No, not the Korn album Issues, the band Issues.
When Woe is Me vocalist Tyler Carter left the band to start Issues, I have to think he had no idea how successful the band would be.
The band's debut full-length, out now on Rise Records, landed at number 9 on the Billboard top 200 this week selling over 22,000 copies. That's a lot of copies for a band I barely knew existed until recently. Basically, the kids know about this band and they like them.
What do they sound like? Basically, nü-metal:
Good cop into bad cop vocals into clean choruses? Check. Record scratching? Check. Yep, as our friends at MetalSucks put it, the nü-metal apocalypse is here. But is it really that big of a deal? Much like with EDM, music fans today are not bound by genre. They listen to everything. Korn is considered a respected band nowadays, whereas 5-10 years ago, they'd be considered a joke. It's a natural progression of music.
It takes about 20 years for things to cycle back around. A decade ago, it was the New Wave of American Heavy Metal, which borrowed heavily from music of the late 80s and early 90s, and now that that cycle has ended, we look to the new wave of nü-metal that has begun. It will have djent elements. There will be record scratching. There will be clean vocals. It will be hard to ignore.
But I don't think the apocalypse is here. I just think the stigma of nu-metal has faded and kids just want to have fun. You could argue when a band like Attila makes the best hip hop video in metal history, that's very nu-metal as well. Nu-metal has always been here, you've just been doing a great job ignoring it.
Issues is currently out with Bring Me The Horizon. Dates here.
