But what’s more important - are KoЯn still relevant?

 

Surprisingly, the answer is more or less: yes. And ‘The Nothing’ sounds like a 2019 rock album indeed. With brilliant production, thick and heavy guitar sound, JONATHAN DAVIS’ strong and varied vocals (check out how many things he tries in ‘This Loss’), it is a superbly sounding a very well balanced album.

 

‘Gravity of Discomfort’ and ‘The Darkness is Revealing’ display all that’s good and great about ‘The Nothing’ - the rhythm section (with FIELDY’s easily recognisable bass upfront), cool riffs delivered by MUNKY and HEAD, simple but effective song structures with great screams and singing by DAVIS. His vocals are indeed a high point here - no wonder it took him longer than usual (we’re talking 4-5 months) to record them. DAVIS’ voice is so interesting and unusual it takes 4-5 spins to really explore the vocal complexity of tracks like ‘Surrender to Failure’.

 

Mere hours after its official release, both fans and critics praised this as KoЯn’s best album in over a decade. And they weren’t wrong either. Still, that doesn’t necessarily make it a great release.

 

Even the more interesting tracks here like ‘Idiosyncrasy’ fall into the band’s main flow of sounding too much like the nu metal cliche they themselves invented. It’s inevitable to hear DAVIS singing and screaming “God is making fun of me/God is making fun of me/God is making fun of me” and not come off with the feeling you’ve heard that before. ‘Cold’, ‘The Ringmaster’, ‘Finally Free’ and ’H@rd3r’ are anything but inventive - they’re so run-of-the-mill KoЯn tracks, their predictability is almost too much to take.

 

As is always the case with KoЯn, themes within ‘The Nothing’ include depression, loss of loved ones, self-flagellation, alienation and loneliness. Things could hardly have gone in a different direction - after all, DAVIS lost both his wife and mother within one year. Our issue with the lyrics is very different - after 26 years of crafting them, and being almost 50 himself, band singer and lyricist still uses a very simplistic, almost childish approach to writing, including too many “fucks” along the way. Combine that with a few sampled (supposedly real) sobs and nervous breakdowns and you can easily imagine how some tracks come off as too teen and devoid of real depth.