The whole thing gained further momentum when Sepultura released Roots in early 1996. The scene was slowly gaining traction: Korn released their debut album in October 1994 Deftones’ debut, Adrenaline, followed exactly a year later. They jumped on board at exactly the right time. Limp Bizkit may have been based 3000 miles from Los Angeles, but they became honorary members of this new fraternity of misfits after Durst pressed his band’s demo into Korn’s hand when the latter band played Jacksonville. I think that was one of the things that became dislikeable about us.” But we just didn’t give a fuck, and we always tried to say that fairly blatantly. “We weren’t quite hip hop, we weren’t quite metal. “We were the black sheep – or the white sheep,” says Durst.

More explicitly indebted to hip hop than most of the bands in California, their singer nevertheless wore his outsider status on his sleeve. Fronted by sometime tattoo artist Fred Durst, Limp Bizkit were creating waves in their hometown of Jacksonville. That’s why we dressed so crazy.”Īt the same time, something was stirring down in the swamps of Florida. We went from wearing Dickies and having our hair braided to getting way more in touch with our goth side. The thing is, everybody had to sound different and look different to stand out. Korn would bring busloads of people up from Orange County. “But then you started seeing all these bands creeping into these places – Coal Chamber, Deftones, System Of A Down. “In ’92 or ’93, the clubs weren’t happening, nobody was playing them,” says Dez. It was only when they decided to down-tune their guitars that they noticed other bands doing a similar thing.

When Fafara started Coal Chamber in 1994, they played standard-issue alt-rock.

One of these bands was Coal Chamber, whose singer Dez Fafara – son of former child actor Tiger Fafara – was a fan of punk rock and 80s synth-pop. Instead it was left to a bunch of local bands to build something from the ground up. Hair metal had gasped its last, Aquanet-choked breath, and the snooty grunge hipsters who had stepped into the breach wouldn’t be seen dead on the Sunset Strip.

Nu metal albums