When a band is so influential that they’re often considered one of the founding pillars of an entire subgenre, that’s a big fucking deal. But when they’re so big that they’re credited with a style of music that most people wouldn’t really associate them with, then you know that’s a massive band.
Apparently, All That Remains vocalist Phil Labonte thinks one such band that’s transcended their own genre and helped birth an entirely different one over the years was none other than nu-metal mainstays Korn. The other genre they helped create? Why, deathcore, of course.
Labonte’s comments stemmed from an interview he had with Joshua Toomey in which he said that Korn was “something that people wanted to emulate.”
“One of the weird things, was in the 90s when Korn came out, like, they had a massive impact. Clearly. I mean, that’s obvious, but I don’t know if people today understand exactly how impactful Korn was back then. Like when they hit, metal bands that were riff-heavy metal bands, they were like, ‘Well, that’s a new kind of heavy.’
And it was something that people wanted to emulate. And without Korn, I don’t think you get deathcore bands that you have today. Like, I think that they had a really, really strong influence on what heavy music; what it meant to make heavy music and what was heavy, right. Like the breakdown and downbeat stuff. There was some of that stuff in death metal before Korn and in metal before Korn. But Korn really brought that kind of out.
And I don’t even know that you would have metalcore breakdowns that you do without bands like Korn. I’m not sure, maybe you do. But I’m not sure.”
Labonte went on to speak of his own experience, citing a moment when he was in a death metal band and his bandmates wanted “to start doing that kind of stuff.” The stuff they were referencing was the sort of breakdowns that Korn and their like were doing.
As someone that wanted to “pay metal, like regular, like thrashy,” Labonte said he was against that idea. And he’s against that idea to this day.
“If you listen to All That Remains, All That Remains isn’t a breakdown band, we’re a riff band. And that’s kind of the way that I’ve always been. I like heavy riffs and I do like breakdowns. But our breakdowns are not the super, super chuggy — and we don’t rely on the breakdowns.”
Now, as our buddies over at ThePRP point out, Labonte’s not too far off with his assessment. Back in the early metalcore days, it wasn’t uncommon for bands like Suicide Silence and whatnot to literally wear their Korn fandom proudly. In fact, they ended up getting Korn frontman Jonathan Davis to guest on their 2011 track “Witness The Addiction.”
With new bands like The Callous Daoboys and the like also showing their love for nu-metal, it could easily be said that Korn and other bands of their time influenced whole swathes of current metal. And that’s to be celebrated.