We’re always being told that everything is cyclical, but for a certain strain of millennials the recent reappearance of enormous, suffocatingly heavy jeans on the youth of today will have sparked a massive nostalgia hit. Nu-metal, that much-maligned beast, is back. From Fontaines D.C. riffing on its tropes in the build up to their new record to hardcore bands far and wide — shout out to Candy’s recent album ‘It’s Inside You’ — tuning down to its stomach-rupturing heaviness, it’s sidestepped novelty status for the first time in decades. Well, unless you’re talking about Korn, that is.
Through thick and thin, the Bakersfield mob have remained, mutating and retrofitting their sound, spinning off into dubstep and industrial noise at one moment and turning in an old school teeth-smasher the next. Want proof that Korn can still draw? Alongside shows in Scarborough and Halifax in the coming weeks, on August 11 they’ll be joined by Denzel Curry, Spiritbox, Wargasm and Loathe at London’s Gunnersbury Park for their biggest UK show to date, some 30 years on from the release of their genre-defining debut. Here we roll the clock back through some of the evolutionary steps that brought their inimitable noise to the masses.
Blind - ‘Korn’, 1994
Here’s your blueprint. Downtuned, crushing, emotionally-coruscating. Blind, and the band’s self-titled bow, were both pit fuel and something more nuanced, pulling on Jonathan Davis’s trauma in a manner that continues to feel painful and real. No matter how stupid nu-metal became, Korn were never a joke. This is perhaps the reason why — they meant it. But their influence also quickly started to spread in a manner they couldn’t have possibly anticipated. They were a mishmash of hip hop heads and metallers whose clothes — witness Davis’s tracksuit in the Blind video — reshaped fashion for kids involved in heavy music. “It changed everything, man, and I’m not saying that because I was in the band, but I started seeing kids in baggy clothes and metal kids in Adidas,” Davis told Noisey in 2015.
Got the Life - ‘Follow the Leader’, 1998
After 1997’s ‘Life is Peachy’ did a fine job of reasserting Korn’s original sound, it was time to change things up. Stepping away from producer Ross Robinson for the first time, ‘Follow the Leader’ leaned hard into the band’s rap influences, calling on features from Ice Cube and members of The Pharcyde, while spinning off some truly iconic imagery from sleeve art courtesy of Spawn creator Todd McFarlane. Got the Life’s video, one of the most popular in the history of MTV’s flagship TRL show, doubled down on the gloss while smashing up expensive stuff with the intention of making an anti-consumerist statement. That’s the late ‘90s in a nutshell.
Falling Away from Me - ‘Issues’, 1999
Given the cultural cachet of the preceding entries on this list, ‘Issues’ is a bit of a sleeper hit. It’s low-key in a way that ‘Follow the Leader’ really isn’t but it’s also lean and mean, heavy and foreboding, to its black heart. Davis, going cold turkey after years of drink and drug addiction, delivers some of his most harrowing work and also some of his most melodic, while the riffs trade in crushing weight to match his gut-level outpourings. Falling Away from Me is the perfect example — it’s bludgeoning and unforgiving, but it’s also a total earworm that won’t leave you. “I was so used to being drunk because that would take away my inhibitions,” Davis told Kerrang! of making the record. “I can be myself, I can freak the fuck out and it won’t matter. Now I’m sober, fuck. Most of the art that came out [previously], I was on something that breaks down that filter, so I had to learn how to deal and be creative again, but I was going through it.”
Thoughtless - ‘Untouchables’, 2002
If ‘Issues’ was about getting to the point — it was recorded in a matter of months — then ‘Untouchables’ was about excess. It took years and millions of dollars to make, with a band falling apart at the seams seeking to keep it together long enough to make their version of a gleaming, monolithic rock record. Compared with the grimy, lived-in feel of their earlier work, against the odds they managed to nail that goal. Riven by interpersonal conflict and with the budget spiralling, it takes a song like Thoughtless to make the vision clear. Bolstered by grinding riffs and a break-it-open Davis hook, this is the cleanest, the boldest, Korn have ever sounded, without ever straying too far from their core materials. Its video, starring a pre-Breaking Bad Aaron Paul, is a prime example of early 2000s angst and bug-eyed imagery.
Narcissistic Cannibal - ‘The Path of Totality’, 2011
Having cycled through different identities during their imperial phase, Korn’s late work has been interesting for the way they’ve pressed forward while occasionally doubling back on themselves. This dynamic has led to expansive, unusual records such as 2007’s ‘Untitled’ sharing space with ‘The Paradigm Shift’, more a reassertion of deeply-ingrained power. Amid them all, ‘The Path of Totality’ is unique. An embrace of a moment in time, it melded the synthetic violence of dubstep to Korn’s existing palette, drawing producers such as Skrillex, Noisia and Excision (whose work first alerted Davis to dubstep) into a one-off superhero squad powered by gleaming, skull-cracking riffage. More than a decade later Narcissistic Cannibal probably remains the best single example of this meeting of minds.
Korn Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Thu August 08 2024 - SCARBOROUGH Open Air Theatre
Fri August 09 2024 - HALIFAX Piece Hall
Sun August 11 2024 - LONDON Gunnersbury Park
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