With their self-titled debut album back in 1994, California’s Korn mixed metal, hip-hop and industrial into one aggressive beast. In the process, the band arguably laid the groundwork for much of the nu-metal sound that would dominate heavy music throughout the late 90s and early 2000s.
Now, in an interview with Kerrang!, frontman Jonathan Davis has talked about the band establishing the sound, calling themselves the genre’s “the last big movement”.
“We were ultimately just outcasts,” said Davis in the interview. “Nobody knew what to fucking do with us in the early days; we were doing tours with No Doubt, Pennywise and KMFDM, but the metal community took us in. We had distorted guitars and were heavy, but no-one knew what to do with us.
Davis goes on to explain that while he initially rejected labels like “nu-metal”, he has grown more comfortable with the prefix over time.
“If we invented nu-metal then fuck yeah, cool,” he says in the interview.
“It’s pretty cool to say we helped invent some kind of movement, that’s pretty insane. The last big movement was us. Other bands helped along the way, but we spearheaded that whole thing.”
Korn’s new album The Nothing is due out on Friday, 13th September through Roadrunner. Watch the video for ‘You’ll Never Find Me’ below.
