Fontaines DC, TikTok crazes and trouser chains: The unsettling return of nu metal, explained

“This life as you now live and have lived it,” once wrote Nietzsche, “you will have to live once again and innumerable times again; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh.”

As he philosophised angstily on eternal recurrence back in 1882, we can safely say the moustachioed German deep thinker didn’t specifically have trouser chains, or cargo pants, or Limp Bizkit in mind. But he may as well have done. Like a great many other tropes of the last rasp of flatulence escaping the dying corpse of 20th century culture that was nu-metal, they’re back, as if they never went away. Just take a look around.

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Amid a wider Y2K music and fashion renaissance, nu-metal – that ungodly fusion of heavy metal, rap, funk, bro-ish idiocy and weird sport-goth attire which took over the world for one hot minute in the late ’90s and early 2000s – is suddenly somehow resonating with Gen-Zers everywhere. A recent TikTok dance craze has seen kids in Adidas and mascara chuck themselves around madly to Korn (bizarrely while borrowing moves from – I’m not making this up – the macarena). You can buy Slipknot and Deftones T-shirts at H&M. 

Even typically impeccably tasteful Irish post-punk band Fontaines DC have returned with a new album titled Romance, and an attendant bold “retro” new image, laced with post-ironic turn-of-the-millennium reference points, including nu-metal. “This thing I loved when I was 14 and stopped listening to for years and now I love again,” said Fontaines DC guitarist Carlos O’Connell in a recent interview. They look like disavowed offspring of The Offspring. A Quorn version of Korn.

Rock’n’roll has always been a derivative artform, destined to spin endlessly on time’s flat circle recycling the same ideas to diminishing returns. I’m sure I’ve enjoyed a lot of revivals of things that people old enough to remember them first time around have quite reasonably found cringeworthy. But this is the first time a genre unique to my young adulthood has come back for another lap (full disclosure: I once owned cargo pants). Then as now, I know nu-metal to be absolutely brainlessly awful – mired in mindless aggression, scatological humour, slimy seven-string guitar riffs and superfluous DJ scratch samples. To say nothing of extremely terrible trousers. 

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I therefore feel qualified to ask: is everyone absolutely sure about this? Is everyone feeling OK? “Without music, life would be a mistake” also wrote Nietzsche. But had he ever heard Limp Bizkit’s Stink Finger?

Sure, nu-metal wasn’t all bad. Deftones, for example – the thinking person’s nu-metal band (singer Chino Moreno’s biggest influences include The Smiths, My Bloody Valentine and Prince) – have been a bit unlucky to end up lumped into a genre which they pre-dated and have long outlived. But they sold a lot of records off the back of nu-metal’s commercial whirlwind, and thus can’t escape being tarnished by its abject soullessness. As the Netflix docuseries Trainwreck: Woodstock ’99 well illustrated, by recalling events of the disastrous American festival that ended in violence and sexual assaults, nu-metal at its worst poured petrol on the flames of something downright rotten and dangerous in late ’90s culture.

I was at Reading in 2000, a festival which – together with its sister event Leeds – had by then become increasingly synonymous with nu-metal (Limp Bizkit, Deftones and Slipknot all played that year). It had also begun to witness increasing levels of disorder that by the mid-2000s would boil over into full-blown riots. I can still vividly recall sitting in the campsite late one night watching a row of Portaloos being systematically tipped over and torched by a mob in black hoodies. That weekend remains the only time I’ve ever been lucky enough to see Beck live, and in his Midnite Vultures psych-funk pomp no less. But I could barely enjoy a single moment because I had to spend the entire set defending myself from getting booted in the head by endless waves of crowdsurfers in orthopaedically oversized shoes. 

Nu-metal stomped all over everything for a while, but then it disappeared, I hoped never to return. TikTok kids’ Korn cosplay is all innocent enough, and there are some great songs on the new Fontaines DC album (albeit the ones that sound least like Korn). While most music genres are temporary, teenage angst is permanent (ask Nietzsche), and I can appreciate why to some young ears nu-metal’s nihilistic howl may represent a comfortingly mindless solace, even if I’ll never understand what any of it has to do with the macarena. But the next revival can’t come around quick enough, whatever it may be.

“Hey kid, take my advice,” once sang Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst, in one of his wiser moments, “you don’t want to step into a big pile of shit.”

Fontaines DC’s new album Romance is out 23 August via XL Recordings; the band play Reading and Leeds festivals 24 and 25 August 

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