From Linkin Park to Limp Bizkit, nu-metal is back but without the cargo pants and casual misogyny

Nu-metal was once shorthand for terrible fashion and even worse music. Now, with a new Linkin Park album and Limp Bizkit announcing their most extensive tour in years, this genre once considered the nadir for rock’n’roll has made a surprising comeback, writes Ed Power

Pedal to the metal: Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park’s new vocalist Emily Armstrong (Getty)

Fred Durst stood in the middle of the stage with arms outstretched, watching the world burn. It was Saturday, 24 July 1999, and the soon-to-be-notorious Woodstock ’99 festival was on a tailspin into a night of chaos and violence. Amid soaring temperatures, flimsy camping facilities and inadequate water supplies, the three-day event at Griffiss Air Force Base in upstate New York was a shambles long before Durst led his band, Limp Bizkit, from the wings – but his angry performance seemed to intensify the negative energy. “When this song kicks in, I want you to f***ing kick in,” said Durst as the crowd moshed, fought and began to tear pieces off the main sound tower.

This last ever Woodstock was regarded as a low watermark for 1990s youth culture. With subsequent reports of vandalism, arson and multiple sexual assaults, it also appeared to confirm another fact. The ugly, ill-tempered performance by Durst and his band was regarded as proof that the genre of nu-metal – which had turned Durst into a megastar – was a nadir for rock’n’roll, music itself and perhaps even civilisation.

Blending thrashing guitars with the coarsest elements of hip hop, nu-metal was perceived as aggressive and misogynist (the chorus to one of Limp Bizkit’s biggest hits, “Nookie”, went “I did it all for the nookie”). Trent Reznor, of acclaimed industrial rock group Nine Inch Nails, likened bands such as Limp Bizkit to hearing Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster singing. Yet in the past 25 years, those negative voices have gone silent and something extraordinary and unforeseeable has happened. All that old notoriety has now been swept away as a new generation too young to have watched Woodstock go up in flames embrace nu-metal’s aggression and anarchic energy.

That comeback gathers pace this weekend as Linkin Park – mega-selling Blur to Limp Bizkit’s Oasis – release their first album in seven years, having reassembled with new vocalist Emily Armstrong replacing the late Chester Bennington (who died by suicide in 2017). Their return with a new LP, From Zero, has been greeted not as a harbinger of the apocalypse but as the welcome rebirth by a group that has overcome the tragedy of Bennington’s passing. Kerrang! praised it for heralding a “bold new future”; The Independent’s Helen Brown, in a four-star review, called the album “re-energised”, with a “distinctive hummable heavy-duty sound”. Not to be outdone, Limp Bizkit will stage their most extensive tour in years in 2025, their Woodstock ’99 notoriety long forgotten. Snapping at the heels of these heritage acts, younger bands such as Blind Channel, Wargasm, and Alpha Wolf wave a banner for the genre. The worst music ever – as Trent Reznor and others saw it – is flying high.

How to explain the remarkable rehabilitation of a scene that spliced ear-bleeding metal riffs with rudimentary rapping – and was typically performed by white suburban males dressed like middle-aged American tourists (cargo pants, baseball hats)? Weirder things have happened in music – but not many.

“The short answer is the cyclical nature of nostalgia and pop culture,” says Lorin Kozlowski, host of the Roach Koach nu-metal podcast. While Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park had their ups and downs, he says hard-working outfits such as Korn, Deftones and Slipknot kept the nu-metal flame burning. They’ve never stopped touring – and simply by staying the course, acquired a credibility that would have been unthinkable when Durst was mugging his way through his unofficial anthem “Break Something” at Woodstock ’99.

“The longer answer is the consistency of bands like Korn, Deftones, and Slipknot to maintain a presence as both continued viable live acts but also bands that are cited as influences on current popular bands,” says Kozlowski. He holds up Korn as especially important. Like Limp Bizkit, they played Woodstock. Unlike them, they tried to calm the crowd during their Friday set – and have gone on to influence younger artists and championed the seven-string guitar, which allows musicians to play deeper, heavier riffs and has been embraced by newer outfits such as Melbourne five-piece Alpha Wolf.

The internet has created a platform for Limp Bizkit to be discovered without it being slammed down people’s throats

Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst

The other factor is the viral power of TikTok, which has spread the word among Gen-Zers about the delights of Durst’s high-pitched rhyming style and the bulldozing guitars deployed by Deftones and Slipknot. As 19-year-old TikToker Kriss Krypt told Metal Hammer earlier this year: “TikTok is incredibly important for fandoms because it is a space to connect with like-minded individuals…[It] makes people feel a part of a community. I’m so lucky to have been able to find a community of nu-metal-loving [fans] online.”

Among these younger fans, the likes of Linkin Park are not the annoying newcomers they were perceived as in the late 1990s but heritage rockers whose music has weathered the decades. That point was acknowledged by bassist David Farrell in an interview in May with Billboard.

“When we were in high school, a classic rock album was like, Led Zeppelin IV, and now we’ve reached a point where for somebody in high school, their classic rock album is Hybrid Theory,” he said, referring to Linkin Park’s debut LP from 2000.

Masked ball: Slipknot will play eight gigs in the UK next month (Redferns/Getty)

“Linkin Park’s songs are timeless – they’ve become part of the cultural fabric,” agreed Warners Records executive Tom Corson. “We actively promote and market their music, whether it’s of the past, the present or the future.”

Durst, for his part, has credited social media with feeding into the rehabilitation of Limp Bizkit. There is no hype around the group nowadays, he appeared to suggest in a 2019 conversation with Billboard. When they’re online, he continued, kids can discover music for themselves – without gatekeepers telling them it’s good or bad. In other words, they can listen to Limp Bizkit without prejudice.

“The internet has created a platform for Limp Bizkit to be discovered without it being slammed down people’s throats,” he said. “They’re actually searching out things that are different than what they’re being fed and Limp Bizkit gets to fall into that part where we’re not being fed to them, they are discovering it.”

As musicians and fans will tell you, nu-metal never went away. But it has certainly undergone a stark reappraisal. In the 1990s, it wasn’t just Trent Reznor who struggled to conceal his contempt for the scene. The music press felt likewise: the NME dismissed Hybrid Theory as “pointlessly jazzed up with tokenistic scratching”; Entertainment Weekly described it as an “unerringly brutal disc ... that often seems like a parody of itself.”

‘Hate for Nu-metal and Fred Durst are certainly intertwined, but not mutually exclusive,’ says podcaster Lorin Kozlowski (George DeSota/Newsmakers)

Then there was the Durst factor. Even apart from Woodstock ’99, Limp Bizkit’s lead singer was widely regarded as an odious oaf. There were multiple reports of the former tattoo artist from Jacksonville, Florida, insulting security staff at concerts – at a gig in New Zealand, he poured water over the heads of security. In 2000, amid a backlash from fans over his MTV VMA Awards duet with Christina Aguilera, he claimed he “did it for the nookie” – a call back to the Limp Bizkit song of the same name. In 2004, Eminem appeared to be speaking for the entire world when he took a potshot at Durst on his track “Girls”, rapping that he was “pegging Fred with the bottle of dye that he bleached his head with”.

However, it was Woodstock ’99 that sealed Durst’s reputation as the most obnoxious man in rock. It would be wrong to blame him for the festival’s ugly descent into violence – it was all down to inept organisation. But his ill-tempered performance seemed to symbolise everything that had gone wrong with youth culture – no matter that the shambolic festival was ultimately not his responsibility. That point was made clear in the 2022 Netflix documentary Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99, which showed that, while Durst’s outburst didn’t help calm the event, he was in no way culpable for a breakdown in law and order already well underway.

Gone but not fogotten: the late Chester Bennington performing at the KROQ Weenie Roast in 2007 (Getty)

“Woodstock ’99 was ultimately a result of capitalism. They had the festival to pump up the egos of the original founders, booked current bands and didn’t think about anything else. Limp Bizkit was one band of many who played aggressive music to an audience of water- and food-deprived people,” says Kozlowski. “They made a convenient scapegoat for the promotors, and certainly the narrative has held for a while, but people have started to see the true culprits ….Hate for Nu-metal and Fred Durst are certainly intertwined, but not mutually exclusive.”

Durst’s mistake, says Kozlowski, was to “make himself a figurehead”. He added that this is “what happens when you mention your name in your song lyrics and dress up your dancers in imitation of yourself. Backlash will come. For the music itself, as I’ve discovered from doing the podcast, you had a lot of imitators diluting the scene. Eventually, people are going to get tired and feel tricked by the umpteenth imitation band.”

The good news for fans, new and old, is that the nu-metal rebirth is just gathering steam. Linkin Park have just announced a huge global tour, including a 28 June date at Wembley. There are rumours of a new Limp Bizkit LP. Korn will headline the 2025 Download festival at Donington Park motorsport circuit in Leicestershire. Slipknot are playing eight UK shows in December as part of a European tour. Meanwhile, newer festivals such as Sick New World in Las Vegas continue to grow (with Linkin Park topping the bill next year). Nu-metal was once shorthand for terrible fashion and even worse music. But now it has achieved something that would have been unthinkable when Durst stood on that Woodstock stage 25 years ago. It is one slam dance away from respectable.

Linkin Park’s new album ‘From Zero’ is out now