat; others...well...not so much.

Still, nu metal has certainly provided some top-tier covers over the years, from turning danceable pop bangers into pure mosh fodder to jumping on a classic power ballad to take their career to greater heights than ever. With that in mind, here are the 10 finest cover songs to ever come from one of metal's most storied sub-genres.

Limp Bizkit - Faith (George Michael)

Love it or hate it, you just can't deny it: Limp Bizkit's take on Faith is one of the most absurd, obnoxious and enduring metal covers of all time, still regularly causing mayhem at Bizkit shows over 25 years since its release and remaining a stalwart metal club night anthem. It's not clever, but it is most definitely big, and the breakdown following that 'Get the fuck up!' still kicks harder than a mule.

Korn - Word Up! (Cameo)

Everyone from Mel B and Little Mix to Scottish hard rock favourites Gun has tackled Cameo's trademark hit over the years, but there's just something about Korn's fundamental sense of groove and propulsion that elevates their fun-as-hell cover above all others. The video, however, remains absolute dogshit. Pun very much intended. 

Deftones - No Ordinary Love (Sade)

"She’s got a beautiful voice," Deftones frontman Chino Moreno said of Sade when discussing this world class cover of her 1992 single, which appeared as a b-side on the Sacremento band's White Pony-era single Change (In the House of Flies). Featuring a guest appearance from Jonah Matranga, it's a prime example of taking a great song, funnelling it through your own style and coming up with something fresh and interesting.

Alien Ant Farm - Smooth Criminal (Michael Jackson)

Many bands from the nu metal era became household names for a second, but few did it as emphatically as Alien Ant Farm when they dropped this ridiculous yet irrepressible cover of one of Michael Jackson's most iconic songs. Accompanied by a video that was somehow even more daft than the cover itself, it was a top ten hit in 11 countries worldwide, sitting atop the Australian charts for eight weeks. Look, it was a weird time. 

Disturbed - The Sound Of Silence (Simon & Garfunkel)

The nu metal band with the monkey noises? Doing The Sound Of Silence?! It was a thought that would have had metal elitists and Simon & Garfunkel diehards alike scoffing, but Disturbed's version was so powerful that in terms of sheer reach and impact, it has since vastly eclipsed the original for an entire generation of music fans. Think that's just hyperbole? The video closing in on a billion views would suggest otherwise.

Wargasm - Lapdance (N.E.R.D.)

One of the many younger bands drawing influence from nu metal's heyday, London-based duo Wargasm are becoming one of the most talked-about acts in the modern British metal scene. It was their riotous cover of N.E.R.D.'s swaggering hip hop classic Lapdance, however, that first put them on many radars. And understandably so: it's a proper rager.

System Of A Down - Snowblind (Black Sabbath)

Originally released on the second of two Nativity In Black albums that united a host of metal heavyweights in the name of paying homage to the band that started it all, System Of A Down's typically zany version of Snowblind was a major highlight of a decidedly mixed bag. Flitting effortlessly from bouncy nu metal stomp to delicate balladry to pure heavy metal thunder, it only just edges out System's similarly ace cover of Berlin's Metro. 

Fear Factory - Cars (Gary Numan)

Dropping as Fear Factory were rolling into their full-on nu metal era, this was very much an 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it!' calibre of cover; the LA industrialists took the approach of not fucking too much with a perfect formula to the nth degree by actually getting Gary Numan himself in to cameo on their well-observed cover of his 1979 debut single, Cars. So basically, this is just Cars as you know it, but a little heavier. Pretty solid sell, right?

Linkin Park - Rolling In The Deep (Adele)

A one-off live cover that has gone down in Linkin Park legend, the megaweight six-piece delighted fans with a stirring, surprise rendition of Adele's monster 2010 hit at an intimate show at the Camden Roundhouse in London in 2011. It could have been a spectacular swing-and-a-miss; instead, it was a beautifully realised cover that once again underlined why Chester Bennington was one of his generation's finest vocalists.

Orgy - Blue Monday

That this is comfortably Orgy's most famous contribution to the lore of nu metal says everything about how beloved their stomping redo of Blue Order's trademark smash hit really is. Bolstered by a classically late-90s video, it landed Orgy major tours, serious radio airplay and the guarantee of filling murky goth club dancefloors forever more. Fair play, lads. 

At the time, it would not have been rash to assume that Get Some, Snot’s riotous 1997 debut album, had signalled the arrival of nu metal’s next big thing. Bristling with the bare-knuckled pugnacity of frontman Lynn Strait, its enthralling blend of funk, nu metal and hardcore breathed renewed vitality into the era’s generic alt-rock stagnancy. A vast and auspicious career opened wide before them, but 25-plus years later, Get Some stands as both a debut and a swan song: Snot’s meteoric ascent was cut tragically short with Lynn’s death in 1998 along a nasty stretch of Southern California highway.

These days, we take it for granted that a new album can reach millions of people instantly thanks to Spotify, YouTube and social media. But, in the mid-90s, the internet remained a remote and exotic vista for many fans. Word-of-mouth was a slow-burning process sparked by mainstream radio exposure, relentless touring and shit-tons of tape-trading among fans.

This makes Snot’s ascent all the more remarkable. In just three short years, the band would form, score a major label deal, release a debut and land on one of the biggest tours of the 90s. That was as close to overnight success as you got back then. And at the centre of it all was Lynn Strait, a whirlwind of pure energy, exuding equal parts talent, charisma and menace.

“I didn’t realise until later how talented Lynn was,” recalls producer Ross Robinson, who produced nu metal’s big guns Korn, Slipknot and Limp Bizkit. “I just thought everybody was that good. I hear it now in other places. Corey Taylor on the first Slipknot record did something that really reminded me of Lynn. He was so unique that when he just did his thing, he really stuck out.”

But Lynn wasn’t without his demons. By the age of 27, he had already spiralled into addiction, and notched up a prodigious amount of jail time for offences ranging from weapons violations, to assaulting a police officer, to robbery. And yet in the roguish tradition of original AC/DC frontman Bon Scott, he could enrapture a room with his stupidly infectious charm. He always made time for friends, and he was ever-shadowed by his beloved boxer, Dobbs, whose furry visage graces Get Some’s cover.

“On one level, he was a criminal,” remembers Snot guitarist Sonny Mayo. “On the other level, he’d love you more passionately than you’d ever been loved. He was somewhere in the middle of those extremes.”

Lynn and guitarist Mikey Doling formed Snot in 1995 in Santa Barbara, a sleepy, seaside hamlet in California known for its sun-drenched beaches and ultra-chill vibes. Through mutual friends, they summoned guitarist Sonny Mayo and bassist John Fahnestock from the east coast and the four men quickly congealed around a love of jamming and the libertine pleasures of rock’n’roll. When drummer Jamie Miller arrived in 1996, the line-up was complete.

“We basically started the scene in Santa Barbara,” says Sonny. “We started playing shows down on State Street and there were skaters, surfers, metalheads and every other token 90s, dreadlocked, hacky-sack-kicking motherfucker showing up. We got it all going.”

With a sweaty, roof-destroying live show, Snot were soon packing clubs on LA’s Sunset Strip, pioneering a vibrant new scene with bands such as Coal Chamber, Incubus and System Of A Down. On the strength of these gigs, Snot scored a major label deal with Geffen in 1996. For the five musicians, their dreams were drawing into focus with head-spinning acceleration.

“I had never met Lynn Strait until I arrived in Santa Barbara,” remembers Sonny. “Fourteen months later we were signed to Geffen, and literally two years to the day that I arrived in Santa Barbara, our one and only album was released – on May 27, 1997.”

Critics weren’t initially sure how to assess Get Some. There were so many styles at play that it was impossible to file under any one genre. It sounded like Pantera and Sublime smoking weed in the garage while cranking 80s So-Cal punk pioneers Descendents. Lyrically, Lynn dragged his real-life experiences with prison, crime and drugs out from the corners of his psyche and laid them bare. He even wrote some songs, including Stoopid, from his jail cell. Meanwhile, their shows kept getting bigger as their rabid new fanbase kept pace.

Snot’s upward trajectory continued when they earned a slot on 1998’s Ozzfest tour. That July, at a show in Mansfield, Massachusetts, Lynn popped up naked onstage during Limp Bizkit’s set, reportedly on a dare from Fred Durst, copping a high-profile arrest for indecent exposure. It hardly slowed them down. By the autumn of that year, Snot had amassed 10 tracks of new material for their sophomore outing. Geffen also sent the band into the studio with Ross Robinson to re-record one track, The Box, with new vocals, for a more radio-friendly vibe.

“When Ross came into the studio, he said, ‘We can do that if you want to. Or we could record a new song,’” recalls Sonny. “We were all, ‘Yeah, let’s write a new song!’ So we wrote this song called Absent, which turned out to be the final song ever recorded by the five original members of Snot.”

On the afternoon of December 11, 1998, with Dobbs in the backseat, Lynn Strait cut across the southbound lane of coastal Highway 101 to make a left turn and was immediately t-boned by a driver heading south. Both Lynn and Dobbs died instantly.

“Are you sitting down?” With those words, Mikey called Sonny and steeled him for the news. Sonny recalls, “Mikey just said, ‘He’s gone, bro,’ and I knew exactly what he was talking about. Mikey told me what happened and I knew the exact spot. There’s a part on the 101 freeway where you used to have to cross southbound traffic to go north. They have since closed it off and you have to take another on-ramp that’s way safer – no one will die there again.”

Any notion that Snot might carry on was immediately squashed by Mikey, who said, “We can’t go on without Lynn. It’s just bullshit when bands do that.” As a tribute to their beloved frontman, the band released Snot’s unfinished songs in 2000 as Strait Up, with lyrics and vocals supplied by rock and metal heavyweights including Corey Taylor, Fred Durst, Max Cavalera, Serj Tankian and Dez Fafara. They later released Alive, a 1998 performance at The Palace in Hollywood, in 2002, featuring the band at the top of their game and including their final recorded song, Absent. Despite Mikey’s initial resistance, they’ve since played reunion shows with vocalists Tommy Vext and later Carl Bensley, but there’s no indication that they’ll ever try to pick up where they left off in 1998 by recording a new studio album.

Had Lynn turned off the freeway two seconds earlier or later, Snot might well have become the next Korn or, more likely, the next Faith No More. Sonny won’t even speculate on what might have been.

“I don’t know,” he says. “If you’d asked me 10 years ago, I might have had an answer. Now I just look back in a state of ultimate wonder.”

To Ross Robinson, Snot’s legacy stretches beyond their music and Lynn’s untimely passing. “They were just the best dudes,” he says. “I couldn’t imagine a sweeter bunch of guys. If you’re going to leave something behind, that’s way better than any level of success. As a band you can be just awful and still have lots of success, but who are you? What do you stand for? But Snot, they were truly great.”

Nu metal had been threatening to return for years. Limp Bizkit’s 2009 reunion was a catalyst, spawning a huge wave of nostalgia. Over the following decade, bands such as Cane Hill, Ocean Grove, Tetrarch and Tallah began to emerge, while well-known metalcore acts like Of Mice & Men and Stray From The Path turned to the often-reviled music of their youth. 

The genre that dared not speak its name huffed and puffed in the background, but it was in 2023 that it truly broke again. The Sick New World Festival in Las Vegas was a pivotal moment, the line-up reading like a Who’s Who of OG Nu Metal: Korn, System Of A Down, Incubus, Evanescence, Papa Roach. 

“There’s definitely a resurgence of it,” said Kittie’s Morgan Lander, whose band also played. “It didn’t really go away… it just took a bunch of kids whose parents grew up listening to that music to get old enough to like it.” 

While the festival did attract Gen Xers and elder millennials who’d been there the first time round, it also brought hordes of teens and 20-somethings, often watching bands who’d peaked before they were born. 

Social media, and especially TikTok, has played a major role in this Nu Metal 2.0 resurgence. Kriss Krypt from Toronto is 19 and has 90K followers. Her TikTok bio declares that ‘nu metal isn’t a phase, it’s a lifestyle’. 

“TikTok is incredibly important for fandoms because it is a space to connect with likeminded individuals,” she says. “Nu metal content that’s posted is usually relatable, which makes people feel a part of a community. I’m so lucky to have been able to find a community of nu metal-loving mall goths online.” 

Mad Kelly agrees: “TikTok is a very strange place but it gets everything out there that you don’t see anywhere else, especially nu metal,” he says. 

The Floridian multi-instrumentalist is one of a new breed of nu metal-influenced artists using social media and home recording tech to create and connect without the lumbering mechanisms of the recording industry getting in the way. 

“You’ve got to move on with the best genre in the world. Check out people like Deijuvhs and Kim Dracula. It isn’t just hip hop and metal mixed together, with nu metal you can literally add anything.” 

And this rush of fresh blood and ideas is vital if a nu metal resurgence is to be anything other than vicarious nostalgia. In the UK, the likes of Wargasm are also mixing elements of nu metal with different ingredients, making something new and exciting – and winning the approval of Fred Durst in the process. 

Others like the masked Blackgold are more overt in their influences, and scene daddies like Limp Bizkit and Korn still loom large. So is nu metal in 2023 an exercise in nostalgia, an ironic trend or something genuinely inspiring? Probably a mix of all three… 

“It’s funny because it was such a hated scene back in the day,” Mad Kelly reflects. “Then it became cool and now it’s already coming back to being hated again. But that’s what gives it its power and propels it for a lot of people.”

The second Sick New World is due to take place April 27 2024. For the full line-up and tickets, visit the official website. 

If the best new music tends to catch you unawares, hearing metallic hip hop act UnityTX for the first time is like opening the door to a surprise party and getting a party popper to the face. The band’s mix of rap, hardcore, industrial and nu metal allows them to blend earworm catchiness and effortless groove with juddering, hip-stomping heaviness to exhilarating effect. Having honed their craft for the best part of a decade and lit up stages alongside the likes of Silverstein, Deez Nuts and The Acacia Strain, they’re now preparing to take on the world - and make a positive change while they do it.

“My whole motive was to open the door for kids who look like me,” says UnityTX frontman Jay Webster. “It’s alienating to be in a circle of people who claim to be outcasts but don’t accept you being there. And once you speak out on things like this, you start to get more naysayers - people are like, ‘Why does it have to be about colour?’ Well, because wherever you look there are no Black or Hispanic people!”

Jay’s chilled, philosophical demeanour stands in marked contrast to his band’s latest LP, Ferality, where his nailgun flow punches through the heaviness with ruthless precision. He admits the mixture of hip hop and heavy music has always fascinated him, ever since he first heard nu metal via Linkin Park in the early 2000s, which in turn lead him to the likes of System Of A Down and P.O.D.

“It made me feel like I could like hip hop and rock,” he says. “I could rap like [P.O.D.’s] Sonny Sandoval – one of my favourite songs was Youth Of The Nation because it was telling the story about kids who were from a not-so-good neighbourhood who went through struggles. That song gave kids like me a reason to exist in this space.”

Beyond onstage representation, Jay also highlights how ticket prices can be a serious barrier to participation and diversification - something that clearly strikes a chord given his own struggles with homelessness. “You get the people who are putting on shows asking an arm and a leg for tickets,” he sighs. “A lot of kids who don’t have shit in life might like this music but can’t access those shows.”

But if lack of funds can be a hindrance for artists and audiences alike, it’s also given Jay a hunger to push through, succeed and engage with communities who’ve traditionally been shut out.

“We were playing house shows and people’s basements,” he says of one of UnityTX’s earliest tours. “I hold onto that memory so dearly because it showed what the true culture is, especially for us kids from the grit who don’t have shit to our names. We were out there just fucking playing and having the time of our lives.”

Jay’s mix of hard-earned swagger and quiet inward focus is immediately engaging, and reflects the sheer ambition and thought that’s gone into his band’s sound, a fresh presentation of familiar elements that makes them kindred spirits with the likes of Zulu, Nova Twins and indie rockers Mint Green. These bands are mapping out their own terrain – Jay going so far as to suggest that we’re now witnessing an exciting “hybrid era” of genre- splicing and experimentation.

“It shows growth,” he says of the way these artists are blowing up. “I like the fact that you have these bands popping in a scene that doesn’t remind people of legacy bands. I don’t want to just work with metal artists. I’d like to work with EDM artists, rap producers...I’ve always wanted to work with Dr. Dre and Trent Reznor – my biggest influences.”

Hearing Jay speak, you get the clear sense that he knows his mind, his art, and where he wants UnityTX to take him. So for all this admirable confidence and ambition, it’s surprising to learn that Ferality was born of stress and uncertainty.

“When I first went into the studio with [producer, Andrew] Wade, I only had one song written and I didn’t think it was expressive enough,” he says. “I wrote [2019 album] MADBOY when I was homeless and going through the worst time of my life. But when it came to Ferality, I was dealing with a lot of stress. I felt like everyone was putting pressure on me, that I was constantly being pushed and expected to deliver with the snap of a finger. I felt like I was going more and more feral, man - I was so amped up all the time that I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs.”

That sense of bottled-up tension – and its subsequent release – is palpable, and doubtless helped make Ferality as compelling as it ultimately is. Thankfully, though, it seems Jay’s now found some much-needed balance.

“I’ve slowed down and learned how to appreciate the little things,” he says. “Before, I was always mad at the world. Now it’s all about finding appreciation for everything - for the universe, for life, for existence, for yourself. Even for the people who talk shit, because everyone serves a purpose at the end of the day. I’m just a kid from Dallas who started writing music at the back of my grandmother’s house, and I’ve gone around the world with it.”

The Smith family have been all over the news recently. Have you noticed? Since Will slapped the saliva out of Chris Rock’s mouth on worldwide television in 2022, he and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith – a comment about whom inspired the whole fracas – have been cross-examined by every pundit and armchair detective in the land. There’s one thing that seems to not be mentioned in this whole multimedia firestorm, however: for a brief stint in the mid-2000s, Jada fronted a nu metal band.

Wicked Wisdom, as this outfit were called, existed from 2002 to 2006. And, although now they’re an oft-forgotten curiosity in the history of music, back in the day they were the industry’s biggest darlings. They released their debut album in 2004 and followed it by touring with Britney Spears and taking slots on the two biggest rock festivals on either side of the Atlantic: Download and Ozzfest. Their second album, 2006’s Wicked Wisdom, was executive-produced by Will Smith himself and promoted by a stint on the road with Sevendust. But then… nothing.

According to interviews Jada gave about Wicked Wisdom, the Nutty Professor and Matrix sequels star is a lifelong fan of heavy music. “I listened to all kinds of metal as a kid,” she told MTV in January 2006. “Metallica, Guns ’N’ Roses… I would always look at Axl Rose and say, ‘Why aren’t there any chicks out there doing this now?’ I always wanted an opportunity to get out there and rock out.”

Jada had connections in the music industry long before she decided to grab a mic and scream out some metal. Of course, Will was a rapper up until 2005, but before their marriage she’d had a close friendship with Tupac Shakur in the early 1990s. So, when the actor decided to perform on heavy music’s stages, she was easily able to make some phone calls and corral a lineup. Guitarist Pocket Honore became her main collaborator, with the aforementioned MTV interview describing him as “the Zakk Wylde to her Ozzy”.

When Wicked Wisdom released their debut album, My Story, in 2004 then embarked straight on the Britney tour, their music was less metal than soul, hip-hop and rock ’n’ roll. It was playing live shows that organically ramped up the band’s sonic aggression, with Jada later commenting, “It just started getting heavier and heavier, and that’s when it clicked for us.”

The next year, Wicked Wisdom’s metal credentials were seriously amplified by the band getting on the radar of Sharon Osbourne. As Will Smith recalled in his autobiography Will, the reality TV star, manager and wife of Ozzy Osbourne caught the band live and decided to add them to the 2005 Ozzfest lineup.

“Ozzfest is the least African American event outside of that broom-and-big-ass-hockey-puck thing they do at the Olympics,” Will wrote in his book (via Metal Hammer). “‘Babe, are you sure you don’t wanna do some R and B?’ I asked softly, but I meant it hard. ‘[Metal] is the music I feel,’ Jada responded softly, but she meant it hard. So we packed up our children and headed down the black brick road to the land of Ozz.”

The 2005 Ozzfest run also brought Wicked Wisdom across the pond, as that year’s Download was billed as a clash of the titans that united the two rock festival monoliths. The band capitalised on the attention they’d amassed on those stages in February 2006, when they released their self-titled album. Reviews were moderately positive: Blabbermouth wrote, “Pinkett Smith does a convincing job with the aggressive vocals and her clean singing may not be stellar, but it is heartfelt and competent.” And, today, that album is the last remnant of Wicked Wisdom’s existence, as it’s their only music on Spotify.

After a supporting tour with Sevendust, Wicked Wisdom vanished. It’s been reported since that the reasoning was Jada wanting to spend more time with her family. However – with her being a successful actor and producer, and Wicked Wisdom then being two albums deep and not even touching the US Billboard 200 – commercial concerns were likely a pretty strong factor as well.

Today, Wicked Wisdom persist only in the minds of a persistent few, with their biggest song Bleed All Over Me not even having 500,000 Spotify streams. Jada’s daughter Willow Smith performed that track live with the instrumentalists of the band in 2021, giving them one last gasp of relevance, but don’t be surprised if that’s the last we ever hear of this short-lived nu metal experiment.

Poppy has come a long way. The singer, real name, Moriah Pereira, kickstarted her career by uploading mildly creepy, pastel-hued videos to YouTube in 2014 that were more avant-garde art project than anything else. Quickly, she amassed a huge following who watched in the millions as she wordlessly ate cotton candy and conversed with mannequins and plants, studying the surreal clips for hints of hidden deeper meaning.

Since then, she’s made the difficult jump from YouTube persona to genuine Gen Z star, establishing herself as a high-concept artist who is impossible to pin down, and shape-shifting between myriad styles, from bubble-gum pop, to 90’s alt rock, fully embracing metal on 2020’s, I Disagree. Zig finds her immersed in industrial metal and dark electronica, pushing buttons from the offset. “This is the dress I want to be buried in,” she murmurs on Church Outfit, over the kind of throbbing, aggro beat you would expect from industrial-noise veterans HEALTH, her voice rising to a banshee scream. It’s a rager of an opener, although Poppy’s genre excavations are never one-note. On Hard, her voice is angelic, floating over a witchy, skittering beat. 1s 0s could be a Rina Sawayama track. Zig sounds like the matrix glitching to 3Teeth, punctuated by sharp stabs of nu metal rage. Closer, Prove It, is wonderfully unhinged, Poppy intoning “I am the blood and the guts spilling over the page” as she boomerangs between a hardcore beat and sweet moments of contemplation.

There’s a lot of ground covered here, but Zig never feels random or messy. Poppy has said that she views albums as “timestamps” of her life and for that reason, her genre-bending feels less like an artist following trends, still searching for their sound, more an avid consumer of art, exploring her influences and making music by her own rules.

Evanescence have released a special demo version of their legendary breakthrough hit Bring Me To Life - with one major part of the song as we know and love it missing entirely. Unveiled as part of a blockbuster reissue that is celebrating the band's debut album, Fallen, turning 20 this year, the previously unheard version of Bring Me To Life was put to tape in 2002, and offers fans a chance to hear close to what the finished song may have sounded like had it never featured the contributions of 12 Stones frontman Paul McCoy.

McCoy's barks during the song's chorus are nowhere to be found here, while his infamous rap that was added to the song's final bridge is also AWOL, suggesting this version of Bring Me To Life was recorded before McCoy had been tapped up to record his parts. Instead, where his rap would eventually sit, there's an instrumental segment featuring a guitar solo from Evanescence's then-guitarist Ben Moody. Alongside some subtle, glitchy electronic elements that were seemingly scrubbed from the final version, it makes for a decidedly different listening experience than the version of Bring Me To Life that would make Evanescence one of the hottest bands on Planet Earth.

Listen to the 2002 demo version of Bring Me To Life below.

Evanescence frontwoman Amy Lee has spoken at length about the label interference that led to McCoy's rap being added to the song. With a view to appealing to the still considerable (and male-dominated) nu metal market, the label ultimately won out, much to Lee's chagrin, leaving the segment with something of an awkward legacy. 

"That part, that sound, that's not my style," Lee told Metal Hammer earlier this year. "That's why it was such a difficult pill to swallow, even on one song. But we won because we didn't have to change our whole sound.” 

Lee also noted that Evanescence rarely perform the rap segment of Bring Me To Life live, stating that the band "stopped performing it a long time ago. We never really did perform it. When we're on tour and we have somebody that fits into that spot, they jump up on the song. We were on tour with P.O.D and we had Sonny [Sandoval, vocalist] get up a few times. And obviously, if we're ever in the same town as Paul [McCoy], we will have him come up, because it's fun and it's cool and nostalgic."

Craft Recordings' lush Fallen reissues will come in 2-LP, 2-CD, and digital formats, with a host of bonus tracks, exclusive photos and artwork and remastered audio. It lands on November 17.

As one of Judas Priest’s dual guitarists, K.K. Downing was a key part of the fabric of heavy metal for more than 40 years. But over a decade since his departure from that band, he’s back with KK’s Priest, reuniting with ex-Priest vocalist Tim ‘Ripper’ Owens to continue his epic legacy. 

With a second album on the horizon and tour dates later this year, we flooded him with your questions, which he answered with an instinctive honesty, thoughtfulness and respect (yes, even the one about custard creams). 

What can you do in your new group that you couldn’t with Judas Priest?
Aidan Rufus, Facebook 

“I can call the shots! Ha ha! I’m not looking to do anything particularly different because with my heritage, my legacy and everything that I am, a leopard can’t change his spots. I just want to continue doing what I’ve always done. We got the Judas Priest brand up to a place where it can never be overthrown – it’s etched in stone. So yeah, I’ve got a mountain to climb, but as long as I enjoy it, and the music and performances are strong, there’s no reason why the two bands can’t coexist happily, like an old married couple!” 

How does it feel starting again after such a long career?
Cam Savage, Facebook 

“Good question! Did I ever think it’d get to this? Probably not. I was always a bit reluctant, but in 2020 I thought to myself, ‘Winter’s coming, can I write an album?’ I sat down to do it and within four or five weeks it was all mapped out, and I was very pleased with how prolific I could be. That was the main thing: I didn’t want to embarrass myself, put a band together then find I couldn’t come up with anything. But I surprised myself, and that gave me the confidence to put a band together.” 

If you could pick three bands to play KK’s Steel Mill [a venue K.K. runs in Wolverhampton] that haven’t played before, which bands would you pick? Chris Stewart, Facebook 

“Wishbone Ash are a big one. I’m delighted to say that they’re coming to the Mill, but it would be nice for them to reform with Ted [Turner] and Laurie [Wisefield] and have three guitarists… imagine that! I was such a heavy little monster that in the early days Wishbone weren’t heavy enough for me. But I did think if [Judas Priest] had two guitarists who could both write and play lead and rhythm, maybe we could do a heavy version, and that’s the way it went. Scorpions would also be great. Judas Priest, there’s another one! Why not? You never know!” 

What is your favourite V guitar?
Killer Kobra, Twitter 

“I love them all, but for me the epitome was the 1967 Gibson Flying V, because the lines, the cut and the headstock was a bit sharper. To me the ’67 was the most beautiful shape. Brian Jones, Dave Davies, Jimi Hendrix, Andy Powell, the Schenkers, they all had one!” 

Who is the loudest band you’ve ever heard live?
Doug McClung, Facebook 

“When we played with AC/DC on the Highway To Hell tour, in an ice hockey stadium in Finland, I went down the front to watch them and honestly, my kidneys were jumping up to my liver and getting entwined with my pancreas. It was brutal, man!” 

What’s the oddest thing a fan has asked you to autograph?
Christopher J. Caron, Facebook 

“Not one but two newborn babies! There are photos on the internet floating around. We’re all sat there, people are lining up with stuff to sign, and there’s these two newborns! The parent of the babies was happy for us to actually sign them, of course we had to back off at that point, that’s potentially a lawsuit! So we signed the babies’ clothes instead. Other than that, there’s a lot of body parts we won’t get into…”

What’s your favourite onstage memory to date?
Rafe Wilde, Facebook 

“Supporting Led Zeppelin at Oakland Coliseum in 1977, looking out at 110,000 people! There’s been an awful lot since, though. I mean, Live Aid [in 1985]… A couple of us went onstage for the finale; Harry Belafonte was there, Tina Turner, Mick Jagger… everybody was there!” 

Have you ever broken the law?
Peter McCormack Wixey, Facebook 

“I had a parking fine a few days ago! I was a bit of a delinquent as a lad, I went through that phase of wanting a few things that everybody else had but you didn’t, and weren’t likely to get unless you rifled [stole] them… It was a bit naughty, but luckily I found music and it kept me on the straight and narrow.” 

How did you feel about nu metal in the 90s?
Adrian Hall, email 

“I wasn’t a big fan. Glenn [Tipton, Judas Priest guitarist] liked it. He had a son who was just that age at that time, and I think Glenn was playing the role of the cool young dad in tune with the kids, not succumbing to ‘old fart syndrome’!” 

Will KK’s Priest play songs from Demolition and Jugulator live?
Constantino Darren, Facebook 

“We’ve got one song in the set from Jugulator, and we’re warming up to do festivals, so… We’ve been a bit cautious not to dig too deep into the history books, but hopefully we’ve got a good enjoyable setlist for even the uninitiated. When we play our own shows in October, I could bring songs back from [Judas Priest’s 1974 debut] Rocka Rolla, I could do anything, as the fans will be there for us.” 

Did you always hope to work with Ripper again?
Jeffrey Peacock, email 

“Yes, I’m hoping we can create something here where Ripper finds a good home. I believe that when he sings this material, he’s at his best. His voice can cover anything, but our stuff is a little paced out so he can get the best out of the lyrics and the notes.” 

Custard creams or milk chocolate digestives?
Andrew’s Feeder, Facebook 

“Chocolate digestives. Those custard creams have a shelf life that lasts a lifetime, they were always a bit odd!” 

Were you offered to rejoin Priest after the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame?
Joshua Leary, Facebook 

“No.” 

Hammer: Would you ever play with them again? 

“No. Before I started KK’s Priest, I asked if they’d consider me stepping back into my rightful place, because at one point they announced they were going out as a four-piece. I was expecting to be back in the band when there was an opening, or at least to be asked. But Glenn and Ian [Hill, bassist] wrote through their lawyers saying a flat no, which made no sense, as I was there first. And Rob [Halford] left for 11 years so how does he have the right to say ‘I won’t consider you re-joining’ – I was instrumental in reinstating him into the band! Glenn wasn’t interested in having Rob back, he wanted to keep Ripper. But I gave them one last chance, and I was like, ‘Are you sure? One day you might live to regret it.’ Let’s hope they don’t.” 

What’s the most you’ve ever laughed?
Chas Malibu, email 

“I hate to say it, but [then-Skid Row frontman] Seb Bach running onstage at Donington [in ’92]. We’d had a bit of rain, and he’s such a lanky guy, he went so arse over tit his legs seemed to be six feet in the air! It’s like he was doing backwards cartwheels! He’s a fantastic vocalist and a lovely guy, but that was one of the funniest things ever.” 

Are you superstitious?
Mrs Cravat, email 

“No. It’s been conjured up out of the imagination, like so many other things. Until it’s proved to me that it exists, I don’t consider it to be real. I’ve always been like that; it’s why I’ve never been religious or believed in life after death.” 

What is your advice to young bands just starting out?
Kenny Elevenses, email 

“It’s tough to break through, just keep working at it. Choose your bandmates carefully, because it’s all about staying the course. Try to pick people who’ll make sacrifices. I remember Al Atkins, our first singer, he had a wife and kid and when there wasn’t enough money there, he needed a full-time job, and it took him away from the band.”

The Sinner Rides Again is due September 29 via Napalm. 

Back in nu metal’s glory days, nothing guaranteed success like a good ’80s pop cover. Limp Bizkit’s first true taste of chart success came from reimagining George Michael’s Faith, while interpretations of You Spin Me Right Round and Blue Monday respectively gave Dope and Orgy their stints in their sun. Even the more established likes of Machine Head and Fear Factory weren’t immune to it, appropriating big hits from The Police and Gary Numan to gain an extra popularity boost.

However, when it comes to nu metal’s twists on old-school pop, is there a more quintessential song than Alien Ant Farm’s take on Smooth Criminal? As the new millennium arrived, the California foursome were just another struggling hard rock band, self-releasing their music and touring wherever and whenever they could. But then, one Michael Jackson redo later, they were topping charts and enjoying endorsements from heavy music stars.

Even before Smooth Criminal, though, one of the things that drew Alien Ant Farm’s cult fanbase was the revolving set of cover versions they busted out live. Lead singer Dryden Mitchell claimed that, growing up, he wasn’t really interested in heavy music: the likes of Joni Mitchell and Tracy Chapman were far greater influences. So, the tracks the band covered live ranged from Phil Collins’ Easy Lover to Sade’s Ordinary Love and beyond.

During one fateful gig, guitarist Terry Corso just happened to play the Smooth Criminal riff live as a tease. “We were at a show in our hometown and we played a few bars of it, like just fucking off,” he told Mel Magazine, “and everyone went mental! We went home the next day and figured it out and [Smooth Criminal] just became a mainstay.”

As Alien Ant Farm – armed with their various covers – toured the US, they ended up playing shows with and befriending Papa Roach frontman Jacoby Shaddix. Shaddix became such a fan that he often made sure his new friends’ music was played over the venue’s PA before Papa Roach went onstage.

One such evening, Jay Baumgardner – the man who produced Papa Roach’s major label debut, Infest – decided to attend a show by Shaddix and co. He then heard a demo version of Smooth Criminal being played before the band came onstage and was so impressed that he asked the DJ who it was covering the MJ classic.

Sometime later, the name Alien Ant Farm came up again: Baumgardner was talking to an A&R friend that was weighing up whether or not to sign the band. Not only did the producer recommend the band – he immediately put himself forward to engineer their next album himself.

Thus, Alien Ant Farm were signed to Universal Music subsidiary DreamWorks and released their major-label debut Anthology (produced by Baumgardner) on March 6, 2001. At first, the album didn’t make a huge impact. Not wanting to be pigeonholed as a cover band, Alien Ant Farm’s first single was Movies, which reached a mere number 53 in the UK single chart.

It wasn’t until New York radio station WXRK started playing Smooth Criminal, and it started getting requested constantly, that the band decided they’d have to embrace the song and release it as a single.

“We didn’t know what to think at first,” Mitchell said to The Los Angeles Times. “We didn’t necessarily want to break on a cover song. We just went with it, though, hoping that it would be more of a blessing than a disaster.”

What really cemented the legacy of Smooth Criminal, however, was the video. The band brought in director Marc Klasfeld to oversee the tongue-in-cheek clip, with Alien Ant Farm recreating classic Michael Jackson moments and playing live in a boxing ring.

“As soon as I heard it, I just started laughing,” Klasfeld recalled to Mel Magazine. “I saw the sense of humour in it. I just thought it was hilarious that a metal band was covering Michael Jackson. It was perfectly within my sensibility, because I love metal and I love Michael Jackson, and I love a dark sense of humour. There was so much there for me that hit me in that one moment.”

The video drew the intrigue of rock fans, and suddenly Alien Ant Farm were one of the hottest new bands on the planet. It was especially seismic in the UK: Smooth Criminal peaked at number 3 on the country’s singles chart and was later certified platinum.

That success catapulted the Anthology album, which went on to sell over a million copies in the US alone. The band also re-released Movies after Smooth Criminal came out. Endowed with another Klasfeld-directed video – which saw Alien Ant Farm recreate scenes from The Karate Kid, Ghostbusters and more – the track found its way into the top five of the UK singles chart.

The momentum sadly didn’t last for Alien Ant Farm. As nu metal’s star began to fade in the early 2000s, the band never managed to keep the same profile as they did during the genre’s halcyon days.

Nonetheless, Smooth Criminal itself still endures: while no one is pining for Spineshank’s While My Guitar Gently Weeps or Coal Chamber’s Shock The Monkey in 2023, go into any rock club in the world for more than half an hour and you’re bound to hear this Alien Ant Farm hit. When it comes to A-tier hard rock covers, Alien Ant Farm will always be on the tip of everyone’s tongue.

Sepultura were one of the most evolutionary metal bands of the 1990s. The Brazilians originally rose from the slums of Belo Horizonte playing a particularly anarchic and nascent form of thrash. Then, they slowed to a stomping groove metal pace on 1993’s Chaos A.D.: two years after grunge and Metallica’s Black Album made high-speed rage passé. That change let the band fly – scoring commercial success and major-label deals – while so many of their extreme peers tumbled out of relevance.

In 1996, Sepultura reinvented themselves once again to reach the apex of their excellence. Singer/guitarist Max Cavalera had been introduced to early nu metal by his late stepson, Dana Wells, and – years before the genre ruled the mainstream – he mixed its hallmarks with the music of the Brazilian rainforest to make Roots. The album’s lead single, Roots Bloody Roots, was released on February 18 – swiftly afterwards, the band behind it were among the biggest in metal.

Roots Bloody Roots hits like a tribal drum lobbed at your head. Iggor Cavalera’s percussion turns the booming sound of Amazon folk music into one of the heaviest things you’ll ever hear, and the song quickly explodes into that primal, shouting earworm. “Rooooooots! Bloody rooooots!” Max roars – a hook that helped thrust the anthem’s parent album up the charts and, nearly 30 years on, is still screamed by legions of Sepultura fans night in and night out.

“When you see a whole field going crazy to Roots Bloody Roots, you can’t not want to play it,” Max told Metal Hammer writer Stephen Hill in 2020. “It’s kind of like our Ace Of Spades. I’ll have to play it forever!”

After Chaos A.D., it would have been easy for Sepultura to rest on their laurels. The album was the band’s highest-charting at the time, reaching 32 in the US and 11 in the UK, Sweden and Germany. The Los Angeles Times even declared in the headline of their review: “Sepultura Fills The Void In Thrash Metal”. However, a change in sound was always planned.

“Before we had even started writing the Roots album, we knew that we wanted to do something different from before,” Max said. “We really wanted to move away from what we did on Chaos A.D. because it would have been too easy to just do the same thing again. We started looking at Brazilian comics and imagery for inspiration – even as we went to write and record, we had that idea that we wanted to have a very strong image that represented where we came from.”

The band also tapped Ross Robinson to produce. The man now hailed as the Godfather Of Nu Metal had recently overseen Korn’s 1994 debut and co-produced Deftones’ Adrenaline. Sepultura were eager for him to bring his fresh ideas and new sound to Roots – even if tales of his more ‘confrontational’ style preceded him.

“We had heard all of this stuff about him throwing things at Korn to get them angry when they were recording,” remembered Max. “We went in there on the first day and were like, ‘Don’t you try pulling any shit like that with us! We’re from Brazil – we’ll fucking kill you!’ Ha ha ha! He never did either… I think he thought we were serious.”

The lyrics of Roots Bloody Roots meant that the album opened by placing its overarching manifesto front and centre. Aside from that now-iconic, snarled chorus, the song’s words express a desire for the preservation of Brazilian culture. “We’re growing every day, getting stronger in every way!” states Max. “I’ll take you to a place where we shall find our roots!”

For the frontman, the intense emphasis on the word ‘roots’ was an attempt at “reclaiming” it – bringing it to metal when it had long been associated with reggae music. “The label [Roadrunner Records] thought we were nuts when we told them. ‘You’re going to do what?’,” Max laughed.

“But once they heard the song they got behind it. They were really cool with designing the packaging and the look of the record, and it was super-influential to people when they saw us in the facepaint and the tribal gear. You only have to look at Norwegian black metal with them going back to their roots. It worked.”

While the lyrics are a clear and unwavering declaration, there was uncertainty over what Roots Bloody Roots’ tempo would be. “Originally it was double time from the version that you hear now,” Max revealed. “I liked it like that – I thought that it was really brutal – but when we tuned down you could hear that it would sound cooler a bit slower and with more of a groove.”

The initial, ‘thrashier’ take on Roots Bloody Roots can still be heard, however. A vastly sped-up take on the song – performed by the Roots-era lineup of Max, Iggor, guitarist Andreas Kisser and bassist Paolo Jr – opens the 2002 live album Under A Pale Grey Sky. This version was recorded at a London show on December 16, 1996: a cursed date for diehard Sepultura fans.

On that day, the band ended the European leg of the Roots tour – and, straight after the show, imploded. Tensions had long been boiling between the members over the role of their manager, Gloria Cavalera, who was (and remains) Max’s wife. Gloria was perceived as putting more focus on her husband than the rest of Sepultura, so – after the London show – Andreas, Paolo and Iggor decided not to renew the band’s contract with her. Max acrimoniously left in protest.

“I probably had a little bit to drink, so I was on the edge,” Max admitted to Hammer writer Dave Everley in 2018. “I told them, ‘If that was how it was going to be, fuck you all, I’m out of here.’”

The classic Sepultura lineup is yet to reunite, but Roots Bloody Roots remains an essential song in both camps. Max and Iggor (who also left Sepultura in 2006) performed Roots in full during a 2016 and 2017 tour, and performed Roots Bloody Roots twice each night. Meanwhile, Sepultura – now fronted by Derrick Green – close their every show with it.

“Roots… has really captured people’s imaginations,” Max told Hammer’s Dom Lawson in 2016. “People love it and bands like to play it because it’s so easy! Ha ha ha! It’s just one string, one riff over and over – like a mantra.”

Nu metal didn't just define a generation of heavy bands: it became a total, all-conquering mainstream phenomenon. Its music dominated the charts; its figureheads were all over TV; its fashion became so iconic that baggy jeans, wallet chains and spiky hair have become in vogue once again over two decades since its heyday. 

While nu metal was filled with one-hit wonders, also-rans and bands that should have been massive but just couldn't quite get it together, it undoubtedly still spawned a solid crop of heavyweights that have since gone on to legend status. Whether it's through staying relevant through reinvention or crafting a lasting legacy through the influence of their early work, nu metal's biggest and greatest hitters largely remain as popular now as ever, if not more so. With that in mind, here are the ten finest bands to ever be painted with the nu metal tag (even if, in some cases, the tag itself didn't last all that long).

Korn

How can you not include the band that invented nu metal in the first place? While the likes of Faith No More and Rage Against The Machine undoubtedly laid down some of the templates from which countless nu metal bands would pilfer in the years ahead, the boys from Bakersfield crystalised their own influences into something fresh, new and vital that truly felt like the dawn of a new era. From Jonathan Davis' instantly iconic 'Areeee youuuu reaaaddyyyyyy?!' and the explosion of groovy, rumbling riffage that followed on Blind, the anthemic opener to the band's 1994 debut album, it was clear that metal's newest innovators had entered the frame. Korn would continue to evolve over the decades that followed; the fact that they are still putting out top-tier albums almost three decades in is testament to their enduring presence and influence on the genre they established. 

Linkin Park

If Korn were nu metal's first superstars, then Linkin Park were easily its biggest. Their 2000 debut Hybrid Theory was freakishly successful, shifting more than 20 million copies worldwide and becoming the biggest-selling debut album of the 21st century. The record also helped to cement nu metal as the biggest genre on Planet Earth at the time, while its phenomenal hit-rate of catchy songs and pristine production would be hugely influential to mainstream US rock music moving forwards. Linkin Park's legacy by no means ended there, though: they'd go on to become one of the biggest rock bands of all time, and while nu metal played less of a role in their sound as they evolved, it certainly defined their breakthrough and incredible success early on.

Slipknot

By far the most intense and aggressive thing to emerge from the nu metal explosion, Slipknot's ferocious, furious debut album was unlike anything else in the scene at the time, bolstered by a terrifying, horror-indebted image that made them instant icons in the eyes of millions of maggots in waiting. Incredibly, their second album, 2001's Iowa, would go even heavier and darker than its predecessor, marking them out as Millennial metal's most fearless heavyweight sonic explorers. They never again captured the pure, unbridled chaos of those first two records, but their evolution over the succeeding decades has given them an almighty staying power, ensuring their relevance in an ever-changing metal scene and securing their legacy for all time as one of metal's most important bands.

Limp Bizkit

If any band symbolised nu metal at its most obnoxious, braggadocios and mainstream-invading, it's surely Limp Bizkit. Fred Durst's red cap became as iconic to a generation of young rockers as Slash's top hat had just over a decade earlier, while the success of the band's third album, 2000's Chocolate Starfish And The Hot Dog Flavored Water, was nothing less than obscene, shifting a million copies in its first week alone. They may have become the poster boys for the backlash that nu metal suffered from traditional metalheads, but the fact that generational anthems like Rollin', Take A Look Around, Break Stuff and My Way are still causing scenes in rock clubs over twenty years after their release tells you everything you need to know about Bizkit's place in heavy metal's great tapestry. 

System Of A Down

Of all the metal bands to make it big, you could make a serious case for System Of A Down to be the most unexpected. Mixing scrappy punk riffs with nu metal groove and more than a sprinkling of Middle Eastern instrumentation, their already unique concoction was given extra vitality by politicised lyrics that swerved from deeply profound to dementedly surreal, and some truly incendiary live performances. In Chop Suey!, they crafted not just one of the nu metal era's biggest breakout anthems, but one of the most famous metal songs of all time (a billion streams and counting doesn't lie). It's a shame we've had no new album since 2005, because for a short but crucial period of time, System Of A Down felt like the most vital metal band on Earth.

Deftones

Like others on this list, it feels a little reductive to just lump Deftones in with nu metal; their sumptuous sonic palette deserves much more than to be pigeonholed in with any genre. Nevertheless, their early run of albums unarguably helped to established many of nu metal's fundamentals, while their skater image hugely influenced rock culture at the time.  You'd be hard pushed to find a more perfectly realised album from the early 2000s boom than White Pony, which remains, to many, nu metal's most accomplished artistic statement. They outgrew nu metal pretty fast once the scene started to die out, but at its height, Deftones were arguably the genre's most critically bulletproof songwriters. 

Evanescence 

Amy Lee has made no secret of her disdain at the record label pressure that lead to a rap being added to the band's breakout single, Bring Me To Life, even if it undoubtedly resulted in the last true nu metal anthem of the early 2000s. The likes of Going Under and Everybody's Fool certainly flirted with nu metal too, even if their gothic overtones and Amy's hauntingly beautiful vocals made them stand well apart from most of the bands that had defined the scene to that point. It means that Evanescence's legacy as far as nu metal goes is a little muddy. What's absolutely not in question, however, is that the band remain one of the era's most successful acts, and a hugely influential presence in the rock landscape of the 2000s and beyond. 

Disturbed

Nu metal was a movement full of bizarre gimmicks and colourful characters, but few made as instantaneous an impact as the bald headed fella with the big chin piercings making monkey noises in a straightjacket. Down With The Sickness might have smelt to many like the kind of one-hit-wonder littering the metal scene at the time, but its parent album, The Sickness, was stacked with similarly great songs, and Disturbed successfully rode out nu metal's eventual implosion to stand as one of the most enduring bands of their time. Incredibly, they'd reach a new peak in popularity - 15 years after The Sickness - with the release of their now iconic cover of Simon & Garfunkel's The Sound Of Silence. Who said nu metal couldn't be tender?

Papa Roach

Another band who could have easily ended up in the nu metal landfill, Papa Roach seemed destined for oblivion with the release of the disappointing Lovehatetragedy two years after the blockbuster, hits-stacked Infest. Thankfully, they rallied in style, bouncing back with the alt-rock influenced Getting Away With Murder, embracing their glammy side with The Paramour Sessions and ensuring that they never musically stood still from that point on. Now, their influence is as wide as ever; Last Resort will always be their trademark anthem, but they've got a career's worth of plenty more bangers behind them.

Mudvayne

It's arguable that were it not for Mudvayne's cartoonish image and the breakout success of Dig, they may never have even been lumped in with the nu metal crowd. Their mixture of spasmodic riffing, polyrhythmic grooves and extreme metal intensity was worlds apart from the bouncing, shameless earwormery of Adema, Taproot, Spineshank et al. Nevertheless, L.D. 50. is rightly regarded as a classic of its time, while the band's side-step into more straightforward, US radio metal-friendly territories as the 2000s progressed ensured they stayed the course as nu metal died out. Their reunion, which has been in full flow since 2021, has brought new appreciation for their work. 

Everybody wanted a piece of Fred Durst at the height of nu metal. The Limp Bizkit frontman got into a scrap with Slipknot after allegedly calling their fans “fat, ugly kids”, while also finding time to threaten a band via voicemail for turning down a record deal and take potshots at Creed. The red-capped loudmouth also got into another public spat that, surprisingly, was not his fault whatsoever, when he found himself in the crosshairs of one of his biggest idols, Rage Against The Machine.

The first shots that Rage fired against Limp Bizkit were heard at the MTV VMAs in 2000. That year, both bands had been nominated in the Best Rock Video category, with Limp Bizkit’s Break Stuff – directed by Durst – up against Rage’s promo for Sleep Now In The Fire.

The Rage clip seemed like a shoo-in for the award. It was directed by Michael Moore, a documentarian already renowned for making Roger & Me, who was two years away from releasing the Academy Award-winning Bowling For Columbine. The shoot also attracted nationwide attention by filming Rage as they played in front of the New York Stock Exchange, drawing hundreds of onlookers and forcing its doors to be closed. Meanwhile, Break Stuff featured Limp Bizkit simply messing about with celebrity pals like Snoop Dogg and Eminem. Rage couldn’t lose – until they did.

At the ceremony, Limp Bizkit were announced as winning the Best Rock Video prize – a victory which Rage bassist Tim Commerford instantly took exception to.

“Tim obviously was taking it pretty seriously,” drummer Brad Wilk told the Let There Be Talk podcast in 2018. “It seemed like, in Tim’s eyes, they were going to give us this award – in Tim’s head. […] I remember sitting next to Tim, and Tim sitting next to Michael [Moore] and he’s like, ‘I wanna fuckin’ go up there.’ He looks over to Michael and goes, ‘I wanna go up there.’ I think other people in the band were like, ‘No, don’t do anything.’ Michael Moore says, ‘Just go with it. Go with your heart.’”

So go with his heart Commerford did. As Limp Bizkit were walking towards the stage to claim their award, the bassist charged and climbed the enormous metal sculpture behind the podium. While up there, at least 15 feet off the ground, Tim swung wildly, instantly getting surrounded by security as Limp Bizkit looked on in confusion.

“And we got a madman,” Durst calmly commented into the live microphone, before handling the spectacle with a respectable display of class: “This guy’s rock ’n’ roll. He should be getting an award.”

“I wanted to bring the whole thing down, but they [the people below] didn’t move,” Commerford later told MTV. “In my mind, I visualised the whole structure on the ground. As they came back from commercial break, I wanted people to see destruction. I thought Eminem was chanting my name, but I was wrong: he was chanting for me to jump!”

Once security finally got Commerford down from the structure, he was arrested for disorderly conduct and spent the night in jail. Turns out, though, that he wasn’t just protesting an upset victory at an awards show: Rage never, ever liked Limp Bizkit by the sounds of it. Wilk stated in 2018, “To be honest, we weren’t fans of Limp Bizkit. The only thing we were fans of is that they were actually getting it together to write music and play, and do things.”

Meanwhile, guitarist Tom Morello has apparently had a distaste for nu metal ever since the events of Woodstock ’99, where both Rage and Limp Bizkit played. During the festival, there were fires and reports of multiple sexual assaults. Limp Bizkit’s set was particularly violent, involving property damage and people surfing the crowd on plywood boards.

“This music started with the idea of making powerful music that had a message and a solidarity between band and crowd,” Morello said (per The Pit). “And that show became a bunch of thugs assaulting women in the pit and burning the festival to the ground. I was just looking around thinking, ‘Man, what have we done?’”

On the other side of the fence, Limp Bizkit have never been anything less than reverent towards Rage. The band covered Killing In The Name in 2014, with Durst saying on stage, “When I first heard this song, that shit hit me right the fuck here,” while pointing to his heart. He added that hearing Rage frontman Zach De La Rocha scream “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me!” during the track “changed my life”.

Commerford’s response the following year was to issue a public apology for inspiring Limp Bizkit to begin with. “I do apologise for Limp Bizkit,” he told Rolling Stone. “I really do. I feel really bad that we inspired such bullshit.”

He added: “They’re gone, though. That’s the beautiful thing. There’s only one left, and that's Rage, and as far as I’m concerned, we’re the only one that matters.”

It’s a statement that’s aged poorly. In 2023, Limp Bizkit are actively touring to promote their 2021 album Still Sucks. Meanwhile, Rage Against The Machine returned from hiatus in 2022, only to cancel all touring for the following year due to an injury suffered by De La Rocha. Despite this reversal of fortunes, though, we’d be shocked to see Rage ever try to mend fences with Fred Durst's band.

When Slipknot first arrived on the scene in 1999, their entire reason for being appeared to be chaos, destruction, violence and hatred. It wasn’t the kind of thing that you’d expect to trouble the mainstream music charts. But the band had an ace up their sleeve: they didn’t soften their attack, but, by adding just a touch of melody to one of their songs, The Nine managed to rule the charts, invade mainstream television and go platinum. This is how Wait And Bleed did it.

Before Slipknot headed into Indigo Ranch Studio, California, with producer Ross Robinson in 1998 to record their self-titled debut album, they were writing new songs in the hopes of getting themselves a record deal. One such song was a number that then-drummer Joey Jordison had recently penned but felt needed completing. Jordison showed it to the band, with the rest of Slipknot believing the thing it lacked was a big chorus to take it to the required level. Meanwhile, vocalist Corey Taylor was relatively new to the band, and his singing voice hadn’t been utilised in Slipknot just yet.

“I was kind of doing more capitulating to their style than they were incorporating mine,” Taylor told the Moon Under Water Podcast in 2022, “so I sat on the steps of Clown’s [percussionist Shawn Crahan] basement in his old, old house on 35th Street [in Des Moines, Iowa] and I wrote the chorus. I sang it and just kept singing it.”

Incredibly, for a song that has since become a nu metal classic, Wait And Bleed was born in no time at all. “In an hour, we built that song and didn’t really change it at all,” Corey continued. “You can hear that from the demo too. We were going to take the world by any means necessary.”

Said demo, known simply as the 1998 Demo, was key to getting Slipknot signed to Roadrunner Records. When The Nine’s self-titled album followed on June 29, 1999, the world was suddenly in the palms of their hands. Wait And Bleed was one of the standout tracks on the record: full of rhythmic twists and turns, concrete-heavy guitars and, as the band desired, a soaring earworm of a chorus.

It was also a song that Corey told Kerrang! in 2012 was about “that switch in your head that can go at any moment. You go from being a civilised human being to someone who can commit terrible acts.” 

Again, catchy though Wait And Bleed may be, it’s hardly the sort of theme for a song that you’d expect to see shooting up the charts. Still, due to its innate sense of melody, it was picked to be the first single and video from the album. Released on February 28, 2000, the anthem entered the UK singles chart at a decent number 27. Its momentum quickly steamrolled, however, and in 2019 Wait And Bleed was certified platinum in the US – that’s over a million copies sold! Massive!

So massive was their success that even the mainstream couldn’t ignore Slipknot. On March 3, 2000, the band made their UK television debut, playing the song on Chris Evans’ Friday-evening chat show, TFI Friday. It’s a performance that’s gone down in legend for the sheer untamed chaos it thrust onto the British public. Evans’ disbelieving “We lost two cameras there, one of them we still don’t know where it is” as it cuts back to him in the studio at the song’s end still raises a smile.

Wait And Bleed was nominated for a Grammy Award For Best Metal Performance in 2001. Although it lost out to Deftones’ Elite, the fast triumph of the song initially worried some fans of Slipknot’s heavier material: would such attention so soon dilute the band’s aggression?

Roadrunner bosses certainly hoped so, desperate to cash in on a more melodic Slipknot. Unfortunately for them (but fortunately for metal fans), anyone who heard the first couple seconds of follow-up album Iowa quickly realised that that was never going to happen. 

“[Wait And Bleed] was just a basic song, we didn’t know it was going to be that popular,” ex-percussionist Chris Fehn told Songfacts in 2007. “The funny thing is the record label, especially new guys at the record label, were coming around when we started getting big, and they’re like, ‘Oh, the next record, you can write, like, three Wait And Bleeds.’ And we’re just like, ‘You are an idiot.’”

These days, Wait And Bleed is considered one of the greatest songs, from one of the greatest albums, in the history of metal. It’s still as potent and powerful as it was all those decades ago and has firmly established itself as a standard in the Slipknot set – even if the man that gave the song its iconic chorus is a bit bored of it.

“I was fucking tired of playing it,” Taylor admitted to All Things Music earlier this year. “I was like, ‘Can we do one run where we don’t play it?” 

A classic like that? That’ll be a hard no from us.

It’s almost 30 years since Korn erupted onto the metal scene, and the sounds they created back then sound almost normal by today’s standards, a template that’s been endlessly copied, but rest assured they are not normal. Korn were – and still are – one of a kind: ever evolving, always leading where others follow. 

It began in 1994, with their phenomenal self-titled debut album, a bolt out of the blue that was, to all intents and purposes, the birth of what became known as nu metal. An album so darkly brilliant that, even for Korn, it was difficult to supersede. By comparison, 1996’s Life Is Peachy seemed formulaic and rushed, by the band’s own admission a “fast food” album to capitalise on their success. “It had its moments, but half of us didn’t really like Life Is Peachy compared to the first album,” guitarist Head admits today. 

But still, the eyes of the music world were upon Korn. Playing the Lollapalooza tour in 1997 with the likes of Tool, Snoop Dogg and Tricky, they were all over MTV, their audiences growing from clubs and theatres to ‘sheds’, playing to thousands of people. The big question was, what were they going to do next? Would they sink or swim? With Korn’s trademark sound already being aped by other bands, would Korn just sound like a copy of themselves?

“It kinda felt like we’d coined this sound and then we were trying to follow it up with something we’d already done,” agrees guitarist Munky. “So when Follow The Leader came around it was like, either we’re gonna make the same record for the next 25 years or we’re gonna be a band that evolves. I think that was the turning point.”

As the title suggests, Follow The Leader was intended as a raised middle digit to the copyists, proof that Korn couldn’t be left in their own wake.

“Now we think it’s cool,” says Munky. “But at the time we were like, ‘Man, this is bullshit, people trying to sound like Korn.’ We’d created something that was different, but right after the ...Peachy album we were starting to hear bands that sounded like us, so we took a left turn. They thought they knew the formula, and all of a sudden we put out this record that’s hip hop, rock, metal… If you listen to the first album and Follow The Leader, it’s almost like two different bands.”

Having written future classics Freak On A Leash, Got The Life and a handful of other tunes, Korn made camp at NRG studios in Los Angeles in spring 1998. They were experimenting with the latest technology and working, for the first time, with producer Steve Thompson. Given that Ross Robinson had produced the first two albums and was known to be an integral part in creating their sound, it was a bold move to say the least.

“We just wanted to try something new,” explains Head. “Ross was an awesome, ground-breaking producer who taught us a lot, but he was like a leader, and the best leaders should be able to train people and then send them out. And I feel like that’s just what Ross did… and then we wanted to go and do our own thing. Ross had really trained us well with melodies and doing weird sounds with the guitar, so we took it another step. The band wrote all the music together and a couple of producers worked on the record. It’s been said in a blog that our songs were a mess when we sent them in, but they were not a mess – they were just like they are. There were a couple of tweaks, but the structures were all in place for almost the entire record.”

“We went in the studio with Steve, and he was kinda going through some personal stuff so he kinda wasn’t showing up and wasn’t really engaged,” Munky continues. “The engineer, Toby Wright, took over from that point and helped us engineer and produce the album. But Steve was there when we were doing three or four big songs on the album, and he was a big part of that. And we were fucking around a lot, too. It was chaos! So I can see why somebody would think, ‘This is bullshit.’”

By all accounts, chaos is something of an understatement. Aside from putting out Korn TV on the internet every week – a show with guests including everyone from the Deftones to Marilyn Manson and porn star Ron Jeremy – the tales of partying, drugs, alcohol, and “random groupies”, as Munky says, are legendary. Sessions would go from three in the afternoon until three at night, sometimes with nothing getting done. Rumour even suggests that frontman Jonathan Davis wouldn’t sing unless he had cocaine.

“Yeah, he’d want some Jack Daniel’s and a line of blow,” nods Munky. “He got sober immediately after that album, that’s how fucked-up it was.”

“I just remember craziness, fucking drugs, alcohol, chicks – you name it, I did it,” says Jonathan. “We were 25 to 28 years old, so it was like party central,” recalls Head. “There was a lot of alcohol. Thousands and thousands of dollars! We were out of control! When you party so hard at that age it’s a lot of fun, but it was the beginning of a lot of messed-up lives.” 

Remarkably, in the midst of all this mayhem, a classic album was somehow taking shape, with Jonathan writing some of his deepest and darkest lyrics, like Freak On A Leash and Pretty – the horrific tale of the rape and murder of a baby, prompted by his time working in a coroner’s office. Not that this darkness was any surprise to the rest of the band.

“What he sang about was always dark,” says Munky, “and even when he sings something uplifting, the band leans towards a minor key. It’s just who we are. We always have a darker sound, whether it’s lyrically or melodies. I’m used to him writing that way, and none of us have ever said, ‘You shouldn’t say that.’ As a lyricist and singer, you have to be very vulnerable and expose part of who you are, and that takes a lot of courage. He exposes a lot of fear and anxiety, and ultimately that helps people because it makes them feel less alone. He’s digging so deep that nothing he pulls up cannot be gold or diamonds.”

Korn also had some impressive guests on the album. Along with Fred Durst and Tre Hardson from alternative rappers The Pharcyde, they managed to get NWA’s Ice Cube and no less a legend than Cheech Marin, with whom Munky smoked more than a few joints.

“I think the Cheech thing came about from Fieldy,” Munky smiles. “He loves smoking weed! It’s the funniest thing, because he used to hate it, and then he went through this weed phase, watching all the Cheech & Chong movies. Then we were messing around in the studio playing [Life Is Peachy’s War cover] Lowrider, and he was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could get Cheech in the studio!’ He was a super-nice guy and he brought his family to the show, later in that tour cycle. Then Ice Cube came into the studio and that was the first time I’d witnessed a real pro, someone that came in and killed it. He listened to the track a few times, studied it, didn’t talk much and was very serious about his craft. I was blown away and it was really inspiring.”

“My heart was pounding!” confesses Head, completely starstruck by meeting Ice Cube. “I had to come up with a cool riff and not let him down, and I’m shaking! Pressure! It was surreal, dude. When I was 19 or 20 I was all over NWA. The realness and the rawness… And Ice Cube’s voice tones were just the best.”

With the album completed and iconic artwork done by comic book creator Todd McFarlane, who later directed the award-winning video for Freak On A Leash, it wasn’t long before Korn, too, experienced those dizzying levels of fame. Follow The Leader was released on August 18, 1998 and went to Number One in four countries, including the US, making it their biggest-selling record to date. And while the band had been primed to expect huge success, confident that they’d made a great album that was unlike anything else, they had no idea how huge it would be. Head remembers that they were on the Korn Kampaign meet-and-greet tour when they heard that the album had reached the top of the charts. 

“I was in a record store signing records,” he says. “I don’t remember the city, but I called my dad, like, ‘Dad, we went to Number One!’ He was always the type who was telling me to cut my hair, so he got to a place where he was like, ‘Man, I was wrong about you. I should have just let you be you.’ That was really cool of him to say.”

But if the album was big, then the singles – Got The Life and Freak On A Leash – were arguably bigger, and they propelled the band to “a whole new level of fame” remembers Head. Got The Life was actually the first video to be officially ‘retired’ from MTV’s Total Live Request show, because fans wouldn’t stop requesting it. Korn were everywhere.

“Yeah, it got pretty crazy, and the fame did go to our heads a little bit and made us a little crazy,” says Head. “Jonathan got suicidal because he was drinking so much Jack and Coke and doing cocaine. He was losing his mind, and he decided to stop it all and get sober during that tour cycle.”

In September 1998, the band went out on their own Family Values tour, taking along Rammstein, Ice Cube, Limp Bizkit and Orgy. The partying continued, but Jonathan sat out on the sidelines.

“It was detoxing,” he says. “All I remember is a lot of pain and anxiety and horrible shit. I would lie shaking in my bunk, and I’d get out onstage, and I could perform but then I’d go back to going through hell again. My therapy was that I’d hang out with my dear friend Rigger Dan. He passed away a long time ago, God bless him, but he taught me how to tie different kinds of knots, and I’d help him rig the show every night. I got involved with the crew, because everyone else was partying, and I couldn’t be part of that.”

Meanwhile, Head was still keeping up the lifestyle, struggling to reconcile the guy he was before Korn with this new celebrity rockstar. He put up a decent front, but behind the scenes he was troubled.

“The friends I grew up with, and the guy I looked in the mirror at, they all became different people. I just couldn’t control the habits,” he admits. “I wanted to drink alcohol and have fun, and maybe do drugs once in a while, but I didn’t want them to rule me. Also, my personality… I was good with the guys and I could have fun, but in relationships I was insecure and I never felt good enough. When the fame came, it just magnified all those insecurities.”

“It was good in the sense that we were able to buy new cars and upgrade from apartments to condos,” adds Munky. “But it was also bad to give five guys money – we were all addicts, just buying alcohol and not thinking about tomorrow or our future. I didn’t really deal with it very well. The money was new to us – we didn’t grow up with money – so it wasn’t like we had some financial advisor sitting us down and going, ‘You need to put money away.’ None of us had any of that until a few years ago, which is kinda sad. It was tough; you have all this money and a lot of addiction problems, and you buy dumb shit when you’re fucked up! Cars and boats, there’s no appreciation. And all of a sudden you have this crew of 10 people, all these guys who wanna leach off you and pretend that they’re helping you. But the only person that’s gonna help you is your mom. Everybody else is out to fucking take your money and it took me a while to see that.”

Older now, and much wiser, the band have had time to reflect upon the extraordinary success of the record, and its legacy. There can be no doubt that it dragged a new (or nu) sound into the mainstream, and its influence is still heard today.

“There’s also a lot of hip hop guys who got into that album,15 or 20 years younger than me, and that stuff influenced a lot of urban kids, which is cool,” agrees Munky. “And it’s tricky keeping people’s attention and keeping them as fans, but we had hardcore fans from the first records and Follow The Leader blew us up. I’m floored by it.” 

When you’re trying to make it big in the nu metal era, turning down an opportunity from a figurehead as massive as Fred Durst is certainly… brave. Not only was the man who now possesses dad vibes the leader of Limp Bizkit but, at one point, he also headed a record label: a subsidiary of Interscope called Flawless. He did a pretty solid job of it too, getting Puddle Of Mudd and Wes Borland solo band Big Dumb Face onto the roster.

The one band that Durst couldn’t get a hold of, though, was Taproot. The frontman and the nu metal up-and-comers (today best know for the song Poem) had an intense love-hate affair. When the Limp Bizkit frontman first heard them, he fell hard, spending plenty of time with lead singer Stephen Richards and wearing their merch. But then the band turned down what they deemed to be an unfair Interscope record deal and the relationship soured at phenomenal speed.

Durst, clearly feeling betrayed after getting shot down by a band he championed, vocalised his hurt on a threatening voicemail to Richards (heard below). “Hey man, you fucked up!” the singer said sternly.

“You don’t ever bite the hand that feeds in this business. Your fucking manager is a fucking idiot: a loser motherfucker going nowhere. You have just chosen that path. I took you under my wing, put you in my house, talked about your ass on the radio [and] in press, and you embarrassed me and the Interscope family. Your association with Limp Bizkit doesn’t exist. Your manager slings our name around, he’s gonna be blackballed, and you will too.”

Durst later added: “Don’t fucking show up at my shows: if you do, you’re gonna get fucked. You’re learning right now exactly how to ruin your career before it gets started.”

Ironically, Durst gave Taproot their most famous moment during his tirade – or second-most, given Poem reached number five in the US rock charts. The audio of the voicemail quickly leaked onto the internet, and the band have since said they have a mixed relationship with all the attention it brought them.

“For a while it had a positive effect,” Richards told Rolling Stone in 2002. “The kids were like, ‘Fuck Fred! We totally respect you guys for doing that.’ But at the same time, that was kind of the only reason people knew about us – it kind of put a negative feeling on our band.”

Happily, Taproot are still a band today, with a new album called Scissrs [sic] dropping on September 29.

Listen to the full Fred Durst voicemail below:

The New Millennium brought with it the nu metal explosion that had been bubbling just under the surface of the mainstream for some years. In the space of a week in October 2000, both Limp Bizkit's Chocolate Starfish And The Hot Dog Flavored Water and Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory were released, selling tens of millions of copies between them. Both in the US and the UK, you could hardly move in the singles charts for generation-defining anthems by everyone from Slipknot, System Of A Down and Deftones to P.O.D., Korn and Papa Roach. 

It mean that mainstream television began to feature nu metal on a regular basis, often with chaotic, hilarious and bizarre results. With that in mind, here are ten occasions in particular where nu metal gatecrashed some of the world's most iconic TV shows and stations to spectacular effect. If you want more of this kind of thing, don't forget to pick up Metal Hammer's tribute to the 2000s, out now. 

Slipknot play TFI Friday (2000)

The gold standard of 2000s nu metal TV: Slipknot lay waste to early evening show TFI Friday. There’s laughter as host Chris Evans announces they’ll be playing a song called Wait And Bleed. By the time they finish, no one is laughing. Apart from people still wondering why Evans described the Iowans as “horror metal landslide legends”, perhaps.

Adam Sandler jams with Deftones and Incubus (2000)

Former Saturday Night Live star Adam Sandler returned to the show to promote his new film, Little Nicky. Cue an unexpectedly excellent acoustic cover of Deftones’ Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away) with Chino Moreno and Incubus’s Brandon Boyd. Everything about this ridiculous yet strangely poignant moment is about as early 2000s as it gets, quite frankly.

P.O.D. do MTV Cribs (2000)

MTV Cribs was the must-appear-on show of the early 2000s, taking the viewer inside superstar musicians’ and celebrities' houses. Cue P.O.D. drummer Wuv Bernardo attempting to look cool while showing off a Buzz Lightyear VHS. yes, really: nu metal was so huge that even the drummer of P.O.D. got his moment in the TV sun. Bonus fact: a pre-megafame Beyoncé was on the same episode with her group, Destiny’s Child. Wonder whatever happened to her...

Fred Durst duets with Christina Aguilera (2000)

Fred Durst teaming up with XTina remains one of the most surreal moments in 2000s music television. MTV’s VMA Awards frequently threw up some brilliant and/or baffling collaborations, and never more so than the sight of our favourite red capped fella rising from his chair to rap the chorus of the Bizkit’s Livin’ It Up midway through Aguilera’s performance of Come On Over (All I Want Is You). Rumours of a secret romance between the two stars only added to the frisson. Unsurprisingly, Durst didn't behave very subtly about the whole thing. 

Linkin Park rip it up on Conan O’Brien (2001)

Conan O’Brien was a champion of heavy music on his late night talk show, with everyone from Slipknot to At The Drive-In making an appearance. Linkin Park’s exhilarating performance of One Step Closer was a highlight. ‘Shut up when I’m talking to you’, snarled the never-more-savage Chester Bennington. Another crowning moment for rock music's biggest new band had officially arrived

Papa Roach perform on Top Of The Pops (2001)

Much-missed Friday night staple music show Top Of The Pops had no choice but
to feature nu metal bands on the frequent occasions they graced the UK charts. Papa Roach turned in a characteristically energetic version of their Top 10 hit Last Resort. Who could have imagined 'Coby Dick' and pals would go on to have an enduring and critically acclaimed career?

System Of A Down make the evening news (2001)

On September 3, 2001, System Of A Down were due to play a free show in a Hollywood parking lot to celebrate the release of their second album, Toxicity, the next day. Except thousands of fans turned up, the gig was cancelled and a riot ensued, landing the band on the US TV news. That was by no means the only controversy that defined the story of Toxicity, either.

Britney Spears serenades Incubus (2002)

Who'd have had the 2000s' two premiere pop princesses in Britney and Christina both appearing on a list like this? Such was the power of nu metal in the 2000s. The worlds of pop and nu metal collided again when Incubus dropped by the studio of MTV’s TRL show. When Brandon Boyd joked to host Carson Daly that it was his birthday, fellow guest Britney Spears led the whole audience in a chorus of Happy Birthday To You. Aw, sweet.

Nu metal bows down before Metallica on MTV (2003)

A cross-generational passing of the torch, as nu metal’s finest – and rapper Snoop Dogg - gathered to pay tribute to Metallica on this MTV special. Korn delivered a superb One while Limp Bizkit’s cover of Welcome Home (Sanitarium) was surprisingly great. We can't do much to defend Snoop Dogg's game but ultimately terrible take on Sad But True, though. Sorry Snoop.

Evanescence vs 50 Cent at the Grammys (2004)

Years before Kanye West gatecrashed Taylor Swift’s Grammy acceptance speech, 50 Cent did the same with Evanescence after they beat the rapper to the Best New Artist award. Fiddy protested by marching on and off the stage, to which Amy Lee coolly replied, “Thanks, 50.” It was seen as a colossal upset at the time, but given how big Evanescence remain to this day, you have to say it was fair enough, really. 

Nintendo is a pop-culture powerhouse. They’ve been the undisputed kings of video-gaming for almost 40 years, and their properties have been adapted into movies, TV shows, card games – you name it. One territory that the home of Mario and Zelda should never venture into again, however, is music.

For starters, Nintendo are responsible for a Legend Of Zelda rap that cursed Japanese television in the ’80s. But that’s a story for another day. In 2001, the company teamed up with a British nu metal band called 50.Grind, letting them release a song called Gotta Catch ’Em All to promote the Pokémon anime – and it’s terrible.

The music video (seen below) shows the band performing in a warehouse, with clips of the TV show randomly screened behind them. It starts off… passably, with your standard turn-of-the-millennium rock riff whirling away, but abruptly leaps off a cliff when it samples Pikachu yelling its own name. After some incredibly of-the-time turntable scratches, frontman Nick Atkinson cuts in with a rap: “Let’s snatch a batch and get down to the nitty-gritty. I’m fully armed, got my Pokéballs ready to go, and for a fact I’ve got Pika-Pika-Pikachu!”

Bloody hell.

The remaining two-and-half minutes aren’t surprising. Long story short, they mesh edgeless Limp Bizkit imitations with lame samples and lyrics so pathetic that to believe an adult wrote them is to feel your hope for our species die a bit.

“Yup, this is as bad as I remembered,” a comment underneath one of the versions uploaded to YouTube reads – and the faux-tough-guy marketing clearly didn’t stick, as Gotta Catch ’Em All only reached number 57 in the UK charts. That’s despite a children’s TV performance to promote the song, as well as a CD single being included with one day’s edition of national newspaper The Daily Express. 

Two decades down the line, the stories of how this actually occurred and what happened to 50.Grind have been lost to time. The band didn’t do anything else to our knowledge, but singer Atkinson later joined a pop-rock group called Rooster, whose self-titled debut album reached number 3 in the UK. Bet he didn’t go shouting about his past CV in interviews…

Heavy metal was in the middle of a sea change in 2002. Nu metal had recently dominated the US charts thanks to the likes of Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit, but the mainstream overexposure and enormous number of wannabes made the genre grow stale fast. Meanwhile, more ’80s-inspired aggressors from Lamb Of God to Shadows Fall were on the up and up.

The death knells were ringing for nu metal and, capitalising on the shifting landscape, one label went so far as to declare its death in 2002. The Australian branch of Roadrunner Records were promoting Killswitch Engage’s second album Alive Or Just Breathing at the time, and needed something big to get the newly signed band noticed. What better than a funeral for the genre that Killswitch, with their obvious classic metal influences, were out to usurp?

The hilarious footage of the publicity stunt (seen below) shows a group gathered into a church by a gloriously OTT vicar, who stands solemnly in front of an open coffin. “We are gathered here tonight to acknowledge and, in some cases, mourn the death of a musical genre,” he declares, before truly twisting the knife into nu metal: “It is time to perform the last rites on this spent and sorry carcass.”

He continues, his disgust obvious: “Many of you own albums attributed to it. Some of you, in moments of weakness, have even adopted its affectations.” Cue a perfectly timed camera cut to a mourner in a scarlet baseball cap.

The vicar then sentences a number of nu metal’s “stylings” to his open casket. “We cast out the following unholy items: sportswear! Unsuitable for the stage!” he cries. “White, middle-class, self-directed angst! We cast you into the hot dog-flavoured water!” The same fate then befalls a turntable (“bringer of so many unnecessary band members!”), a seventh guitar string and a baseball cap.

Finally, the coffin’s shut and taken outside, where it’s lowered into the earth. But our good reverend isn’t done. “In the name of Halford, I compel you!” he screams, spraying holy water into the grave. “By the power of Dio, I compel you! By the blood of Dickinson, I compel you! The body of Blackmore compels you!”

For a grand finale, the vicar only grows more and more animated as he repeatedly yells, “The power of Ozzy compels you!”, complete with his hands throwing the metal horns as if they were a sacred holy symbol.

“You may desecrate the deceased as you see fit,” he finishes as the scene fades to black. And, considering nu metal would take almost 20 years to make a stylistic comeback, we can assume the coffin was then buried very, very deep.

Watch the classic piece of footage below.

Nu metal, more than any other subgenre in heavy metal's rich and vast tapestry, is the absolute king of rock club dancefloor bangers. For well over two decades, the scene that turned Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park et al into household names has been dominating DJ mixes, its greatest hits influencing everyone from Spiritbox to Rina Sawayama. 

Sadly, when it comes to world class albums, nu metal's hit rate slows down a little. Sure, heavyweights like Korn, System Of A Down, Deftones and Slipknot have put out absolute, iron-clad, classic records, but by the time the New Millennium kicked properly into gear, it seemed that for every White Pony or Toxicity, there was a bucketload of also-rans and one-hit-wonders clogging up the joint, unable to produce the goods for long enough to sustain a full LP. Within a few years, even some of nu metal's most reliable names had become guilty of putting out sub-par material.

With that in mind, here are ten nu metal albums that just didn't live up to the genre's heady heights - but at least managed to sneak in one certified anthem along the way.

Limp Bizkit - Eat You Alive (Results May Vary, 2003)

By the time Limp Bizkit were finally able to put out the follow-up to 2000's squillion-selling, hit-stacked Chocolate Starfish And The Hot Dog Flavored Water, nu metal was dying on its arse. Meanwhile, Bizkit themselves had lost their talismanic guitarist Wes Borland, meaning they were lacking both a key songwriter and an iconic part of the band's larger-than-life image. Results May Vary needed to make an almighty statement to keep the Jacksonville crew on top of the metal mountain. Sadly, the record was a monumental drop-off from Chocolate Starfish...; Fred Durst's attempts to embrace a slightly grittier, more serious side to the band were commendable, but the songs just weren't up to scratch. While their earnest cover of The Who's Behind Blue Eyes has since taken on a life of its own, there's only one original Bizkit composition worth anyone's time here: the driving, crushingly heavy Eat You Alive. 

The Union Underground - Turn Me On "Mr Deadman" (An Education In Rebellion, 2000)

Signed to Columbia and armed with an absolute beast of a lead single in Turn Me On "Mr Deadman" (albeit one whose lyrics haven't aged entirely well thanks to the clunky inclusion of a Dire Straits-inspired slur in the second verse), Texan nu-industrial mob The Union Underground had all the tools to be massive. Unfortunately, An Education In Rebellion just didn't match up to its most famous cut, leaving the four-piece resigned to residing in nu metal's great dustbin of also-rans. The Union Underground wouldn't even release another album after this, although they did get a brief stay of execution by providing the theme to WWE Monday Night Raw for a couple of years with Across The Nation. 

Korn - Evolution (Untitled, 2007)

Remember that period in the mid-00s where Korn had that backing band made up of musicians in animal masks? That was weird, wasn't it? Anyway, musically that era was undoubtedly a mixed bag for nu metal's founding fathers, reaching a nadir in the almost entirely forgettable Untitiled album that landed in 2007. We say almost entirely forgettable because, to be fair, Evolution remains an absolute worldie of a track: a catchy, up-tempo, no-nonsense Korn rager that we'd happily see return to the Bakersfield boys' setlists soon.

Taproot - Poem (Welcome, 2002)

Taproot were probably just a little too late to the game when they got their first real breakthrough hit with Poem. Dropping in 2002, it was one of the last insta-classic anthems of nu metal's great takeover, peaking at Number 5 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock Chart and earning the Michigan mob their place on nu metal greatest hits playlists forevermore. Sadly, that's as good as it got for the band, not least because the album from which Poem came, Welcome, is as derivative and by-the-nu-numbers as it gets. Ah well.

Adema - The Way You Like It (Adema, 2001)

Hailing from the same town as Korn and featuring Jonathan Davis' half-brother Mark Chavez in their ranks, Adema certainly had the DNA of nu metal royalty running through their veins. Unfortunately, they just didn't have the chops to stand out in an increasingly crowded field, with 2001's self-titled album - the closest they got to any real widespread recognition - doing little more than rehashing ideas other bands had done better. There was one gleaming diamond in the rough, though: The Way You Like It, whose propulsive, r'n'b-inflected beats and gleaming production makes it sound way ahead of its time when revisited over two decades later. 

Crazy Town - Butterfly (The Gift Of Game, 1999)

Look, no one is saying that Shifty Shellshock is amongst music's most subtle lyricists, but Butterfly isn't one of the most popular songs of its era for nothing. Firstly, it packs one of the most simple but effective uses of a guitar sample ever, lifting John Frusciante's woozy riff from Red Hot Chili Peppers jam Pretty Little Ditty to rock club immortality. Secondly, it's just catchy as hell; an instant earworm that helped its parent album, 1999's The Gift Of Game, eventually shift millions of copies. Which is a miracle, really, given that the rest of the album is somewhat bum.

Papa Roach - She Loves Me Not (Lovehatetragedy, 2002)

When you've produced one of the greatest albums of nu metal's boom period, you can be forgiven for letting your foot off the gas a little, but there can be no arguing that Papa Roach's follow-up to the mighty Infest, 2002's Lovehatetragedy, brutally pales in comparison to its predecessor. It'd be churlish to say everything here is truly bad - Time And Time Again would be an upper tier Roach track were it not for its laboured chorus - but the fact that She Loves Me Not is the record's only cut with any kind of legacy speaks volumes. Thankfully, Papa Roach would go on to prove they were no flash-in-the-pans with later efforts, but Lovehatetragedy wouldn't come close to troubling 2000s nu metal's Mount Rushmore of great albums.

Staind - Mudshovel (Dysfunction, 1999)

You wouldn't know it from the amount of time he spends ranting and regurgitating nonsense conspiracy theories on stage these days, but Aaron Lewis has a band! Staind would ultimately find their biggest success in the 2000s by pivoting towards the post-grunge sound that'd dominate much of the US metal scene as the decade progressed, incredibly nabbing a UK number one album with 2001's Break The Cycle. While that album at least boasted a couple of classic tracks in Outside and It's Been A While, 1999's Dysfunction really offers nothing of interest other than Mudshovel, a groovy, angsty burst of late-90s nu metal that remains one of the band's biggest hits. The rest of the record is one to skip, though. Much like an Aaron Lewis gig in 2023.

Drowning Pool - Bodies (Sinner, 2001)

Perhaps it's a little unfair to write off Sinner completely - Tear Away was also a minor hit and has over 75 million streams, for a start - but the fact is that everything else on Drowning Pool's debut album is completely dwarfed in terms of quality and lasting impact by Bodies. One of the all-time-great nu metal ragers, it proved that when they put their mind to it, the Dallas brutes were capable of crafting arena-worthy anthems. Sadly, with the sudden death of vocalist Dave Williams the following year, we never got to see if the band were truly capable of capturing lightning in a bottle for a second time.

Coal Chamber - Fiend (Dark Days, 2002)

Such is the strength of the nostalgia train currently doing laps around nu metal that some people seem to forget that, as fun and colourful as Coal Chamber were, Dez Fafara's output with Devildriver has spectacularly eclipsed that of his previous band. Case in point? Coal Chamber's 2002 album Dark Days, a record that didn't do anything to disprove the notion that the LA spookycore squad's schtick was starting to feel out of step with metal's evolution. The record did, however, produce a world class track in Fiend, still one of the best songs of Fafara's career and a classic of the era.

The weatherman has advised we dress for the 90s today – by which he means that temperatures will be nudging a scorching 95˚F (35˚C), and we should all be liberally coated in sunblock and wearing white. Unless, of course, you are one of an estimated 85,000 people attending the highly anticipated Sick New World festival at the Las Vegas Festival Grounds, in which case, black from head to toe is the order of the day. With the Festival Grounds located at the far end of the Vegas strip, there’s a long walk in the heat, a dark swarm of people converging on the site from every direction, and long lines to get in. 

Still, the view’s impressive, with the famous Circus Circus Hotel & Casino looming large. It was here, in the early 70s, that legendary gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson made a name for himself on his drug-addled quest to find the heart of the American dream, commenting, as he did so, on the fading embers of 60s counterculture. Perhaps one of his most important and moving passages, known now as ‘the wave speech’ talked of how that generation believed they would prevail over the ‘forces of old and evil’. Such is the beautiful naivety of youth. No small wonder that future generations were angry. Some 50 years later, the hippies are long gone, their place taken by subsequent generations of freaks and rebels who saw themselves sitting outside of mainstream culture. 

In the late 90s and early 00s, it was the turn of nu metal and alternative rock, movements that burned with a countercultural spirit before being commercialised and having the life sucked out of them. But even that was more than 20 years ago. In 2023, nostalgia rules, and for one blazing day in May, that era lives once more in the Las Vegas Festival Grounds. Sick New World is nu metal’s answer to When We Were Young – the hugely successful emo revival festival held here last year, headlined by My Chemical Romance and Paramore. 

Today’s headliners are System Of A Down, and the 50-band undercard features Korn, Deftones, Incubus, Evanescence, Papa Roach, Coal Chamber, P.O.D., Sevendust, Alien Ant Farm, Soulfly, Hoobastank, Kittie and Orgy, plus a selection of other big bands from the era and a smattering of new ones. Even the poster artwork, featuring a doll-like creature with its mouth sewn up, recalls Korn’s 1999 album Issues. Is this what the counterculture looks like in 2023? Let’s go in and find out…

Walking into the Festival Grounds, across a purple carpet leading to what’s essentially a huge car park, we’re struck by how young the crowd is. While Gen X and millennials are in attendance, Gen Z-ers are everywhere – perhaps indicative of nu metal’s recent resurgence. Opening the festival are Santa Cruz five-piece Scowl, on the Sick Stage, who fall into this category. They might be a hardcore punk band who formed in 2019, but they’ve toured with Limp Bizkit and have a healthy respect for late 90s/early 00s culture. 

“Nu metal rules!” enthuses green-haired singer Kat Moss, as we catch up with the band backstage in an airconditioned tent. “I fuck with nu metal and all types of music. But I think when it comes to genres and labels, sometimes things just stick, and nobody involved in that world had any intentions of it. We all enjoy nu metal, and I would say it’s influenced us in the way of, ‘Do what you want, have fun, and fuck the rest.’" 

When Scowl toured with Limp Bizkit, they found them to be “super nice” and unfairly vilified; last year’s two Woodstock ’99 documentaries painted Fred Durst as a rabblerouser who knowingly goaded jocks into causing trouble. 

“It’s funny,” says Scowl bassist Bailey Lupo, “because he talks about how he was never friends with people like that. I think there’s some satirical moments that the jocks didn’t catch, and the whole time, they were poking fun at the jocks.” 

Limp Bizkit have undergone a revival, their 2010s career slump reversed by Fred Durst’s knowing ‘Dad Vibes’ look of a white wig and slacks, the release of 2021’s Still Sucks after a decade-long wait, and a string of party-starting tours. 

At the same time, there’s been an explosion of nu metal in popular culture, whether it’s newer bands taking influence from the sound (Spiritbox and Loathe are playing today), viral songs and clothing trends on TikTok, or the soundtrack of Netflix’s recent horror/comedy Beef. Is nu metal popular again? 

“I think guitar music is getting popular again,” says Kat. “Young people are craving that energy. There’s a lot of reasons to be angry in this world, and nu metal has a place in that.” 

Stepping out into the heat once more, we find that while Kat is angry about “women’s reproductive rights and the fact that black and transgender people have to live in fear”, the audience is more pissed off about the lack of shade and a merch line that must be a mile long. To be fair, there are free water refills, and this is not the kind of hardy crowd who’d cope well with three days of mud at Download. But as the medics start carting sunstroke victims away, it becomes evident that wearing a leather trench coat was not a wise idea. It also becomes evident that jamming a three-day festival line-up into one day doesn’t work. 

Fifty band names look impressive on a poster, but you probably won’t get to see more than a handful, especially with the two smaller stages (Sick and Spiral) running concurrently. They’re also side by side, meaning you can often hear two bands simultaneously. Long walks and short set times also mean bands frequently finish before you’re close enough to check them out. 

Kittie overlaps with Melvins, who overlap with Mr. Bungle, and so on. Kittie are looking on the bright side: their set on the Sick Stage is well received, not least the debut of a new song called Vultures and crowd favourite Brackish. The band were happy to get a second chance after reuniting at last year’s When We Were Young festival, essentially ending a 10-year hiatus. 

“It was the same people who put on Sick New World, and they made us an offer we couldn’t refuse, financially and otherwise,” singer Morgan Lander tells us in the press area. “It seemed like a really good opportunity. The line-up was cool, and we just weren’t getting those kind of offers.” 

Morgan has seen a new generation waking up to the excitement nu metal’s offered all along. “There’s definitely a resurgence of it,” she smiles. “It didn’t really go away. It was hiding in the depths of southern America for a long time. It just took a bunch of kids whose parents grew up listening to that music to get old enough to like it. A lot of those kids never got to see Kittie play, because the first album [1999’s Spit] was 20 years ago, when nu metal was first happening.”

We go outside to talk to some of the “kids”, pretty much all in their 20s, often dressed in what their parents would have worn in the 90s. Korn shirts and baggy pants are everywhere. Lani is from Huntington Beach, California, and is wearing Disturbia vegan leather clothing. She came here to see Deftones. “I grew up with nu metal,” she says. “My dad listened to it a lot, and I rediscovered it during my teenage years.” 

Nu metallers, the next gen, cooking nicely on the barrier Meanwhile, Carlos, from LA, got into nu metal via his brother. Late to the scene, he was confused about which bands were a part of it. “He was into System, and I was a little Catholic boy. I heard, ‘When angels deserve to die’ [the lyric in Chop Suey] and I was like, ‘What? Who says that about angels?!” he laughs. “But it intrigued me. Are Papa Roach nu metal? P.O.D.? System? Korn? I didn’t know they were considered nu metal until I’d already heard them.” 

Frankly, it’s kinda weird, and perhaps a little sad. There is no real sense of nostalgia, simply because they weren’t around for the inception of nu metal. With few exceptions, all the bands playing Sick New World have been around longer than the kids, and even some of the newer bands such as Turnstile have been around for more than a decade. Backstage, we see if P.O.D. can offer any insight. 

Formed in San Diego, California, in 1992, they were riding the nu metal wave before it even had a name, but had a breakout hit with 2001’s Alive. They’ve consistently released successful records since the genre’s peak. Like many bands, they don’t really care for the moniker, it just happens to be what stuck. 

“Everything comes back around, and we’re at that age now where you have 15-year-olds discovering music and going, ‘Hey, I kinda like that,’” grins frontman Sonny Sandoval. “But that’s what music is supposed to do. You’re supposed to be digging in the crates and checking all these bands out. It doesn’t change what we do; we’ve been making music for 30 years. We didn’t even call it nu metal, someone made up that name. We were influenced by punk rock, hip hop, reggae… all kinds of stuff. I guess this was a new kind of metal.” 

Is there a difference in the crowd, these days? 

“I think these kids are starting to realise that all us old guys were young once, too,” says Sonny, “and we were in the moshpit and flying off the stage. For a while, it seemed like that scene kinda died, and I don’t know why. We’re an energetic band and we love getting involved, even if it’s 120˚. We wanna get busy!” 

The truth is, the kids are not getting particularly ‘busy’ today, the heat having taken its toll – something Sonny acknowledges when they open the main, Purple Stage. “You’ve gotta be safe, drink lots of water, have a good time,” he says. “Thank you for supporting all these years, and thank you to all you newbies who are out today listening to us!” 

Then they play Alive with a guest spot from Jinjer singer Tatiana Shmayluk – she’s married to their drummer, Alex Lopez – in a nod to the following generation. We head over to catch Ministry (representing 90s industrial today along with Filter, Skinny Puppy and Stabbing Westward) whose set is running 15 minutes late and cut short by two songs, due to what Al Jourgensen calls “incompetence” on the part of the festival. 

Worse is to come. Bodycount are all but unlistenable due to sound issues; The Birthday Massacre suffered the same problems earlier in the day and stormed offstage. Cradle Of Filth’s headline set on the Sick Stage will later be delayed by 30 minutes, only to be unceremoniously cut due to curfew restrictions. Power off, lights on, go home. 

With tickets starting at $250 (£200), this is not good value by any measure. $17,000 (£13,500) for a VIP cabana is not what metal, nu or otherwise, is about. Or maybe it is, in 2023, since they all sold out. But hey, you get to skip that merch line.

For all the gripes, Sick New World has its moments. Korn are magnificent, with nine of their 14 songs from the 90s. The crowd sing the opening riff of Blind and, as expected, a proper pit kicks off. There’s a snippet of Queen’s We Will Rock You during Coming Undone, and Metallica’s One during Shoots And Ladders. Incidentally, Jonathan’s wearing Adidas again. 

Headliners System Of A Down play a massive 31-song set, kicking off with Prison Song – “SICK NEW WORLD!” screams guitarist Daron Malakian during the intro, before Serj Tankian has even sung a note – and including rarities like Darts and Peephole. They sound great, but there’s a feeling they’re dialling it in. Perhaps it’s because, unlike Korn, they haven’t released an album in 18 years (since 2005’s Hypnotise). 

“I noticed that nobody’s pitting very much,” says Daron before Suite-Pee. “Is pitting not allowed in this motherfucker? Are they telling you not to pit? I’m telling you to pit.” 

It gets a cheer, but nothing more. On a good day, System Of A Down can fill your heart with joy, or make you shed a tear. Tonight, they’re something to watch, something to dance to, if you still have the energy. It’s not life-changing as it once was. As nu metal once was. At the end of Toxicity, people start to drift away, before realising there’s another song. 

And then, 85,000 people all try to leave at once, skint and sunburned. There doesn’t seem to be any sense of elation, just a need to go home. Except that Uber want $95 (£75) for a $12 (£10) ride, just like Sick New World wanted $18 (£14) for a $3 (£2.50) beer. Instead, we head to a Korean restaurant already packed with festival-goers who had the same idea. Order something cheap and keep hitting the refresh button until prices go down. Again, there is no sense of elation, just exhaustion. 

Hunter S. Thompson came to Las Vegas half a century ago as part of his search for the American Dream. Back then, he found only the fading remnants of the 1960s counter-culture, a pallid imitation of what it once had been. Fifty years on, it turns out little has changed. 

Skindred are a British national treasure. Slaying every stage they turn up on and conquering just about every festival from Download and Bloodstock to Boomtown and Glastonbury, it's not least thanks to their irrepressible frontman Benji Webbe that they've become rightly acclaimed as one of the UK's greatest ever live acts. We grabbed Webbe himself for a chat about nu metal, dogs, Eurovision and why Skindred will always spread the love. 

Come on then, Benji – when are Skindred gonna do Eurovision?

“You know what, bro, I’m a champion for Europe and if we got the opportunity, we’d sing it loud and proud. Johnny Rotten and PiL tried out [this year with the song Hawaii] and I thought it was great; if we keep hiding in metal world that’s all we can ever do, but I want to shine a light on our music, let the world see how strong and passionate we are.”

Nu metal’s blowing up again. Did you ever feel like Dub War or Skindred fit in with that crowd?

“To me, bands like Coal Chamber and Spineshank were proper nu metal. Bands like us and Vacant Stare came up at the same time, but I think it’s just metal getting some new influences rather than being part of it. We were always the weird kids in the class.”

What’s the wildest thing you did during the nu metal heyday?

“I’m more the guy who gets people to do crazy things! I did once jump off a roof into a pool when at the barbecue of a band called Snot, which is pretty cool.”

A few years back you presented BBC TV show Give A Dog A Home. Why are dogs so important to you?

“I think dogs are humans that can’t talk anymore, come back from heaven to be comforting and loving to us. They’re amazing. I had a couple growing up and they were my best friends. It was so lovely to take some poor rescue dogs and find families for them – it’s a great idea and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. God bless Lily Savage [Paul O’Grady, late drag queen, presenter and animal campaigner].”

What’s all this about you hating Skindred’s last album, Big Tings?

“You know what it is, we got into a lot of scraps with that record. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I do like the songs, don’t get me wrong, but when I think about what the band was going through, it was pretty gruelling. Still, 20 years with the same line-up – we’re doing something right.”

Is there a message behind your new album, Smile?

“Always! Just as Stephen King will always write about horror, Skindred always write about unity and love. Fortunately, I grew up in a community that was diversely mixed with different nationalities and colours, because that made me want to reach out to other communities and say, ‘We can all live together.’”

Since the pandemic, Skindred have played some massive shows. Do you feel like you guys are finally getting the dues you’ve always deserved?

“It’s really nice to be rewarded with stuff like the Kiss tour, the Volbeat tour – all that stuff. But there’s still a hell of a long way to go. I hope we’ll eventually get to a point where more people have heard of Skindred than haven’t. Until we get that, I’ll never be happy.”

How did you find out Nobody had gone viral on TikTok?

“My niece is R’n’B as fuck and I couldn’t even understand what she was saying when she called me – I thought someone had died! She called back when she calmed down and said, ‘Your song Nobody is viral, people are doing this dance to it’, and I couldn’t believe it when I realised it was millions of people.”

Which song from the upcoming album is going to go viral on TikTok?

“[scoffs] I don’t know, bro! I reckon Set Fazers is one of those massive dancefloor fillers; it’s one everyone at [Nottingham venue] Rock City will request on a Saturday night. We’re not about just making one track that’ll make you shell out a tenner for the album – we want to give you life tools.”

What reggae record would you say every metal fan needs to hear?

“I’d say one that was released about six years ago called I Haven’t Been Nicking In Ages by a young man from Newport, South Wales, called Benji Webbe. You find that album, it’s the ultimate metal reggae barbecue for your summer. All the other artists can fuck off – I’m picking my album!”

Originally published in Metal Hammer #375

As divisive today as it was popular during its early 2000s heyday, there can be no doubting that nu metal has been one of the most impactful and widely debated sub genres to ever hit heavy music. It's produced some of metal's most colourful characters, churned out enough one-hit wonders to fill a rock club Saturday night playlist and resulted in the kinds of collaborations we'd have previously never thought possible, but as far as producing music that can spark a real, tangible emotional pull goes, nu metal has often been rather overlooked.

Despite its reputation as a braggadocio, obnoxious corner of the metal scene, however, nu metal is absolutely capable of creating emotional moments, be they amazing covers of classic power ballads, unexpected detours into deeply personal subject matter or team-ups that had us all wiping a tear or two away. Here, then, are ten times nu metal unexpectedly hit us right in the feels.

Korn - Daddy

The earliest sign of nu metal's capacity to deeply move us came right at ground zero, on the final track of Korn's game-changing debut album. Daddy painfully recounts frontman Jonathan Davis' experiences of chid abuse, namely his parents' refusal to believe him when he told them and the agony that lack of belief has caused him since. The track famously ends with poor Davis weeping his heart out, making this one of the most upsetting and difficult listens ever committed to tape. Last year, Davis told Metal Hammer that he never wants to play the song live again, and we can understand why.

Slipknot - Vermilion Pt. 2

It'd be plainly ridiculous to suggest Slipknot aren't an emotional band - those first two albums are almost nothing but raw, unbridled pain, rage and anguish - but the Iowans really spread their wings on this Vol. 3 number, showing a level of sensitivity we hadn't previously seen from them. An delicate, acoustic sequel to the far heavier but similarly soul-wrenching Vermilion - also on Vol. 3 - it captures the heartache that comes from that most universal of lived experiences: unrequited love. Vermillion Pt. 2 was all the proof you need that you don't need distorted guitars to move people.

Limp Bizkit - Behind Blue Eyes

Classic rock diehards scoffed their tits off at the image of a topless Fred Durst gazing mournfully into the camera as he croons to this 2003 reworking of a Who classic. It clearly struck a chord regardless: two decades on, Bizkit's take on Behind Blue Eyes stands as one of their most popular songs, their third most-streamed song ever and a cover capable of producing the kind of full-hearted, emotional singalongs Ed Sheeran would be proud of. Plus, when all is said and done, it's a fucking great cover. There, we said it. 

Korn and Amy Lee - Freak On A Leash

Korn's classic Freak On A Leash might be more likely to induce mayhem in the mosh pit than bring tears to our eyes in its original form, but this gorgeous reworking from the Bakersfield boys' 2006 MTV Unplugged concert was special. Stripping the track back and adding in bonus strings and fresh percussion, it unlocked a stirring, ethereal new take on a nu metal banger. Its legacy is so strong that Korn and Amy Lee made headlines when revisiting the collab on their co-headline tour last year.

Disturbed - The Sound Of Silence

Imagine if someone told you at the start of the 2010s that a) Disturbed would be bigger than ever, b) their most famous song wouldn't be Down With The Sickness and c) in its place would an absurdly powerful cover of a Simon And Garfunkel song? Nonetheless, when David Draiman et al included a cover of The Sound Of Silence on 2015 album Immortalized, the track took on a life of its own, racking up almost a billion views on YouTube. A billion. Now, the cover is a setlist staple and sounds even more impactful live. Fair play, lads. 

System Of A Down - Roulette

No one should be surprised by System Of A Down's capacity to pluck at our heartstrings - all the way back on their 1998 debut, Spiders had a beautiful swell of emotion lying under its unhinged exoskeleton - but rarely did the band sound so delicately succinct as on Roulette, the beautiful acoustic joint snuck near the end of their ace 2002 b-sides collection, Steal This Album!. An achingly earnest ballad that Daron Malakian once described simply as a "pretty song about a pretty girl", it's one of the album's most popular cuts to this day. 

Linkin Park - One More Light

Linkin Park's final studio album, One More Light, received admittedly mixed reviews upon its release, but its title track has taken on an agonisingly poignant new meaning since the devastating loss of Chester Bennington in 2017. A man who was never afraid to bear his emotions, his tear-jerking performance of the song on Jimmy Kimmel's talk show a few weeks before his death will linger long in the memory - not least because it was dedicated to Chester's dear friend Chris Cornell, who we also sadly lost that same year. 

Snot ft. Lajon Witherspoon - Angel's Son

The tragic story of Snot is a well-worn tale in the world of late-90s metal, but the shocking death of frontman Lynn Strait in a car crash wasn't quite the end of the band. They did manage to rally for one more studio album - a heartfelt tribute to their singer, titled Strait Up and released in 2000. It featured a host of special guest stars, and by far the record's most effective moment came from Angel's Son, a collaboration between Snot guitarist Sonny Mayo and Sevendust. It was the centrepiece of a heartwarming response to a senseless tragedy.

Seether and Amy Lee - Broken

One of the most enduringly popular songs released by either artist (it's clocked up almost 250 million streams on Spotify alone), Seether's collab with Amy Lee remains a perfect slice of earnest, full-hearted 00s metal power balladry. The video, featuring both Lee and her then-boyfriend, Seether frontman Shaun Morgan, sadly plodding around an empty wasteland, was in constant rotation on the likes of Scuzz and Kerrang TV. Given that Lee would go on and pen bitter anthem Call Me When You're Sober in the aftermath of her break-up with Morgan, we're not sure if this is a team-up she'd be mega keen to revisit, but her contributions to this reworked version of Seether's original 2002 track undoubtedly elevated it to greatness.

Deftones - No Ordinary Love

Suggest to a Deftones lover that the band don't have any emotional songs and you'll likely be subjected to an impassioned speech fit for a Ted Talk, but the fact is that their lovely cover of Sade's No Ordinary Love struck a slightly different chord to what fans were used to. Chino Moreno's diaphanous tones are perfectly suited to a version which takes a shimmering pop classic and morphs it into a breathy, gothic epic. Perhaps not a total surprise, but a delight nonetheless.

By the end of 2003, the writing was on the wall for nu metal. That summer, Limp Bizkit had been chased offstage at a Metallica gig in Chicago by a hostile crowd chanting “Fuck Fred Durst!” A few months later, they’d struggled to replicate the success of 2000’s Chocolate Starfish And The Hot Dog Flavored Water with its Wes Borland-less follow-up, Results May Vary. Onetime running mates Korn had received a lukewarm reception with their sixth album, Take A Look In The Mirror, and one-hit wonders like Crazy Town, Soil and Adema had, erm, failed to get another hit.

More astute bands, though, had read the signs. Like Deftones and Slipknot, who’d jumped ship years before, Papa Roach had also clocked the finite nature of the genre’s jock strap posturing. Aware they would need to mix up their formula to survive the inevitable, steadily approaching nu metal cliff-drop, the band had already started putting in the groundwork, embracing a harder rock edge on 2002’s Lovehatetragedy. By 2004’s Getting Away With Murder, they’d ditched the rapping, oversized Dickies and wallet chains completely, transitioning to a sound designed to ensure that when the end came, they would be clear of the debris.

“To be honest, I didn’t like 80% of the ‘nu metal’ bands,” admitted frontman Jacoby Shaddix in an interview with Metal Hammer years later. “I was like, ‘This is fucking weak.’ When we were dubbed nu metal, we hated it. We did everything we could to rebel against it [Jacoby's stance on nu metal has since softened]. I didn’t want to be compared to every other band and be stigmatised. I wanted to prove myself as a valid rock singer and Getting Away With Murder was a turning point for our band, especially with a song like Scars. You listen to that song and you don’t think of nu metal. You think, ‘Fuck that’s a great song!’”

Not everyone was convinced that there was life after nu metal; for one, the band’s label, Geffen Records, was far from enamoured when Papa Roach turned in Getting Away With Murder. “DreamWorks Records got bought out so we went over to Universal and got pushed over to Geffen,” Jacoby recalled. “The president of the company was not impressed with the album. He was like, ‘I think this band’s had its time and is essentially over.’ We did not feel that way. We’re always evolving – that’s been something even before we put out [2000 breakthrough] Infest. We were like, ‘We think we’re sitting on an album that’s amazing and you are using your preconceived notions about a dying genre and I’m not dying with the genre, period.’”

Despite the misgivings of the label, Getting Away With Murder went on to sell 1.5 million copies: success that not only bought the band a vindicating degree of artistic freedom, but finally won them Geffen’s full support. So much so that, when it came to writing and recording the next record, The Paramour Sessions, in December 2005, the label agreed to let them spend the next six months living in Los Angeles’ Paramour Mansion. The band had wanted to create something dripping in rock’n’roll superfluity – and let’s be fair, nothing screams “excess” more than a 15-bedroom, 15-bathroom residence atop the highest hill overlooking Los Angeles, in the celebrity neighbourhood of Silver Lake.

“At this point in our career we were just off to the races, anything goes, we weren’t trapped,” remembered Jacoby, grinning. “We said, ‘Let’s go live a fucking rock’n’roll dream in a crazy mansion,’ but we didn’t live out a fantasy, we lived out a fucking reality. The owner of the home had the coolest taste. There was a stuffed polar bear in one room, a fucking stuffed lion in another… a taxidermy tiger… all this antique furniture. Being in that type of space brought something new out of us. We just went nuts and recorded an over-the-top rock record.”

At the time, Jacoby was listening to a ton of Queen and Mötley Crüe, which had manifested in both the band’s music and his image. By the time the album was released, Papa Roach looked like a band reborn. Out were the sullen teens mired in angst. In was bollock-throttling leather and a lot of guyliner. They’d done the hard work by shaking off the nu metal tag, now they needed a song to secure the longevity of their sonic evolution… and they struck gold with …To Be Loved.

During the Getting Away With Murder tour, Jacoby had been walking about backstage, singing a melody he’d cooked up months before as part of his warm-up. The rest of the band had latched onto the tune, keen to see if they could fit it onto a riff and with the hook already in place, it was one of the first tracks to be laid down at the Paramour Mansion. That snippet became …To Be Loved’s irrepressible chorus, packing that now-iconic, swelling, gang chant: ‘WOOOAAAHHH, I never give in. WOOOAAAHHH, I never give up, WOOOAAAHHH, I never give in, and I just wanna be, wanna be loved.’

“It just had that vibe, we knew it from the beginning,” remembered Jacoby. “I remember jamming that song [at the Mansion], looking out this, I guess the window was at least 20 feet tall, over LA. We sent it to the record company and they were like, ‘This could be huge.’”

This time their label got it spot on; the song went balls-to-the-wall massive and it gave Papa Roach a new lease of life, firmly establishing them in a new age where emo and metalcore bands like My Chemical Romance and Killswitch Engage were the reigning kings. Granted, the album itself was a patchy affair, the product of a band still feeling their way around a new sound, but …To Be Loved was a moment where they resolutely nailed it. A shameless, glammed-up rock’n’roll banger, it positively burst with Papa Roach’s now-trademark take-on-the-world exuberance.

Of course, it’s the chorus that everyone remembers, but the verses too pack a punch, all fighting talk wrapped up in glossy anthemia with Jacoby firing back at everyone who had ever doubted him and affirming you can never lose when you listen to your gut ‘I gotta follow my heart,’ he sings. ‘No matter how far. I gotta roll the dice. Never look back and never think twice.’ Even now, it’s still one of the most triumphant hooks they’ve ever written. 

As rip roaring as the song is, though, it’s the video that takes it to the next level, a revelation that was completely removed from anything we’d seen from Papa Roach before. Reflecting the exaggerated environment in which it was made, it has the band committing high sacrilege by turning a cavernous church into the kind of club even Poison wouldn’t take their mothers to. The band are surrounded by partying, fire- breathing models and, in the middle of it all, Jacoby commands the altar, kitted out in leather and a shitload of hairspray while PVC-clad trapeze artists swing over his head.

Not long after its release, the WWE picked up the song and for three years used it as the theme tune for flagship show Monday Night Raw. The exposure brought Papa Roach to brand new audiences and not long after that, along with Mastodon, they supported Iron Maiden on their 2007 A Matter Of Life And Death tour. It gave the band the opportunity to find out just how successful their transformation had been, in front of the most exacting and intimidating of metal audiences.

“I was like, ‘Fuck, Maiden fans… I don’t know, man. Are they going to love or hate us?’” said Jacoby later. “We get up there and we play …To Be Loved and instantly the crowd just goes apeshit crazy. I’m going, ‘What?! I knew this song was a hit, but not this kind of hit. What’s going on?’” 

These days we're in the full swing of a nu metal revival and although Papa Roach will always be considered one of that genre’s greatest exports, they’ve now shut down the critics who had them pegged as rap- rock also-rans. Undoubtedly, though, …To Be Loved was the song that set them on a path they’re still on to this day, pushing their music in consistently new directions and confounding expectations. 

“It was definitely a pinnacle track for us,” agreed Jacoby in his Hammer interview. “It was like us staking our claim again, like, ‘We’re still here, we’re doing what we believe in and what we love.’ Every song and record is a statement like that and that was another one of those moments in our career when we said, ‘We’re not going away, you can’t get rid of us.’”