The classic album Korn’s Munky says is “alternative metal at its best”
Despite returning to prominence thanks to the present fascination with Y2K culture and heavier music, nu-metal is still as divisive as ever. The ostensible scene might have been widely influential in its heyday in the mid-late 1990s and have been so on modern heavyweights such as Code Orange, but things were always much more complex than the popular narrative has us believe. Just ask Korn, a band often tarnished with the designation.
Although they have been immensely successful, the Bakersfield band find themselves in an unenviable position. Not only are they incredibly influential and undoubtedly pioneering, but they are forced to reconcile this status with popular misconceptions, including being partially to blame for the many terrible nu-metal bands that arose in their wake. Ironically, they cannot help that their innovations inspired a wave of cheap imitations.
When forming in 1993, the group knew they wanted to do something different from the grunge zeitgeist, and so they picked up their seven-strings, de-tuned all the way to A, and experimented with dynamics, percussion, and frontman Jonathan Davis’ incredibly expressive delivery. Doing away with the bluesy chromaticism of grunge, this fresh, dark and dissonant sound managed to straddle the line between nightmares and pure grooves.
Their 1994 self-titled debut was the first of its kind, beating fellow Californians and fellow pioneers Deftones by a year. Its unique darkness appealed to Generation X in ways that Nirvana and Alice in Chains’ work had done at the start of the decade, with the quintet delving into challenging and controversial personal themes more explicitly than anyone had ever done. Almost every aspect felt new, and given their collective potency, Korn were soon beating off waves of pretenders and being blamed for their blights on music.
With Korn, it’s all about context. They might have instituted elements of what became the nu-metal sound and been inspired by earlier metal heroes such as Van Halen, as well as grunge, goth, industrial and hip-hop, but they always emerged from the alternative metal context. Despite their own individual tastes, each member of the group’s classic lineup has discussed the significance of Faith No More’s first album with Mike Patton, 1989’s The Real Thing. A genre highlight, its pure imagination in the vocals, melody, structures, and other aspects proved galvanising for Korn.
This was something guitarist Munky recalled when speaking to The Skinny in 2015 when he named the albums that were the greatest influences on him. He explained that he and Korn’s bassist, Fieldy, were big fans of Faith No More in the late 1980s when they were playing a form of funk rock in their Chuck Mosley-fronted years.
However, they became totally enamoured with Faith No More after Patton joined, and they charted a new direction with ‘From Out of Nowhere’ in 1989, the debut single from The Real Thing. Led by blaring synths, crunching metal guitars and Patton’s pronounced vocals, the pair of aspiring musicians knew that the San Francisco group were onto something consequential in this chapter.
They became “real fanatics” after hearing the track, started researching Patton and travelled to San Francisco to watch them in action. Then, when The Real Thing dropped, it became the future Korn members’ ultimate galvanising force, which Munky called “alternative metal at its best”.
Munky said: “Every song on this record was super inspiring to us. The song structures and Patton’s sense of melody – it was alternative metal at its best. You don’t have any wailing solos – there tended to be a bridge where things got crazy, and they’d feature each artist rather than just the one guy. It was much more of a band effort than the norm. Now, I love guitar solos and Randy Rhoads, but Faith No More steered us in the direction where we ultimately ended up.”
Given their inextricable link to alternative metal and Faith No More, in 2000, when drummer David Silveria was injured, there was no one better than the ‘Epic’ band’s Mike Bordin to sit in for him. It proved a stellar convergence.