Korn - Life Is Peachy (30th Anniversary)

Korn got stranger and nastier on Life Is Peachy, their 1996 second album, back for its 30th anniversary on 140-gram vinyl with a bonus a cappella take of Twist.

Arriving barely two years after their self-titled debut, the record found the Bakersfield band leaning harder into everything that made them unsettling: Jonathan Davis's tortured scatting and screaming, Fieldy's clanking slap bass, and the downtuned seven-string grind of Munky and Head. Producer Ross Robinson captured it all raw and in the red, helping set the template for the nu metal wave that followed.

Twist opens with a burst of near-unintelligible fury, A.D.I.D.A.S. turns crude humour into a bouncing, hook-heavy single, and No Place to Hide shows the band's knack for pairing dread with melody. There's room for covers too, including Wicked, a take on the Ice Cube track that brings in Deftones frontman Chino Moreno to trade lines with Davis. Under the aggression, the grooves are deep and oddly danceable, closer to hip-hop than to classic metal.

Thirty years on, Life Is Peachy remains one of the purest documents of Korn's early chaos, ugly, groovy and strangely catchy all at once. This anniversary pressing, complete with that bonus a cappella Twist, is a fitting way to revisit the record that proved the debut was no fluke.