Just listen to “Passenger,” an unsettling track featuring a delightful contrast between Chino’s rough and moody vocals and James Maynard Keenan’s signature dark, syrupy approach. White Pony is brutal, catchy, sexy, disturbing, and beautiful all at once. Here, Chino and crew fully realize the balance between heavy and brooding they had flirted with since 1995’s Adrenaline. White Pony is a brilliant album all the way through. Sure enough, nu metal would never be the same. When “Change (In the House of Flies)” came along, however, I knew immediately that a watershed moment was at hand.
I loved “Shove It,” as was required of any good nu metal fan. Many people would give Around the Fur (1997) the distinction of “most important Deftones album,” but really, the album’s big single, “My Own Summer (Shove It),” wasn’t that far from the general run-of-the-mill fare for the time, with the obvious exception of Chino’s goddamned beautiful voice. So RUN… right back to the year ‘00, when nu metal changed forever. Hopefully, this list of the best albums of the nu metal age will help wash away some of that lingering bad taste and encourage you to dig out the old CD wallets covered with band stickers.
It really is a shame that Limp Bizkit’s Chocolate Starfish somehow became the figurehead nu metal album for future generations. I’d argue that some of these albums have even improved with age. Still, a few bands managed to push boundaries enough to release a product still as entertaining today as it was around the turn of the century. Granted, not many of them were it’s admittedly difficult to be original when your palette consists of basic bar chords in drop D tuning, or when your industry lyrical expectations end with curse words and anti-establishment cliches. A few albums that dropped at the forefront of the nu metal scene, as well as a few that remained relatively peripheral affairs, were actually really good albums. Seriously though, it’s not pure nostalgia. In the meantime, you’ll have to forgive us old folks our nostalgia, kids. Those of us born in the mid to late eighties landed squarely in the hype during our most formative years before moving onto emo and metalcore as the 2000s progressed… but that’s another (and equally embarrassing) story. I swear it’s true kids, just google “Jncos.” The nu metal heyday may have been before your time, late millennials, but it was truly one of those “you’d have to have been there to understand” moments. Who can forget it? That’s back when everyone shopped at Hot Topic and wore jeans that could easily hide the smaller members of your immediate family.
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