You don’t know them but your kids might. Long-defunct Canadian nu-metal band Nervepitch and their lone album, 2003’s …My Sombre Existence, was lost media just three years ago. They have a handful of pictures to their name and that’s it. No interviews, no live footage, no music videos. They also have around 130,000 monthly streams on Spotify.
Nervepitch are emblematic of the nu-metal rabbit hole. Despite being one of the most popular genres of metal ever, nu-metal had no indie scene to speak of and was widely mocked by the press, mainstream or otherwise. While the mighty Pitchfork was making stars out of Neutral Milk Hotel and Broken Social Scene they were sneering at Deftones and dismissing Orgy. You have to go all the way back to 1998 to find any sympathy in Brent DiCrenzo’s review of Korn’s Follow the Leader; a review that fictionalizes the author seeing a priest to confess the sin of enjoying nu-metal and has long been erased from Pitchfork's website. With no influential infrastructure, nu metal bands that didn’t get signed by a major label basically didn’t exist, doomed to PrP message board threads and mislabeled Limewire downloads.
As such, nu-metal has become a vast ocean of undiscovered albums that went completely unnoticed in their era. To the serious nu-metal devotee, bands like Folder, Calm, Brik, and Left are household names with mentions of them becoming mind-blowing occasions. Twitter user @isawh3rlaugh asked me to post a song by Prefix - a band that I had never even heard of - and, when I did, proceeded to spam me with gleeful replies and quote re-posts like a kid tumbling down stairs on Christmas morning. Artists like 40 Below Summer and Nothingface, who both had major deals and real push, were taken for granted in their time as the nu-metal sound was becoming passe but now sound shockingly original. Younger nu-metal groups trying to create something other than the 1,000,001th spin on Bring Me the Horizon mine these acts for raw creative energy. Texas group Empty Shell Casing once explained to me they yanked so many ideas from French nu-metal acts like Guts Syndicate and Pleymo it was almost embarrassing, I was floored they knew who they were at all. Tom Hobson of the Leeds-based Bodyweb says he discovered Nervepitch by stumbling over a different underground nu-metal band called Minus and then getting algorithmically recommended, claiming their obscurity enhances the appeal “in the way of ‘can’t wait to show this to other people to see them be like ‘woah what’s this’ rather than gatekeeping it.”
Nervepitch formed in Oshawa, Canada in the wake of another band's dissolution. As bassist Johnny T recounted to me: “NeedleRust broke up [...] Ryan [Moonlight, vocals] and I wanted to form a band that had some bounce.” Nervepitch bunkered down to record their debut album …My Sombre Existence in 2003 which, upon release, started picking up significant local buzz. Johnny: “I would get stopped sometimes when I was at the mall - I would see Nervepitch t-shirts and hoodies being worn and people would want CDs signed.”
But Nervepitch wasn’t content with local success. “We wanted it all [...] Eventually in 2003, our friend and manager at the time, Kyle, got the album to someone at Roadrunner Records. Someone from Roadrunner came out to see us in Toronto one night.” But like a million other nu metal bands in 2003, they were just a little too late, a little too different, for Roadrunner to take a chance on an act that went all in on harsh vocals. “What I remember is being told by our manager that Roadrunner wanted a singer/singing style similar to another one of their bands,” Johnny claims, adding, “This ultimately, I believe, was the beginning of the end for us. It was shattering for Ryan to be told that.”
The rejection basically ended Nervepitch right there. Members moved onto other bands and, eventually, from music altogether. Johnny: “I moved to the countryside and kinda lost touch with everyone initially, Ryan started singing in a few small local bands again, and Scotty [drums] the same for a bit. Julius [guitar] moved further away too.” Any concept of Nervepitch continuing was permanently dashed when frontman Ryan Moonlight took his own life in 2015. Johnny: “It was a shock. I know he had a good family. And I'm sure we'd have new music today if he was here. I can only think of the positive.”
Both Nervepitch and …My Sombre Existence faded from memory, another rock ‘n’ roll dream defied. When Johnny’s home burned down in 2018, taking their material with it, all seemed lost. But then, something unexpected happened.
Johnny: “I probably started getting messages from people telling me our name was out there - about 2 years ago or so, I saw that people were looking for the albums.” Johnny reached out to the recording studio where …My Sombre Existence was recorded, looking to get their music online as a birthday surprise for Julian, only to find he had already done it. That it became the success they never achieved in their time has astonished all involved. “I am working so hard to try and get merch out for everybody, Julius and I talk almost every day. We are feeling the love for sure. And I know Ryan is feeling it too.”
All of this was made possible by the nu metal rabbit hole. It was Jade, 18, username infrarainch2 on Instagram, who discovered them after a recommendation by a friend who found out she liked Staind’s debut album Tormented, an underground nu metal album by an extremely mainstream band, not just in sound - which is vastly more raw than later efforts - but that it cannot be streamed anywhere.
Jade: “I started playing ‘Stitches’ and got instantly hooked. I can't really describe what it was, but the feeling that song would give me whenever I listened to it was something I never experienced before,” she continues, “I was showing it to my friends, researching day and night.”
The collective efforts of a nu-metal preservation Discord server are what cracked the case. It took years of DMing anyone remotely connected to the band. Their bassist, drummer and sound engineer had lost the files. They even scoured the liner notes to reach out to personal friends the band thanked. Nothing. It was former Nervepitch guitarist Julius that was their last and best hope.
Jade: “I was tired of the constant trolling we would get while trying to search for info on [Nervepitch] so I decided to put my big girl pants on and contact Julius about it,” she continues, “Once he responded our conversations gradually began to form. We were talking for well over two hours and I made sure not to seem pushy about wanting to hear the lost songs from …My Sombre Existence. Once I did he sent me the FLAC files and I completely lost my shit.”
If Nervepitch’s out-of-nowhere success starts anywhere; it might have been TikTok. First, user @dannyglikesmusic made a post briefly recounting the history of the band and the story of their album, netting 125k views in the process. This post was seen by user '@reacon.productions,' who edited some Halo 2 clips over Nervepitch’s “Stitches,” racking up an astounding million views and sending streams for “Stitches” from around 20,000 into the hundred of thousands. Reacon: “I was listening to them nonstop and doing edits later that week and I just thought ‘Stitches’ fit perfectly with the Halo trailer. Never knew that it was going to blow up as hard as it did.”
Beyond that it’s word of mouth, algorithms, and playlists. Search “Nervepitch” on r/numetal and you’ll find page after page after page of eager and excited nu metal fans recommending the band to each other. Kristian, 20, discovered them by being “bored at work” before coming across a nu metal meme by PorcelainMaggot and going through all of it. “I discovered this band by accident just because I was bored on Reddit. I love that album. I play it almost everyday.”
I reached out to Julian, former Nervepitch guitarist, for his take on the situation: “I get messages all the time about how our music has helped people through dark times and even given them a voice when they didn’t think they had one,” he communicated to me via Instagram DMs, “The idea that something we collectively worked on so many years ago, and almost forgotten about, has come back to life is absolutely astonishing.”
Younger fans gravitate towards underground nu-metal’s double obscurity (underrated genre, underrated bands) as a piece of rock history they can own. Alienated by the exhausting lionization of groups like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, underground nu metal is a way of accessing the past without the weight of nostalgia. Many of their new fans are young teens who didn’t even exist when this music was released. Kyrin, 17, discovered Nervepitch by “Looking through underground nu metal playlists” and “enjoys how different it sounds compared to other nu metal bands in the mainstream.” Frankie, 23, adores the group so much they create and sell (through us, natch) a Nervepitch holographic trading card. “It brings me back to that angsty DIY vibe that my brother's band would embellish when they used to play in my basement,” she tells me, “ It just gives me the sense and feeling of that era.”
Like with most lost media, curiosity is enhanced by the elusiveness. Seeded Crown, another one and done nu-metal band with no corresponding media to their name, were accessible only through zip files of mp3s for decades before they uploaded their lone album Please Remain Seeded, to streaming this year. They now have over 62k monthly streams with opening track “Giving In” topping 250,000. Design19, a Finnish group making Deftones-core long before Deftones-core was a thing, released Trigger in 2000 to zero fanfare. They’re now clearing 300k monthlies with an album that would be a phenomenon if it was released tomorrow. As Max, 25, put it: “[Design19] went in, dropped a banger album, broke up, refused to elaborate. Biggest power move in nu metal history.”
All of this is transpiring right under the noses of a music press that you’d think would have noticed by now. However, when you consider that even the legacy of nu-metal’s most famous acts are still in contention, it makes sense. If we can’t agree on whether or not Significant Other is a classic, there’s no chance anyone with a smidge of journalistic integrity is going to ride out for Nervepitch. A proper critic would take one listen to …My Sombre Existence and send it hurtling into the trash, inventing a score below zero along the way.
This is also the appeal. To love this music is to own it, it’s yours. You don’t have to contend with acclaim or movie syncs or interviews or performances or covers or music videos or retrospectives rattling around in your brain; instead, you get to experience the music and decide what it means to you, by yourself, and when the music is as lonely as you are it becomes an even more comforting place to hide. As Mac, 21, relayed to me: “The vocals that Ryan Moonlight gave to us was some of the rawest of its time and it truly makes me feel understood or just not alone.”
In many regards, the idea that kids would be as hype about Nervepitch as they would Korn and excavate nu-metal’s past while pushing it into the future is the agenda, manifest. It’s one thing to love Linkin Park but to go so far out of your way to discover completely unknown nu-metal bands that would make any discerning, "respectable" music fan seize up and die with disgust is another. To actually track those bands down and inform them that the music they made in their youth and forgot about is worth preserving, is something else altogether.
Holiday Kirk, who once helped Simon Says recover their own lost classics, is a writer based in Los Angeles, California.
