Korn Follow The Leader May 2026

No one expected Korn to headline. After touring nonstop, the band was fractured. Davis was drinking heavily, numbing the childhood trauma and bullying that fueled his tortured yodel. Head and Munky were experimenting with even lower tunings (A, sometimes drop-A). Fieldy’s bass sounded like a jazz upright being slapped by a vengeful god.

The sessions were chaotic — pranks, late-night parties, and one infamous incident where a naked, paint-covered Davis chased a producer through the halls. But out of the mess came . Every staccato riff, every Davis scat-scream (“twist! twist!”), every Fieldy “clank” was intentional. The Singles That Broke the Mold Follow the Leader spawned two seismic singles. korn follow the leader

was something else entirely. A haunting bass intro. Davis’s whispered verse. Then the explosive chorus: “Something takes a part of me.” The middle eight broke all rules — Davis scat-singing nonsense syllables, then a guitar break that sounded like a helicopter crash. The animated video (by Todd McFarlane, creator of Spawn ) featured a silver bullet ripping through walls, a metaphor for frustration, abuse, and release. It won a Grammy (Best Short Form Music Video) and became the band’s signature song. The Bite: Why It Mattered Follow the Leader debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, selling over 268,000 copies in its first week — unheard of for a band who once played to 50 people in a Bakersfield VFW hall. It went on to sell 5 million copies in the U.S. alone. No one expected Korn to headline

Two years earlier, the five Bakersfield misfits — Jonathan Davis (vocals), James “Munky” Shaffer (guitar), Brian “Head” Welch (guitar), Reginald “Fieldy” Arvizu (bass), and David Silveria (drums) — had released Life Is Peachy , a raw, claustrophobic follow-up to their game-changing 1994 debut. But they were still outsiders. Metal was still dominated by Pantera’s groove-metal swagger, the fading grunge of Stone Temple Pilots, and the rap-rock novelty of Limp Bizkit (whose frontman, Fred Durst, was about to become their unlikely hype man). Head and Munky were experimenting with even lower