Unironic Nu Metal Fans?

GB has a long history of shitting on "nu" or "alternative" metal/rock or even emo bands from the late 90s or early 2000s, and often rightfully so, but I'm still a fan of some of the bands I grew up with. Wondering if there are any other GB duders still rocking bands they were a fan of at the height of the raprock.

I definitely grew out of a lot of the bands I listened to in my teens or early 20s, but I remain a fan of a select few. Linkin Park (RIP Chester) still make their way onto my playlist often, alongside Breaking Benjamin, Seether, Audioslave, Red, Chevelle, Alter Bridge, and 10 Years.

In my mid 20s I came to realization that maybe Disturbed was never good? I was just 13 and liked loud music lol. A few tracks I will still play for nostalgia but boy, some of it is rough to go back to.

Also any new suggestions are welcome, I'm currently listening to the new Red album which is way better than I expected.

I loved nu metal at the time. In hindsight, a lot of it wasn't that good. But whatever, man, I'll still listen to Korn's Issues, Cold's 13 Way to Bleed on Stage, Staind's Break the Cycle, Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory, Evanescence's The Open Door. Deftones and System of a Down were also lumped in there but I listen to them regularly. Not too familiar with new stuff that copies that style directly, but I can hear those influences now and then in modern guitar-based music.

I "moved on" from nu metal when I got deeper into guitar playing. I went through an extreme metal-only phase a decade ago that would've found my high school tastes laughable. But since then I've learned to embrace any music that I like, despite the genre labels. I'm sure there's some nostalgia tucked in there, but there's also some good songwriting, catchy melodies, meaningful lyrics.

Also, fuck making fun of other people's music tastes. The internet's full of people that seem to think their own tastes are superior and the most valid, but gatekeeping in music is awful. I don't like GB doing it, although it's not that common and limited to a handful of duders. Alex is an example of being super cool about all sorts of music, as demonstrated on his drum streams. Be more like Alex.

At some point in the past year, I decided to listen to Linkin Park's first two albums. I still like those albums. I also feel like the hate towards Linkin Park was disappearing around the time of Chester's death and very quickly disappeared afterwards, but that might just be me. I don't know.

Otherwise I never listened to that much nu metal. I listened to Disturbed a decent bit - this would have been around Ten Thousand Fists-era and then I got into the stuff before it. I haven't actually listened to that album in a long time, but I listened to one of their newer albums recently. It's fine, I guess, but it sounded pretty much exactly the same. Their cover of The Sound of Silence is legitimately pretty good.

How far does the term "nu metal" stretch, really? I wouldn't consider Red or Breaking Benjamin nu metal and Alter Bridge is pretty much the opposite of nu metal. Also, holy shit, Red's still making albums? I actually have their first album from my high school days. For some reason, my dad really liked that album, it was one of the few things I could play out loud without him complaining. I haven't listened to it since probably early college, though, so I have no idea what I might think of it now. I have listened to some old Breaking Benjamin recently, though, and I still enjoyed it. I didn't love it and I don't find myself going back to it but it was all right.

If you like Red and Breaking Benjamin, you should listen to some Katatonia. They started off as a death metal band in the 90's but they changed styles completely after two albums and only sing now. I think it's because their singer had a bad screaming technique. If it hurts, kids, you're doing it wrong.

Is Jinjer nu metal? I've heard that term attached to Jinjer before and I can see how it fits. Stuff like Teacher, Teacher definitely has some pretty big nu metal influences. Actually, listening to it now, I'm going to say that straight-up is a nu metal song, though I always associated nu metal with mostly singing and some screaming, while Jinjer seems to be 2/3 harsh vocals.

Anyway, these days I don't listen to many bands associated with nu metal and when I do listen to some of it, it's usually for two or three songs before I go for something else.

I've never lost interest in nu metal it's still my favourite genre, though it seems a lot of people only think of rap/rock when talking about nu metal but my interests go quite a bit further than that.
Obviously there's only a few of my favourite bands from the nu metal "era" still going so i've had to expand my listening to find new music, but i still look for that creative spark wherever i go, Jinjer definitely fits for me as a nu metal fan, before now the only screaming bands i really liked were Slipknot, American Head Charge and Mudvayne but Jinjer are insanely creative and talented.
I never stopped listening to Limp Bizkit, maybe because i'm British i'm further away from the things people don't like about Fred Durst, but i like his voice and Wes Borland is phenominal on guitar.
I like a lot of progressive stuff since it's very creative like nu metal, mixing styles and just doing things differently, more recently i like some songs from Haken, i guess Fractalize is just djent but it's got more going on than most djent songs i've heard, Toska have put out some of my favourite tracks in the last few years, of course i'm still listening to Tool pretty much every day.
A couple weird shoutouts, apparently Guano Apes are still going, much softer pop'ier music now but a few years ago they remade an old track which is my current guilty pleasure, and i guess this is "mathcore" but i enjoy how creatively bizarre it is.
Edit: Forgot, also been getting back into The Mad Capsule Markets a lot recently, i discovered they weren't on streaming services and hardly any of their stuff is on youtube, so i made it my mission to preserve their albums and hunted them all down on CD, you're welcome world.

@csl316: Funny thing for me, I didn't get into Korn until it seemed like everyone gave up on them. I thought See You On The Other Side and the untitled album were actually really great. And I even kinda liked the dubstep album.

@cikame:I'll have to check out some of your suggestions when I get a chance. I was never a big Mudvayne fan until their last, self-titled album. That one blew me away and I've been a fan of their work since. Hellyeah seems a bit too much like a dude-bro-party-rock spinoff for me but I should give them more of a chance to fill that Mudvayne-shaped hole. And I think the only djent/prog band I've been really into is Tesseract, and Voices From The Fuselage. As far as mixing styles goes I've become a big fan of Zeal & Ardor. Their conceit is basically what if the slaves brought to the US got into Satan instead of Jesus. Also Bloodywood, a metal band that started doing metal covers of Bollywood songs and have now spun off into new songs. Bollywood beats and metal is an amazing mix.

@justin258: I wouldn't really consider BB or Red nu metal either but they lumped in there. I think even Rock Band lists BB as such which I thought was weird. But yep, they're both still going. BB went on hiatus for like 6 years because Ben was involved in a lawsuit with other members of the band. He came back a few years ago with a new band and their last album has probably some of my favourite songs from them. As for Red, also still going. They've been alternating good and meh albums for a while, their newest I really enjoyed though.

Still identify as a korn fan. Saw Disturbed a few times slipknot as well.

The Disturbed live album recorded at Red Rocks in CO is fantastic.

Also, the Filter version of Crystal Method's 'Can't You Trip Like I Do' is like musical junk food, so good.

I don't care what anyone says about Evanescence. Amy Lee's voice is incredible.

@marino: Hell yeah, those first 2 albums are great.

@bigevil1987: A few years ago, she went and rerecorded the hits from those first albums but in a whole different style. "Synthesis" it's called. An orchestra and an electronica vibe. It's just nice to hear Bring Me to Life without white dude rap in it. Her voice is still amazing now.

@marino: I heard some of it, it’s not bad. I actually just listened to her new track Wasted On You which has a bit of a mix of that style and Evanescence. Funnily enough, the white dude rapping is the lead singer of 12 Stones, another band I listened to a lot in high school.

Its something I left in my teens years when I was a fan of everything from Mudvayne to Mushroomhead but I do listen to a podcast called the P.O.D.Kast and I have to strongly recommend that. Been a fun way to relisten to old stuff. They cover an album an episode and are both funny and are really not coming to the podcast trying to hate on nu metal (one of them still very strongly likes nu metal music, he's probably the biggest self proclaimed Korn fan I see online).

I will say, there are tracks I do listen to when I follow along with the podcast and still actually like. Yes I have listened to Rearranged by Limp Bizkit a lot in 2020 and yes the first few songs on the first Slipknot album are actually badass and have an industrial kind of vibe I forgot about.

Listening to the last one it was funny to revisit Incubus. I didn't realize how dumb their lyrics were at all back then when I was a semi-fan of them. They were just reading them out loud and it was painful lol.

Used to absolutely love them so I disagree lol. When they had Opeth's lead singer for the album Brave Murder Day they made one of the most underrated metal albums ever and their stuff after that through Last Fair Deal Gone Down was great in a grungy, metaly shoegaze style with some extremely catchy riffs and hooks. Not to start some annoying music argument just my 2 cents lol.

BUT to your point if you like a Breaking Benjamin yeah you should like their new sound.

koRn's 'Follow the Leader' is a really good album and Fred Durst aside, musically, Limp Bizkit is great at times.

At the time of Nu Metal height I was probably listening to it as a guilty pleasure. As I have gotten older though I have just accepted the fact that certain bands just did things that appealed to me. And to this day, if I am having a day when I am in a bad mood or work is really annoying in some form I find that Nu Metal has a lot of aggressive songs with enough swinging rythm to work. Someone would probably say a lot of my other music is more aggressive (like Death/Black Metal, etc.) but there’s something about Nu Metal’s version of it that just nails how it feels. Anyway, Nu Metal bands that cought my fancy (sometimes just a song, sometimes everything, but can’t be bothered to be that specific); Slipknot, Korn, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, Coal Chamber, Mudwayne, Kittie, Kid Rock, Mushroomhead, Disturbed etc. Probably forgetting something

What caught me off guard though, but shouldn’t have, was the influence Nu Metal would have eventually. There’s now a ton of Metalcore bands that have very distinct Nu Metal influences. Certain bands have released albums in that genre that seem so influenced by Nu Metal that they sound almost like if Limp Bizkit or Korn sat down and said ”let’s make some Nu Metal Metal”. And despite me being pretty open to new things and looking new things up, I found out about this trend when it had been going for a while.

@pezen: there's a lot of rap stuff that has been in that vein. When I went to Grey Day to see Suicide Boys and associated acts live, City Morgue just straight up played Slipknot for a while (which was lame to do but goes to show how similar the vibe has become and the influence is there).

I also would say Code Orange, who I am a big fan of, has influence from Slipknot for sure and some associated sound. They have done songs with Corey Taylor too.

So there's these sorts of melding of these sounds, metal with rap and electronic, that are going to happen some way or another. 311 was also doing that and they have a growing sort of influence with a certain crowd of new music now too.

I liked Brave Murder Day as well! And Opeth is easily one of my favorite bands, so hearing him do all of the vocals in a completely different album was a good surprise (he also did some stuff for Bloodbath, if you're looking for more death metal Mikael Akerfeldt and haven't heard that stuff yet). Still, I found myself listening to more "hard rock Katatonia" than I ever did "death metal Katatonia".

Yes? Or maybe it's nostalgia?

Once I hit my 20s and the nu era sorta ended I pushed into more fully metal bands. Unfortunately, that led to way too many crab core bands who I still unironically enjoy.

Most of the bands you listed are stuck in a very middle/high school period for me so I doubt they'll ever be able to escape that window.

I don't know if I could un-ironically listen to Limp Bizkit or Linkin Park in 2020 and enjoy it, but they both were quite important to my early teenage years, Linkin Park especially. I once genuinely got real emotional while listening to "Numb" because I felt like I could relate. I was 13 or 14.

There is one nu metal band that I will always go to bat for 100%, and that is Deftones. I know this isn't a rare or controversial opinion, but Deftones have always been great, they outgrew the nu metal label, and pretty much everything they put out has been somewhere on the spectrum between good (self-titled) and absolutely incredible (Koi No Yokan and White Pony).

Alter Bridge is not nu metal, and are also a good band. I've also always like Evanescence. I never got into Korn or Slipknot, and I wasn't the right age/was listening to different music when Disturbed and other contemporary bands got big, but I have nothing negative to say about them.

On a sort of similar note: how do we all feel about Tool these days? I got into them years after they first got big, so I wasn't one of those obnoxious fans that people talk about and loudly declare their hate for. But I ended up being a pretty big fan of theirs - Lateralus is quite an important album to me. And their new record, Fear Inoculum, is pretty great.

I actually only recently got into Slipknot and Korn. Never cared for them before but I got really into metal/nu-metal last year. Love it.

I am still a fan of quite a bit of the music from the late 90's and early 2000's. I tend to like a lot of bands/songs that other people crap on and call terrible music, but I don't really care because I like what I like. I like most music on the heavier side, but am not a huge fan of the screaming/growling stuff if it is the entire song.

Every now and then I'll go back to some nu-metal when I've had a few drinks and want to zone out playing games for a bit.

I kind of stopped poking fun at it after Chester Bennington died. It kind of put things into perspective. Yeah, we can laugh at our own emo teenage years. In most cases, it's healthy to do so. But, I dunno. It's like, going back and listening to that stuff now, knowing what he struggled with...it doesn't feel right. Some of the lyrics may feel a bit "too much," but when you put that in the perspective of realizing it was all written by a real person dealing with real pain, it makes it harder (for me, at least) to want to laugh at those lyrics 20 years later.

@marino: True statement! I saw her in concert with Lindsey Stirling last year, and it was an incredible show.

Most of it's just a nostalgia listen at this point, but I do really love System Of A Down. They've just got so much energy, and enough genuine creativity to make it work.

Nu Metal served as a gateway drug to other sorts of metal (thrash, death) for teenage me that I might not otherwise have discovered. Plus some bands broke down my expectations of songs having conventional rhythm backing and AABA structure so I can listen to almost anything for a minute or two before I give up on it.

I still listen to Slipknot (early stuff), Deftones and occasionally System of a Down and I would hope I'm far beyond trying to hook my identity to some band so who cares? It's what gets me through some days. Metal has some weird fetish for subgenres (grind, core, slush etc.) and I'll never know them all but I would probably put Audioslave in the "hard rock" genre.

OTOH if you're a Nickelback or ICP (that has been Giant Bomb's goto objectionable music diss) fan you might need help :)

I don't really know how to distinguish sub genres like this, but I love so many rock bands from the late 90s to the late 2000s. Linkin Park(my fav band ever), Evanescence, Breaking Benjamin, Rise Against, Shinedown, Three Days Grace, Disturbed, I could list dozens of bands from that time that I am a big fan of.

Also I've never understood the hate for Nickleback, they have like 10 songs that I enjoy.

Hey..... speaking of nu metal, don't shoot me.
Just going to casually bring this thread back just to post a new Mushroomhead song from their upcoming album, i only really like a few of their songs as they deal in repetition a lot but this one's nice, more normal than their usual fare but i think this is the first album after the lead singer left the band, i really like the new female lead.
I skipped the long intro.

I wasn't ever big on Alter Bridge (although I've liked some of the Myles Kennedy/Slash stuff), and bands like Linkin Park, Chevelle, and Breaking Benjamin haven't really aged that well (though I enjoyed them at the time). Red was underrated and still mostly holds up (probably because the radio didn't beat them into the ground). 10 Years was always great, and even their newer stuff has been somewhere between decent and good. I agree that Disturbed (in retrospect) wasn't ever that good (I think you nailed it on them being just the "right" kind of loud at the time).

Seether has been very hit and miss to me, but overall are still probably my favorite "nu-metal" band. I've typically loved an album of theirs and then hated the next one, and rinse and repeat. Karma and Effect was good, Finding Beauty in Negative Spaces was decidedly less so, Holding onto Strings Better Left to Fray was quietly great (especially some of the bonus tracks), Isolate and Medicate was awful, Poison the Parish was good, and the One Cold Night acoustic show/CD was excellent.

I will wholeheartedly disagree with Audioslave being categorized as nu-metal. They were kind of their own distinct thing, so I struggle with associating them with a style or another act. I can't really think of a band where I thought "oh, they kinda sound like Audioslave" (barring of course the simplistic comparison to RATM due to Morello). With Cornell's piercing vocals, Morello's effects, and the bass-heavy riffs, they had a fairly unique sound, and even within their own discography, they bounced from some head-banging, metal-ass-metal to some gritty grunge to some smooth and blues-y songs with aplomb. (If it isn't readily apparent by now, I love Audioslave. Everyone go listen to Audioslave.)

I've been kinda wanting to dissect Alex's drum stream of terrible songs (which are hard to argue against for the most part), so maybe I'll get to that later. I was afraid that the butt rock block would feature a bunch of songs I have soft spots for, but I was mostly spared there. I still want to talk a bit about how some of this stuff has aged and how I think my tastes have aged since, so maybe I'll make a thread about that if I have some time later today. Music is fun.

That new Slipknot album wasn't bad. I can still listen to SOAD and Chevelle as well.

Imma do it again.
This is probably the last time i bring this thread back because a new song comes out, but if you release a song called Parasite Eve and attach it to the pandemic OF COURSE i'm going to post it here.

What do you think, does this count as nu metal?
The wiki for the band doesn't say they are, but i think that's just because we've invented so many new genre tags since the 2000's.

Bring Me The Horizon is more post-hardcore than nu-metal.

All I remember of the nineties /late 90's 2000. I was pretty disconnected, though I had the one 'college' radio station I would listen to.

What I would do is listen/watch videos on whatever was presenting them on the internet at the time. So I liked that one video of Evanescence where everyone turns ghoulish and she dives into the water and all-beautiful voice! I really truly liked Korn's Done my Time, featuring Angelia Jolie in the video. And I liked that one song by Linkin Park where he's real glad he was becoming more like himself, and less like somebody else. Something intense like that.

But there was other stuff I was sort of listening to, and I was still thinking of the 80's.

A lot of it is nostalgia these days, but I still fuck with nu-metal. It got an unfair rep because admittedly a lot of it was... rough, but I'll stand by bands like Korn. I also really like some of Coal Chamber's stuff, and I loved that first Evanescence album at the time, although kinda hard to go back to. Amy Lee's voice is awesome (and holy hell, I had a big crush on her, haha), but the lyrics give me a bit of secondhand cringe. Not to mention Slipknot, who really transcended the genre label into a truly respectable band.

I don't think of Jinjer as nu-metal, but since djent has a ton in common with it, I should mention how incredible they are too.

Lately I've been embracing the music I loved as a teen but grew out of, and I'm finding that a surprising amount of it still grabs me in my mid-30s.

@alanmckinnon said:

Ok so i'm totally unfamiliar with post hardcore so i went on a quest for learning.
Searching for hardcore got me happy hardcore, which was kind of predictable, hardcore metal got me... nothing, well not nothing, a few compilation videos showed up containing what the author thought was "hardcore" but Blue Stahli is alt metal/industrial, post hardcore itself is apparently more tied to a harder evolution of punk rock, but again like the search for "hardcore metal" i don't get back popular songs to use as examples, just a compilation, however Wiki recognises it as a thing but i really don't think BMTH are post hardcore.
I did put two and two together and think "hardcore metal? .... metalcore", investigated metalcore and got every kind of modern metal band, from non stop screaming, grunting and double bass to melodic singing with acoustic interludes, it seems to be a very broad term.
I won't say they are nu metal, only because people are averse to that term for their own reasons, but the creativity and genre mixing in their form of metal does put it nu metal adjacent.

I can go back to Mudvayne, Kittie, Coal Chamber, American Head Charge, a few song by Korn, that one song by Drowning Pool, those two songs by Papa Roach, and even Disturbed every once in a while.

Limp Bizkit and Dope on the other hand, not so much.

I don't listen to any of them at all anymore, but there are pictures of me as a 17 or 18 year old in 2000 that show just how much I was into the scene at that time. I even think that in few I'm wearing a red hat backwards...*shudders*

At the time, I liked Limp Bizkit, Korn, and Staind probably the most, but I listened to a smattering of others here and there. The girl I was dating at the time was MASSIVELY into the genre, and still is to this day, so a lot of what I heard I can't really remember because it would be things she played for me.

I watched family values 98 tour earlier today

I don't listen to nu-metal very much these days outside of Korn and Slipknot but I enjoyed it at the time. Lyrically a lot of it was truly awful but I tend to find good lyrics are rare across all genres. If anything nu-metal softened me up for ever more absurd and gloriously ridiculous metal bands. It'd be easy for me to sneer but I listen to (and love) Kamelot, Ad Infinitum, Unleash the Archers etc. so there'll be no stones cast from me.

Nostalgia flavors a lot of nu metal so i still enjoy going back to old classics like disturbed, korn, and my personal favorite, coal chamber. Coal chamber was my introduction into heavy music, and i love dez fafara as a metal vocalist, even if devildriver has had some mediocre albums. On a side note, when i was a bellhop i unloaded 2 busses worth of luggahe for korn about 12 years ago and never got a tip.... still kinda stings.

Limp Bizkit will always have a place in my heart because of Wrestlemania 17 and the use of "My Way" for the Austin/Rock hype video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srhd2fZyDB4

I liked some of those type of bands back in the day, but if I were to revisit them, I probably won’t like what I find.

Over 10 years ago, I liked some Three Days Grace. Like 20(?) years ago I liked Linkin Park. If I were to listen to some of that music now, I would probably find it lame or lazy. Some of it is “of a time”, but I think some of it won’t hold up that well.

There are songs I still enjoy. I listened to “Bodies” by Drowning Pool so much I will probably never not like that song. There are some Papa Roach and Limp Bizkit songs I still like. That said, I would no longer consider myself to be a fan of a vast majority of those bands. Besides, there’s better rock and metal out there, both in terms of old and new stuff. (I never listened to Iron Maiden when I was into those bands. I would have probably been less into them if I knew about bands like Maiden back then)

The only real related music to that era I still regularly enjoy is SOAD.

Are Deftones Nu Metal? I'd argue Around the Fur and Adrenaline are clearly of the genre but they leave Nu Metal behind with White Pony.

@not_a_bumblebee: They definitely have nu metal songs but they're a bit of their own thing, experimental/gloomy, is gloom rock a thing? It should be.

For me, my initial (and current) enjoyment of bands like Linkin Park (their first two albums), Korn, and Limp Bizkit (again, fist two albums only - although Eat You Alive is pretty good) were rooted in my enjoyment of rap music of the time (Pac, Jay-Z, Eminem, and the like). I feel like my current enjoyment of a lot of that stuff now is unironic, but still somewhat rooted in nostalgia - but I’ve still been able to enjoy them as my tastes in metal have become heavier and my tastes in hip-hop have become more ‘lyrical’. Just a mood thing in a lot of ways for me... It’s good to have a variety of music on hand - some days, I want to hear LP, others I want to hear Infant Annihilator (although days for the latter far outweigh days for the former)