KORN // Letting The Dark In

Jonathan Davis looks calm, comfortable and, most importantly, healthy as he connects with the chat from his home in Bakersfield, California. He is now well recovered from the bout of COVID that put him out of action in August.

MORE: FANGZ: Our Top 5 Bands Playing Halloween Hysteria // FROM CRISIS TO COLLAPSE: Talk Us through Their Essential Deserted Island Albums REVIEWS: PRIDELANDS: Light Bends // FIT FOR AN AUTOPSY: Oh What The Future Holds // UNDEROATH: Voyeurist // KORN: Requiem

“It wasn’t like life-threatening COVID or anything,” he says, “but it fucking hit me hard. The biggest thing was that I couldn’t eat and I had this horrible, horrible, horrible weakness. It really zapped me. I was really fucked up. I had enough energy to sing. I could sing, but that was just about it.”

Most who’ve come down with COVID will agree it’s hardly a picnic, and there’s many of us who have lost people to it – Davis included.

“I was very lucky. I lost a lot of people to this shit. I lost my stepdad to it, all kinds of things, so I was very happy that I got to come out on top and I could play shows and everything’s good. It took me about three months to recover fully. I still can’t taste or smell probably after four months and that’s irritating as hell, but we’ll see. It should clear up soon, we hope.”

Davis wasn’t the only member of Korn to get knocked around by COVID. Guitarist Munky and drummer Ray Luzier also fell victim to the virus during their autumn US tour but the band got the shows done with help from friends like JR Bareis from Love and Death and Fever 333’s Aric Improta.

With touring and recovery done, it’s time for the band to now concentrate on album number fourteen – Requiem. Written and recorded in April last year, there’s both a familiarity and newness to the release, with a clearly different aspect to 2019’s The Nothing, which was created in the aftermath of deep personal and emotional turmoil for the singer.

“The vibe is a little bit different because I’m in a lot better place mentally than I was on the previous records, so that’s nice and I really enjoy it,” Davis says. “And then also the big thing when we did the record, I was involved from the first note being written. I wasn’t there when the band was writing music on the previous records because I had too much stuff going on at home, and all kinds of crazy shit. So when we all got in the studio, I was there and the workflow was a lot easier. They weren’t guessing, ‘I hope he likes this part’, you know, that kind of thing, so it was awesome. It all fell together perfectly.”

The last three we had done before this we had done like huge layering and accents and shit underneath the guitars and we did a lot of big production shit. I asked the guys this time, let’s do this record with just us. Two fucking guitars, a bass and some drums, and me. And that’s it.
[ Jonathan Davis ]

Requiem features something of a stripped-back Korn, a focus on the group as musicians with less of the dense layering and production of previous albums. There was a deliberate move to do away with much of the studio trickery and, with the extra time they were due to universal forces, decided to lay down the album to tape.

“The last three we had done before this we had done like huge layering and accents and shit underneath the guitars and we did a lot of big production shit. I asked the guys this time, let’s do this record with just us. Two fucking guitars, a bass and some drums, and me. And that’s it. There’s nothing else other than that. We wanted to do it, and we recorded it on tape. And we did the hybrid thing we came up with, of mixing tape and capturing shit digitally. It was all a bunch of nerdy shit, but I was heavily involved with that, but it just gave it this vibe.”

Davis doesn’t want Korn to fall into the trap that has ensnared so many modern rock bands.

“If you hear a lot of rock music today, you can just hear it’s lifeless. It’s all done in a fucking box and it’s over edited … This was very loosely edited and done on tape. There’s something with tape that captures this energy. You hit that guitar string, and that guitar string resonates, and it sends a signal with electricity, through the cable and into the board and it’s captured on magnetic tape. It’s fucking moving energy. You do the same thing when it goes into a computer, it’s converted into ones and zeros and that’s it: the life is gone. You do that onto tape, and capture it, it still retains that essence.”

Part of Korn’s original appeal when they emerged in the mid-90s was in how they presented their music as a straight-up, organic force of nature and passion. Does Davis think that the band may have lost their way with all the added elements and effects over time?

“I think when we did do it, if we did do it super digitally, it was meant to be that way. We did it on purpose. You know like when we did Path of Totality, that was all done on computer because we worked with deejays. The first album we did digitally was Untouchables. That was the first one, and we did that digitally because it just sounded better than anything else at the time. After that, we just started using ProTools and that became … well, it is what it is, you know. But, how the band started, and when we hear the drums back, and the guitars on tape and we’re like ‘Ah! There’s that sound!’ You kind of forget about it. So we won’t do that again. We’re always going to be recording to tape. Call me an old fuddy-duddy who digs classic rock, but that’s how we’re going to do it!”

2022 marks the twentieth anniversary of Untouchables, their immense fifth album. It’s a record Davis gets distinctly animated about.

“Untouchables just solidified shit for us. It took us two years and it was crazy, with Michael Beinhorn. I call that album the heavy metal Asia, Steely Dan or Asia. Now you put that album on and it still sounds so fucking good. We had to have equipment custom made to handle the digital world. There was one long day of drum takes we did and there was fifty-something mics. 48 tracks of drums! Shit was crazy, crazy, crazy when we did that record, but when you play it – there’s nothing like it. It’s twenty years old, and it still sounds fucking ridiculous!”

The pandemic gave Korn time to experiment and record the way they wanted to. It also saw Jonathan Davis spending a lot more time at home than he otherwise might have at the beginning of a new album cycle. He was able to put his house in order, both figuratively and literally.

“I was home for a couple of months,” he says, “and I was going crazy. But I liked it. I sat there and I did some soul searching and dealt with a lot of stuff in my head that I needed to deal with, and I got to be a fucking dad and hang out with my kids, and I got to do some fucking gardening and do shit around the house. Shit I don’t ever do. I took that time, and it was nice. Looking back I thought I was going crazy, but I thought it was much needed, and then we were making the record at the same time too.”

Requiem was done with the band flying in to meet up at their facility in Bakersfield, writing for ten days straight and then taking a break of three weeks before regrouping.

“Nobody burned out,” Davis says, “and it was nice. That was the one thing I’d look forward to every month.”

The result is a lean, mean, stripped-back and dark Korn release that Jonathan Davis still finds time to enjoy.

“I listen to it all the time. I mean, it’s really old to me now, ‘cause it was done back last year, when but I do listen to it, it sounds so fucking good! I’m really proud of it.”