Back in the Nineties, Korn’s early albums revolutionized the heavy-music world with their menacing 7-string riffs, hip-hop-influenced grooves and Jonathan Davis’ unsettlingly personal and uniquely quivered and scatted vocal performances.
While those stone-cold classics made them nu-metal icons from the jump, the Bakersfield, California, quintet have steadily built up their impressive songbook with a series of modern-day masterpieces beloved by the fan base.
With that in mind, we asked Revolver readers to rank the greatest Korn songs to have been released after 2002’s Untouchables, which they ranked accordingly.
“Love & Meth”
Korn’s The Paradigm Shift effort from 2013 marked a homecoming, as it’s the album where founding 7-stringer Brian “Head” Welch rejoined the fold following an eight-year sabbatical from the band. For the purposes of this poll, Revolver readers welcomed its “Love & Meth” into the top 5 with open arms.
Stylistically, the band had explained that the album’s M.O. was to mix the darkness of Issues with the heaviness of the Untouchables era. The addiction-informed “Love & Meth” hits the sweet spot in between, delivering both death-grizzled growls and sinewy chorus vocals from Jonathan Davis, and a moto-bounced pull-off intro that quickly shifts the act into overdrive.
“Cold”
Nothing pleases some Korn fans more than the sounds of The Nothing’s heavy second single, “Cold.”
Let’s break it down quickly: From its noise-fractured chords, to the funkily triplet-spat scream sesh Davis incorporates into the verses, to the darkly anthemic drive of the chorus, Korn knocked this motherfucker straight out the ballpark and up into the stratosphere.
While it’s a song about discomfort, listening to “Cold” still feels pretty damn good.
“Right Now”
“I’m feeling mean today.”
Jonathan Davis revealed back in the Aughts that the bleak, angry and antisocial vibe coursing through Take a Look in the Mirror’s “Right Now” was inspired by one of those days where “you wake up and you don’t want to talk to no one and you’re just pissed.”
He channels that disgruntlement above the streamlined punishment the rest of the band delivers on the track. It all makes for a barbed-wire slam, and more than 20 years later it rages just as hard as ever.
“Black Is the Soul”
“Almost every night, I hear the demon sing”
It is fair to say that the past 30 years have seen Jonathan Davis exploring the darkest recesses of his soul on record — pushing himself to the brink for cathartic in-studio breakdowns in a way many vocalists wouldn’t dare.
“Black Is the Soul” accordingly finds him lost in an emotional inkscape of mistakes and bitter tears. As he contemplates the path that he’s on, the group lean into a melancholy groove that’s hard not to get lost in.
“Rotting in Vain”
Korn fans just can’t seem to get away from “Rotting in Vain” — and, frankly, why would they?
The band’s first Serenity of Suffering single is another cathartic anthem full of dark-cloud melody and impressively clicky bass lines. Davis tries to claw himself out from an emotional abyss, propelling himself forward with heavy croons and onomatopoeic tics.
The track is a standout banger in the modern Korn era — it reached No. 4 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock charts, yielded a Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance in 2017, and remains in semi-regular rotation in their set lists to this day. In other words, Korn’s rot still sounds fresh.