Nu metal loves a costume. Born in the 90s, the nu metal imaginarium drew equally from metal’s hand-in-spiked-glove relationship to horror and alt-rock’s yen for subverting mainstream culture’s fetishization of childhood innocence. That decade’s specific blend of demoralized social movements, corporate acceleration, a widening wealth gap, and a post-cold war/pre-war on terror official enemies vacuum being filled by the fever dreams of a metastasizing Christian fascist movement found a generation of young people trained to consume but deeply skeptical of buying in, nursed on suburban dreamscapes but all-too aware that Pennywise was still out there. Given all that, is it any surprise that the preeminent heavy music of generation Columbine featured a parade of freaky clowns, fucked-up dolls, and looming shadows over suddenly-empty swing sets? Don’t blame Limp Bizkit or the Chilis—Woodstock was already burning.
Swollen Teeth’s debut full-length, Ask Nothing, arrives in the sunken heart of a decade that for most of us makes the 90s—at the least the imagined one—look practically pre-Columbian in terms of chill-factor. The band announced themselves in 2023 with a self-titled EP produced by Slipknot DJ Sid Wilson (steampunk gimp mask), who brought the band to the attention of nu metal Prometheus Ross Robinson. Robinson was so impressed he arranged for the EP to be the first released on his newly formed Blowed Out Records imprint. According to a Metal Hammer interview that same year, what drew both Wilson and Robinson in was the band’s weaponization of mystery—“you couldn’t really see what was going on, or who they were… I was just getting these flashes: no songs, just different sounds creating an uncomfortable atmosphere”, recalled Wilson of how he encountered them on Instagram. When Robinson attended their live show for the first time, the band forced him to wear a mask, an equalizer of sorts. Even without the cosign of two of the most important figures in nu metal history, it’s strong lore. Swollen Teeth appear in all their press photos masked, wigged, and hospital-scrubbed, the look a sort of escaped patient from a psych ward for demons, or maybe non-benign forest-spirits; the long, stringy-haired wigs are a solidly unsettling touch on top of an already-achieved vibe. They maintain anonymity, at least for now, so we get monikers: Megaa, Sun, Skutch, and HOG, like Teletubbies from the Upside-Down, and come with a logo and symbol in place; two slanted lines with two shorter ones between, resembling both fangs and an inverted devil-horns hand gesture (cool). We don’t know where they’re from, or what bands they may have been in before, if any. The echoes of Slipknot are loud, and, while Deftones may the moment’s most de rigueur nu metal OGs, for my dollar the former’s wounded ferality makes them the most emotionally coherent of that class of bands in today’s climate.
But what 25 years ago was reflective of a cultural moment where it was enough to flip the floorboards rot-side-up on all the shiny End of History triumphalism, today could pass virtually undetected, curlicues of mist off the data-firehose. What’s a band in costumes subverting, when Sleep Token dress like orcs on Grindr and make music that sounds like Imagine Dragons if they played D&D exactly once, evil as a brand-new Nissan Leaf? What's a mask when the performance of self as product is endless, seamless, and extends not just to Sabrina Carpenter but all the way down to an aspiring fly-fishing influencer with 500 followers? What does embodying rot mean when Gaza’s in the scroll, right there, not only utterly unhidden, the jackboots not only in the streets but actively stanned by what feels like half the internet? What does a mask mean when the face underneath looks exactly like it?
The answer turns out to be the same as it was back when Sid was still just 0—nothing without the music. Which is bad fucking news for Sleep Token, but I’ve already given them a sentence, so fuck it, new subject: Swollen Teeth are the goddamn truth. Ask Nothing might be the best nu metal debut since Hybrid Theory, one that owes its tar-black energy to that chapter of nu metal the Linkin Park era more or less foreclosed on. We’ve had young bands dusting off various abandoned elements of nu metal before now—Klokwise and Silly Goose have goofball rappers, .bHP’s got a wrecking ball of a DJ—but we haven’t had a new band push this hard into truly evil atmospherics since that shit was abandoned to the Odd Futures and Salems of the last decade, and the timing couldn’t be more appropriate.
Ask Nothing opens on a sound like a panic attack communicated via sonar, and closes on a keening drone punctuated by a steady, flat pulse that gradually fades, like a sinking ship diving into the void. There isn’t an inch of tape between those two points where the band isn’t placed among amorphous volumes of sonic phenomena that surge and recede as though slipping between valences of space demarcating some otherwise unknowable distance between the instruments and vocals we recognize and the abyss they seem in constant relationship with. It’s an incredible production, but before I imply this is the Wilson-Robinson show, it’s equally a credit to the band’s craft that the atmospherics feel like extradimensional outgrowths of the songs themselves, which are both inventive and relentlessly propulsive, the productions chasing the songs’ movements and the songs rebounding back through the productions in ways that feel both wildly free and frantically possessed. The way opener “Family” shifts from a doomy mosh churn to a blast-beat driven black metal breakdown and back while vocalist Megaa swings freely from death growls to soaring, anthemic altar calls like some sort of backlit cult leader skin-suiting for a literal demon is awesome, but what makes it truly wild is the way the production traces those shifts, flattening the reverb on the growls and blackened gnashing, then spangling out echoes when Megaa goes leader-mode, doubling him as he builds momentum, the vocalist sprouting dopplegangers like a soaked mogwai—the hip-hop toned “Woo!”s buried in the mix a third guy, the intoned tongues-mumbling exorcist at the 2 min mark a fourth, on and on—the track is a true statement of arrival, concluding with the chanted lines “Stand in allegiance to/The horns-down family”.
Swollen Teeth maintain a relentless energy through the entire record—you can feel a kind of wired urgency in these performances that can’t be faked, or dubbed in. The famed “Ross Robinson Boot Camp” method Wilson alludes to running the band through while recording the EP is legendary in the lore of those early Slipknot records, which sounded like hell to make but the effort bleeds out of the wax to this day, frenzied, staggering. Here we have something akin to that approach; the band are certainly up to being driven, especially at the more extreme end of their range, but there’s a mystery dimension to these songs that Wilson does well to create room for. “4 Wars” starts out like a churning, gritted-teeth rager, but it’s the nursery rhyme chorus handing off to the disc-grinder DJ work and the panic sirens leading into Megaa’s anxiety-attack rap verse on the bridge that give the song its feel of being built on a tilted axis the way those early Korn songs often did—that vulnerable element that made nu metal feel so vital and strange in a genre that had never allowed that sort of thing in. “Medicine” has a breakdown in the back half where Megaa’s turntables get the fuck down with a searching little Tom Morello-style riff from HOG that’s all the more funky for taking place in a hell-dimension, while album highlight “Foster” manages to imbue the record’s most straightforwardly-driving song structure with a Lovecraftian vibe supported by creepy guitar artifacts floating through the mix and some lunatic vocal overdubs, giggles and what sounds like a brief booth meltdown. On “Ask”, a standout from the back half, the approach seems to be to create something like a national anthem for the Cenobite dimension, a truly weird track that feels both uplifting and not at all for us, like you wandered into a ritual while looking for the washroom out back.
Swollen Teeth feel like the first nu metal band of the 20s to have internalized the overwhelming, exhausting, spiritually violent experience of being alive in this time and crystallized out music that both could only be nu metal and could only be now. Sid Wilson’s production feels absolutely integral to the sound of this band and the nature of this record, a zeroeth member. If putting that mask on Ross Robinson was about keeping the experience of witnessing this band in their element a pure thing where there are no celebrities and no stars, only the music and the horns-down family, maybe nu metal once again can be a genre that moves in the opposite direction of the stream of things, and pulls everyone around to it. There isn’t anything here that I can imagine on a chart, but I also can’t imagine entities like Megaa and Sun and HOG and Skutch having anything more than a blank stare for an aspiration like that. So we’ll do this their way, one experience at a time. You’ll want to be a part of this.
Ask Anything is available on September 5th via Blowed Out Records.
