These songs are so nice, they were done twice... or three times, or four times, or they've been done to death. In any case, covers are a way for a new act to capture the spirit of one of their influences or inspirations, while putting their own spin on it to make the song theirs. Are any of these the level of Johnny Cash's version of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt," in that the song was basically handed off by the original artist themselves? No, not really, but these are still fun takes on iconic pop and rock songs that have been given a nu life by the respective bands.
The Starter Packs aren't definitive lists, but they are the first stop on the journey through the nu world, so have fun and let us know what you think should be on this list in the future.
"Shout 2000" by Disturbed (originally by Tears for Fears)
Disturbed’s cover of Tears for Fears’ 1984 “Shout,” aptly retitled “Shout 2000” to mark the year of its release, stands as one of the greatest covers not just in nu-metal, but in modern rock history. "Shout 2000" was released on Disturbed's breakout debut The Sickness, along with hits such as "Down with the Sickness" and "Stupify". The band truly makes the track their own, weaving in unexpected nods to early 90s pop culture by splicing in lyrics from Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” and House of Pain’s “Jump Around.” The result is a collage of nostalgia that pulls listeners into the aggressive, present-tense sound of turn-of-the-millennium nu-metal, so much so that many in the new generation may not have even realized it was a cover at all.
The timing was spot-on. By reviving a song originally released 16 years earlier, Disturbed helped reintroduce “Shout” to a younger audience. Tears for Fears were also experiencing a cultural resurgence around that time, not only through this cover but as key contributors to the Donnie Darko soundtrack the following year. “Shout 2000” captured that moment and became a defining piece of it. They also throw down this song so strong live. So "Shout!, Shout!, Let it all out!"
-Ricky Adams
"Taste" by Poppy (originally by Sabrina Carpenter, with a segment of "I Touch Myself" by The Divinyls)
Australian music channel triple j is best known for their series Like A Version, where artists pick a song to cover in their own style. While this series may best be known for Denzel Curry's fiery take on Rage Against The Machine's “Bulls on Parade,” an even more recent runaway success was Poppy taking on a hit from one of her contemporaries. It is surprisingly restrained for the post-genre princess, but it is in this cooler-headed approach where her cover shines. She even sneaks in the chorus to Divinyls’ “I Touch Myself,” taking the suggestive nature of the song one step further. Sex sells, and while it's not usually something that Poppy goes for in her presentation, her (per)version of it works wonders here.
-Lucia Z. Liner
"Welcome Home (Sanitarium)" by Limp Bizkit (originally by Metallica)
Back in 2001, MTV hosted a special series known as MTV Icons where they paid tribute to trailblazing and world class artists by inviting others to take part and cover their songs. Metallica was honored on the program in 2003, which occurred right as nu metal was still somewhat well liked by the general public, with Korn, Staind and Limp Bizkit performing. Limp Bizkit picked an interesting track to cover, “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)” from Master of Puppets, and it was actually, genuinely fantastic. I rarely ever hear people talk about this cover compared to the buzz Korn’s cover of “One” got. Maybe it was due to the song choice, as “Sanitarium” is probably the last song someone might choose from Master. It’s packed full of intensity and Limp Bizkit’s signature hip-hop flair with a sickening scratched solo from DJ Lethal. Fred Durst is at his absolute best as a frontman here, commanding the crowd to get out of their seats and move (which they did, Metallica included!), and the track lets the rougher edge of his vocals get a nice spotlight. It’s a refreshing reminder that, for all the crap they get, Limp Bizkit are fierce at what they do and the chokehold they had on the world at one point was completely understandable.
-Cain Borgia
"Eyeless" by Bring Me the Horizon (originally by Slipknot)
Bring Me The Horizon’s cover of "Eyeless" by Slipknot is a tease.
It's not available on DSPs and isn't always available as an “official” download, which bites as it's the best cover of the song to date. Originally a Hot Topic exclusive, its legacy is one of many promotional singles to become lost media, or at the very least something which fans don’t know of its existence (Sky Eats Airplane's version of "Nookie," ABR’s "Chop Suey," and Suicide Silence's "Engine No. 5")
While a straightforward cover for what was a bonus, it is perhaps the hardest of them all. When taking on the Nine, too many play it safe and end up underdelivering in the end. Bands don't usually add blackened deathcore sections, turn the bounce riffs into a breakdown, and then slow it down at the end to potentially crowdkill anyone in the immediate vicinity. That is Bring Me the Horizon’s job here, and it's no wonder it’s Corey's favorite version of the song.
It just sucks that this isn't downloadable in a “ISP-friendly” fashion.
-rosiegothicc
"Metro" by System of a Down (originally by Berlin)
If you don’t know the American synthwave band Berlin for their 1986 smash hit “Take My Breath Away”, then perhaps I can interest you in one of their earlier hits called “The Metro”. Best known for its usage of the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 synthesizer, it became their third highest charting single and received numerous remixes and re-recordings over the years… much like System of a Down did with their own covers of the song.
The most well-known version is arguably the one that appears in the films Not Another Teen Movie and Dracula 2000, alongside a slew of other nu metal tracks, The most widely-available version came from their 2006 “Lonely Day” maxi single, but there are two other versions that exist, one from 1995 as part of an untitled demo and again in 1997 on their fourth demo cassette. Though the 2006 version shows far more polish and practice, it surprisingly doesn’t stray too far away from its previous versions, with Serj Tankian sauntering about the verses alongside a chunky bassline while the chorus breaks into a frantic punk sprint with some classic System cheese in the instrumental break. What makes a fantastic cover is when an artist is able to put their own flavor on the original, not exactly reinvent the wheel, and this does a perfect job of that.
-Cain Borgia
Spineshank - "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" (originally by The Beatles)
Paul McCartney would love this. I think the audacity would just blow him away, he’d respect the disrespect. And indeed it is disrespectful as all hell. Massacreing the original’s melody, exchanging its mournful groove for an industrial sturm und drang, Spineshank’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is a radical take on a beloved classic that barely acknowledges the original at all. But Johnny Santos straining for a melody he can’t capture lends the track a new kind of ache, a grounded teen’s agonized lament. And when he flips the “Look at you all” into a shrieking refrain it unlocks a level of white hot angst that approaches existential levels of despair.
-Holiday Kirk
Disturbed - "Land of Confusion" (originally by Genesis)
Once upon a time, Disturbed used to be cool, and this cover of Genesis' all-timer, along with the accompanying video animated by the great Todd McFarlane (Spawn), proves it. Featuring the band's mascot The Guy front and center, fighting against capitalism, corporate greed, and the endless war machine, the cover is, by frontman David Draiman's admission, "taking a song that's absolutely nothing like us and making it our own." It marks a turn towards the band's more melodic hard rock stylings, but not without sneaking in some post-verbal growls (the "ahh ahh" of Draiman in a couple of places throughout) or even a brief guitar solo by Dan Donegan.
The whole of the band's Ten Thousand Fists marked a turning point for the band, and lest we forget that without this cover, their now-legendary take on "The Sound of Silence" may never have come to pass. On a more personal note, said album was the first metal album I ever purchased, after hearing "Stricken" on Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock in the sixth grade. And the rest, as they say, is history.
-Lucia Z. Liner
Dope - "You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)" (originally by Dead or Alive)
I happen to be intimately familiar with this song, as it has been played dozens of times at my home on the club scene, The Ination. While staying melodically faithful to the Dead or Alive classic, Edsel gives just enough grit to dirty up this synthpop staple. Featuring on the 2000 re-release of the band's debut LP Felons and Revolutionaries as well as the soundtrack to American Psycho, the song helped the band crack the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart, and serves as an energetic contemporary interpretation of a beloved Eighties dance hall anthem.
-Lucia Z. Liner
Deftones - "No Ordinary Love" (originally by Sade)
Sade used to be lame. I’m serious, witness David Strubbs of Melody Maker panning her then recent single “No Ordinary Love” as “godawful, glutinous glop.” Trust me when I say, Sade used to be the enemy, music for the rich and vapid. Although her presence in the pop pantheon is now unquestioned, when Deftones decided to cover the aforementioned “No Ordinary Love” it was a radical selection. Imagine Anthrax recording a reverent take on “Deacon Blues” and you’re getting there. But they understood the truth before everyone else did: Sade is cool as fuck. Deftones are right at home here with Chino Moreno’s roar leashed to a sensuous croon that locked in his sex symbol status well before his own band would be revised from lame to legacy status. Couple that with Jonah Matranga of Far offering gentle vocal counterpoints and Stephen Carpenter’s restrained touch harmonics and distorted chord washes and all those histrionic “horny Deftones” memes seem perfectly sensible.
-Holiday Kirk
Chimaira - "Fascination Street" (originally by The Cure)
Hell yeah. These are the best nu metal covers. The ones that would send OG fans of the original into sputtering hysterics at the disrespect. Chimaira transplants The Cure’s whispery, winding “Facination Street” onto a loose drop tuned groove and almost entirely junk the melody in favor of Mark Hunter’s frustrated growl. It does almost nothing good that the original did and instead has to be approached on its own terms. Which is as a nu-metal ripper job that teases out the already heavy undertones of the original before violently ripping it out of its socket.
-Holiday Kirk
3rd Strike - "Paranoid" (originally by Black Sabbath)
3rd Strike’s frontman, the late Jim Korthe, already sounded so much like Ozzy Osbourne that it’s hard to fault Hollywood Records for demanding they record at least one Black Sabbath cover. And “Paranoid” for its first minute and a half, is relatively straightforward. Then Korthe drops an original rap verse right into the middle of the song:
"Hate flowing through my veins / I can't change re-arrange (just how many nu metal bands rhymed change with re-arrange anyway?) / Just a victim, a casualty.”
It’s kinda funny but totally invigorated, a shot of nu-metal adrenaline that explodes into the final verse. The biggest Black Sabbath fan I know - my Dad, naturally - thought it rocked. That’s about the best co-sign I could imagine.
-Holiday Kirk
Fear Factory - "Cars" (originally by, and featuring, Gary Numan)
It's not often that a cover will feature the original artist, unless the group covering the song features a member of the original act, but Fear Factory tapped synthpop legend Gary Numan to tag team vocal duties with the dry lung vocal martyr Burton C. Bell on their version of "Cars." The band played the song as an encore on their European leg of their Demanufacture tour, and while apprehensive at first, Numan signed on for the project in order to help introduce his music, which he felt could be considered dated in some respects, to a newer generation.
To his credit, the song helped the band's Obsolete become their best-selling album to date, introduced metalheads to one of the progenitors of electronic music, and gave a fresh coat of paint to an all-timer of a song.
-Lucia Z. Liner
Korn - Word Up! (originally by Cameo)
While one of the biggest influences in nu metal outside of heavy music is hip-hop, we often forget the funk flavors, at least we did until Korn gave a heavier take on Cameo's hit "Word Up!" Releasing a new cut on a greatest hits album is a choice, but in this case, Korn released this and their full version of "Another Brick in the Wall" on Greatest Hits Vol. 1, though the band had been using it as a soundcheck for some time before deciding to record it.
While the reasoning makes sense, the absolutely batshit music video for the song does not. The band members' faces superimposed onto dog's heads is a visual for sure, namely the ending shot of Jonathan Dog-vis being cradled between a dancer's bare (albeit censored) breasts is an image that may take some time to cope with. Even still, it's a fun cover, with all of the guitar tricks and rattling bass that comes with a Korn song.
-Lucia Z. Liner
Coal Chamber ft. Ozzy Osbourne - Shock the Monkey (originally by Peter Gabriel
Sharon Osbourne was the manager for the nu metal upstarts Coal Chamber, long before frontman Dez Fafara was praying for villains with his groove metal outfit DevilDriver. That to one side, he and his first band proved they could go for groove and sway with their take on Peter Gabriel's hook-heavy "Shock the Monkey," featuring guest vocals from the godfather of heavy metal himself, Ozzy Osbourne. Add to this help from keyboardist Troy van Leeuwen and Dave "The Rave" Ogilvie of Skinny Puppy mixing the song, and this eccentric tune gets a melodic and malicious turn courtesy of Fafara and Co.
-Lucia Z. Liner
Limp Bizkit - "Faith" (originally by George Michael)
Above all else, Limp Bizkit made their reputation on having fun. Ever the canny businessman, Fred Durst had been incorporating cheesy pop covers into their live sets long before they’d become the world's most hated nu metal boy band. The J. Geils Band’s “Love Stinks,” Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up,” and “Beat It” by Michael Jackson were all in frequent rotation at their shows, but it was George Michael’s “Faith” that rose to the top and became on of the defining tracks of their early image. Even though it was something they’d become known for playing live while coming up in the underground scene, it was a tough sell to include on their 1997 debut Three Dollar Bill, Y'all. Wes Borland hated it. Ross Robinson hated it and almost didn’t include it. But Fred Durst had a vision, and that vision paid off.
The cover itself is so undeniably fun, no amount of theorizing could fully capture it. George Michael’s 80s pastiche of the 50s, layered with Fred’s pastiche of the 80s on the verses, giving way to an almost parody of late 90s aggression as he screams the chorus comes together into a track where the only time that matters is the energy of the present. It’s loud, it’s goofy, but it takes the source material seriously, something that became especially significant after Michael was arrested and subsequently outed in April of 1998. There’s a cynical way to read Bizkit’s decision to release “Faith” as a single that October, to see it as trying to get their big break by taking advantage of someone’s suffering. And maybe it was, but the way Fred talks about it in contemporary interviews doesn’t give that impression. In a moment where he had every opportunity to be nasty, and an audience primed to accept it, he instead talks about how much Wham! meant to him growing up, and that he’s excited for his fans to discover the original song. It means something to me that this band, often posited as the epitome of bigoted masculinity, kept this song as something they were proud to have as a part of their catalogue.
-Riviera
