Rating: 10 / 10 Stars
KORN is: Jonathan Davis – Vocals, BagpipesJames “Munky” Shaffer – GuitarBrian “Head” Welch – GuitarReginald “Fieldy” Arvizu – BassDavid Silveria – Drums
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REVIEW – By the time KORN released Follow the Leader on August 18, 1998, the Bakersfield, California outsiders had already spent two albums constructing a sound that seemed almost designed to make conventional metal uncomfortable. Their self-titled 1994 debut was ugly, claustrophobic and startlingly different. Life Is Peachy pushed further into that damaged world. But Follow the Leader was where everything became enormous.
The remarkable part is that KORN did not achieve that breakthrough by sanding away everything strange about themselves.
Instead, Follow the Leader magnified it.
The detuned guitars became wider. Fieldy’s percussive bass became impossible to mistake for anyone else. David Silveria’s drums leaned even harder into groove. Jonathan Davis moved between melody, rage, rhythmic phrasing, whispers and eruptions of almost inhuman scat vocals. Hip-hop stopped being merely an influence running beneath KORN’s music and became an overt part of the album’s identity.
Produced by KORN, Steve Thompson and Toby Wright, with Brendan O’Brien handling the mix, Follow the Leader sounds considerably larger and cleaner than its predecessors without becoming comfortable. That distinction matters. The production gives every strange component of KORN’s sound more room to operate.
And there are a lot of strange components.
The original CD famously makes listeners wait through 12 brief silent tracks before “It’s On!” finally arrives as Track 13. Removed from that physical-media oddity and treated as the musical opener, “It’s On!” remains exactly what its title promises: an announcement.
Munky and Head’s downtuned guitars grind against Fieldy’s instantly identifiable clicking bass while Silveria provides the rhythmic foundation underneath them. The guitars rarely behave like traditional metal guitars. They scrape, pulse, squeal and create texture as often as they deliver riffs. KORN understood that heaviness did not require filling every available space.
Then comes “Freak on a Leash.”
Decades of radio play, videos, compilations and cultural familiarity have made it difficult to hear the song without all the baggage attached to it. Strip that away and the construction remains exceptional. Its creepy, atmospheric verses create tension rather than immediately releasing it. Davis sounds restrained until restraint becomes impossible.
Then the song breaks open.
His famous barrage of rhythmic scat vocals functions less like conventional singing than another percussion instrument, accelerating toward the command that detonates the breakdown. It is one of those moments copied so often afterward that hearing the original can obscure how bizarre it actually was. This was not conventional pop-metal songwriting dressed in baggy clothes. KORN turned one of their weirdest vocal ideas into the centerpiece of one of their biggest songs.
“Got the Life” demonstrates the other side of Follow the Leader.
Silveria drives the song with an almost dance-oriented beat while Davis delivers one of the album’s most immediately melodic vocal performances. The result feels like nu metal colliding with a nightclub without either side completely winning. KORN discovered that groove could make their music accessible without sacrificing weight.
That rhythmic sophistication is one reason Follow the Leader separates itself from many records subsequently lumped into the nu-metal explosion. The band could be brutally heavy, but brute force was never the entire vocabulary. Silveria and Fieldy created a rhythm section capable of making distorted seven-string guitars move.
“Dead Bodies Everywhere” turns that movement into psychological horror.
Its opening juxtaposes a low, wobbling synth-bass presence with a warped music-box-like melody, building unease before the guitars arrive. The song does not simply become heavier; it feels as though something lurking underneath the arrangement has finally broken through. Davis thrives in these environments because his vocals can move from wounded to threatening without making either emotion feel disconnected from the other.
The album then makes its hip-hop fascination explicit with “Children of the Korn,” featuring Ice Cube.
What could have sounded like a record-label crossover stunt instead fits naturally into the rhythmic language KORN had already developed. Ice Cube’s forceful delivery and Davis’ tortured vocal approach occupy different emotional spaces, but the bouncing groove underneath them provides common ground. The collaboration helps demonstrate that KORN’s relationship with hip-hop was structural, not cosmetic.
“B.B.K.” pulls the album back toward frantic rap-rock momentum. Davis attacks the vocal rhythms while shimmering guitar effects keep the arrangement from becoming a simple exercise in aggression. Head and Munky repeatedly demonstrate how important their guitar partnership was to KORN’s identity. One player can establish weight while the other introduces dissonance, noise or an unsettling texture around it.
Then “Pretty” slows everything down.
Built around a deep groove and a much darker emotional atmosphere, it is one of the record’s more disturbing pieces. Davis’ performance carries a visceral quality that makes the song uncomfortable rather than merely heavy. That discomfort has always been central to KORN at their best. Their darkest material rarely feels like horror viewed from a safe distance.
It feels personal.
Not every experiment survives nearly three decades equally well.
“All in the Family,” featuring Limp Bizkit vocalist Fred Durst, is the clearest example. Its deliberately confrontational back-and-forth brings the album’s hip-hop battle concept into full view, and the clashing vocal personalities certainly capture the juvenile, antagonistic energy surrounding late-1990s rap-metal culture. Historically, it is almost a time capsule.
As a song in 2026, however, it is far harder to defend than the material surrounding it.
The performance has energy, and the beat works, but the insult-trading increasingly feels like a novelty interrupting a record capable of considerably deeper emotional violence. Context explains it. Context does not automatically improve it.
That imperfection is important when evaluating Follow the Leader rather than simply celebrating it. This is an adventurous album, and adventure occasionally means following an idea farther than it deserves.
“Reclaim My Place” restores the menace with aggressive, rhythm-driven metal and particularly forceful drumming. Silveria’s contribution throughout this record deserves emphasis. He is not simply keeping time behind the guitars. His playing determines how KORN’s riffs breathe, swing and hit. The double-bass work here adds intensity without turning the song into conventional speed-driven metal.
“Justin” changes the emotional temperature again.
Somber and dynamic, it moves through a heavy-soft structure that allows melancholy to occupy as much space as aggression. KORN were frequently marketed through shock, anger and grotesque imagery, but vulnerability was always one of the engines underneath Davis’ writing and performance. When Follow the Leader allows that vulnerability room, the record becomes substantially more interesting than its reputation as a late-1990s cultural juggernaut suggests.
“Seed” is frantic and claustrophobic, with Davis once again using scat-style vocalizations while the arrangement darts between metallic weight and stranger rhythmic impulses. There are flashes here of the jazz-informed elasticity that occasionally surfaced inside KORN’s otherwise crushing framework.
“Cameltosis,” featuring Slimkid3 of The Pharcyde, returns to hip-hop fusion from another angle. Instead of the more confrontational feel of “Children of the Korn” or “All in the Family,” the song rides a darker, slinkier bass-driven groove. Its smooth rhythmic foundation and heavy ambient chorus show how comfortable KORN had become allowing outside voices into their sound without abandoning their own identity.
Then comes “My Gift to You.”
Rather than closing with one of the album’s more commercially obvious impulses, KORN sink into something suffocating. The tempo feels agonizingly slow, while Davis’ bagpipes introduce another dissonant texture over the heaviness. It is oppressive, patient and deeply unsettling—a finale that reconnects Follow the Leader with the darker instincts beneath all its crossover ambition.
Keep listening beyond the apparent ending and “Earache My Eye” emerges as a hidden piece of absurdity, a cover associated with Cheech & Chong that loosens the tension after the album’s crushing conclusion. Its campiness is almost the point. After an album filled with trauma, menace, grotesque humor and experimentation, KORN leave through the side door laughing.
That collision of seriousness and immaturity is part of the truth about Follow the Leader.
It is tempting to rewrite historically important albums as though every choice was calculated and every experiment succeeded. This one does not need that protection. Some moments are dated. Some of its late-1990s excess is impossible to separate from the era that produced it. “All in the Family” in particular lands far differently today than the album’s strongest material.
But those weaknesses are surrounded by songs whose musical language remains remarkably identifiable.
“Freak on a Leash” still sounds strange.
“Got the Life” still moves.
“Dead Bodies Everywhere” still generates genuine unease.
“My Gift to You” still suffocates.
And the rhythm section still sounds unlike virtually anything that followed in KORN’s wake.
That last point matters because Follow the Leader became enormously influential. The album reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and eventually earned a 5× Platinum certification in the United States. Its success helped move a style once considered too strange for mainstream rock into the center of popular heavy music. Countless bands subsequently borrowed pieces of the formula: low-tuned guitars, hip-hop rhythms, vulnerable vocals, oversized grooves and DJ-informed textures.
But influence is not why Follow the Leader earns a high score.
The music has to survive independently of what came afterward.
Most of it does.
What sounds particularly impressive nearly three decades later is how much personality exists inside the performances. Fieldy’s bass could be identified within seconds. Silveria approaches metal drumming with an unmistakable sense of groove. Head and Munky make seven-string guitars sound alternately enormous, diseased and alien. Davis possesses a vocal identity so peculiar that even his most imitated techniques remain immediately recognizable as his.
Together, those elements made KORN difficult to reproduce accurately even when the music industry became flooded with bands attempting to follow them.
That is the irony sitting at the center of Follow the Leader.
Its massive success helped create a movement built around imitation, yet the record itself succeeds because KORN were almost impossible to imitate convincingly.
In 1998, Follow the Leader represented KORN becoming one of the biggest heavy bands in the world. In 2026, the more interesting question is what remains when that historical achievement is removed from the equation.
The answer is an ambitious, deeply rhythmic, frequently disturbing and occasionally flawed album made by five musicians whose individual peculiarities locked together at exactly the right moment.
It is not perfect. Its experiments do not all age equally well, and portions of its rap-metal excess are unmistakably products of their time. Those weaknesses keep it from a perfect score.
But Follow the Leader does not require nostalgia to remain powerful.
Twenty-eight years later, the leader is still considerably more interesting than most of what followed.
For more information on KORN, visit:
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