Nu metal in 2024 is in the best shape it’s been in since the first W. administration. It’s in such good shape it could fight an old Tyson who didn’t have a cheque in his pocket. It’s in such good shape David Draiman can sign his name on an IOF missile and the nu metal body politic just squeezes him out like a blackhead in a middle school bathroom. It’s in such good shape someone could drop a disc of an entire generation of young nu metal bands covering classics from the first and second-wave giants and the second disc containing their originals would be mandatory listening. These conditions are not merely the result of pop culture’s seemingly inexorable Saturn return of a nostalgia cycle, or the whiplash rise and fall of Sick New World (RIP that whack 2025 lineup) would be all the citation needed on the nu metal revival’s gravestone. “Here Lies the Nu Metal Revival: tickets started at $400 and the Flaming Lips were gonna be there”.
It is not so. Instead, in 2024 every band on nu metal’s Mt. Rushmore was on tour, from Slipknot to Korn to Limp Bizkit–hell, even System of a Down played some shows, and unlike Jane’s Addiction nobody got put in timeout. With all the daddies at work, the decks were cleared for nu metal’s young and hungry underground–the first it’s ever had, genre acolytes take note–to drop some era-defining records. And this is to say nothing of the return of both Kittie and fucking Linkin Park. So yeah, the revival’s over. Nu metal is vived.
To arrive at this ranking, the writers at Nu Metal Agenda submitted their own top ten lists that were then fed into a Final Ranking Machine (me) and lo, this list emerged. Don't come at any of us as individuals--if we did something wrong here, we did it together, as one. Trust me--every one of our individual lists was exactly as you would have it, just in a different way that resulted in what you see below. But feel free to leave a comment, and drop your own list if you've got one.
10. Empty Shell Casing – And Slowly... As I Turn My Back
Opening with a skittering breakbeat straight off Guts Syndicate's Laisse Faire and closing a mere four songs and one shit-headed skit later with a heaving spoken word passage set against a “Daddy”-ass panic attack, with And Slowly…As I Turn My Back, Empty Shell Casing announce themselves as maybe the most reverential young band of nu metal’s new wave.
Very much a first EP, And Slowly…’s raw production, all jumpy snares and jam-space scuzz, channels nothing so much as the unpolished thrills of Three Dollar Bill, Y’all-era Limp Bizkit. Opener “Blanks” comes in almost hotter than the band themselves can handle, the wobbly pacing and energy-drink addled gear-shifts giving the feel of a skater launched off a stopped board, arms windmilling and feet way behind, while “Lucy (Look Into My Eyes)” sees the band experimenting with the kind of dubby, abstract trough sandwiched between mosh-riff throwdowns that down the line while yield moody dimensionality. These loose shoelaces are entirely to their credit–this is a band hungrier than they are capable, which is the ratio that conquered the world at nu metal’s dawning. But it’s closer “New Disgust”, one of two 2024 tracks featuring mighty labelmates Papercut (see also), that earns ESC their spot at number 10; the track is a bouncy castle of youthful power and endless swagger, the swaying, climactic back and forth between Papercut’s death retches and ESC’s bars providing the kind of joyful catharsis that only the best nu metal can. The future of the genre is secure.
-- Josh Rioux
9. Flagman – Tastes Incredible
By the late 2010s, nu metal had transitioned from being vilified to a successful product of nostalgia-based marketing. Upcoming bands who looked to carry the genre’s torch either leaned hard into shoegaze-y metallic aggression or sought refuge in the burgeoning hate5six scene (praise Sunny). Rarely, however, did they embrace nu metal’s roots in playful anarchy and absurdism. Enter Orlando’s self-proclaimed “crispy, deep-fried poop rock” pioneers Flagman, the rabies-ridden bastard child of Grant Freeman, Cody Singleton, and Les Claypool’s illegitimate son (we call them as we see them), Sam Stewart. Tastes Incredible, the Sunshine State whack pack’s third full-length is a thrilling reminder that nu metal is at its best when it gleefully upends expectations while also making you nervously laugh.
Dubbed “Primus from Hell,” Flagman injects the scene with a comically large needle filled with silly juice right up its chocolate starfish. Their diet mainly consists of the zany chaos of Primus, the socio-political bite of System of a Down, the honest nonconformity of Zappa and whatever the fuck Mr. Bungle was doing in the early 90’s that eventually gave us something to write about. If you dig this type of music, look no further.
Clocking in at a lean 25 minutes, Tastes Incredible is a whirlwind of stop-start funk metal filled to the brim with frantic yet familiar vocal performances and manic instrumental detours. Pretty much every song highlights frontman Sam Stewart’s bass mastery as well as his uncanny ability to swing between goofy crooning and unhinged yelping. “Bombs Away” wouldn’t sound out of place on any System record, blending anti-war satire with rapid-fire riffing, while the instrumental interludes add a deranged Americana framework, skewering consumerism in a weirdly patriotic way.
The result is a deeply 2024 album: wired, weird, and reckoning with cultural rot through the lens of slapstick apocalypse. It probably smells like a Woodstock porta potty, too.
-- Timon De Zwaef
See our full review here.
8. Poppy – Negative Spaces
In the pivotal year of 2016, when edgelords ruled the internet from the comfort of their DXRacer gaming chairs, Moriah Rose Pereira—professionally known as Poppy—made waves in the not-yet-stale uncanny valley corner of YouTube. Her performance art drew attention from critics and tinfoil-hatters who never quite grasped the concept of satire, setting the stage for her music to get noticed as well. After the release of Poppy.Computer it became clear that she would continue to prioritize experimentation in both sound and image. But unlike Joji, who almost entirely moved on from his Francis of the Filth days, Pereira still embodies her online persona while sharing the stage with the likes of Spiritbox and Knocked Loose.
Negative Spaces fully deserves its critical acclaim, especially when you consider the fact that Poppy, once known for her oddball bubblegum electropop, only started dabbling in metal about six years ago. The record feels like the statement of an immortal princess of darkness reflecting on her first steps as a mere foot soldier. From the industrial party-rock sound of “crystallized” to the get-the-neighbours-to-call-the-cops-on-you effect of “the center’s falling out,” Negative Spaces thrives on contrast. Poppy’s ethereal vocals often soar above heavily processed riffs and breakdowns, creating a push-and-pull dynamic that mirrors nu metal’s roots while keeping it fresh. You’ve also got songs like "Vital" and the title track that blend pop-punk melodies with grunge undertones—much like what she explored on Flux—recalling influences like Hole and Avril Lavigne.Production duties fell to ex-Bring Me The Horizon member Jordan Fish, one of modern metal’s go-to producers. Although he likes to wear his influences on his sleeve, he ensures that Poppy owns every moment on this record. With Negative Spaces, she channels the spirit of the genre while screaming her lungs out, proving exactly who’s boss in a male-dominated scene.
-- Timon De Zwaef
7. Kittie – Fire
In a once-boys’ club like the nu metal scene, Kittie didn’t just open the door, they kicked that bitch off its hinges, so to see the Canadian quartet return after thirteen long years was a thrilling prospect. The Lander sisters, along with returning co-guitarist Tara McLeod and bassist Ivy Vujic (taking the baton from the late Trish Doan), stuck the landing and brought plenty of riffs and rage with Fire. As great as it's been seeing the upswell of new nu metal acts, it’s been a joy to see legacy acts make monster comebacks, and Kittie has been, for lack of a better phrase, the most Fire among them.
From the lead single “Eyes Wide Open,” the excitement for their return built to a fever pitch. It felt like an old friend returning after having glown-up something fierce. “I Still Wear This Crown” is a statement of a song; not just an anthem of empowerment and bad bitch energy, but of the band taking back their place as a big deal in the metal world. Morgan Lander’s voice sounds as commanding as ever, from her melodic cleans to her bellowing growls. Fire is everything a Kittie album should be, and proves the band still has plenty in the tank, much to our delight.
-- Lucia Z. Liner
6. Thotcrime – Connection Anxiety
Friends, I’m gonna be honest with y’all, this one’s a hard one for me to write about. Connection Anxiety is Thotcrime’s first full-length since the tragic passing of drum savant Dot Homler in late 2023, and hir final work with the band. Reading hir obituary while writing my review back in August did things to my soul I’ll still be unpacking years from now. I can’t imagine how hir bandmates felt, are still feeling, will continue to feel. Sometimes survival looks like screaming at the top of your lungs in a funhouse where half the mirrors want to kill you and far too many of the other half don’t give a fuck either way. Maybe some of the mirrors gleefully insist that your anger and grief are misplaced, sir, yes, I did say sir, this is a Wendy’s, how may I help you today? Take off your mask so I can see your beautiful smile. Look, my friends, I have walked these halls long enough to know that there is no correct or graceful way to live with a pain like that, only mirrors and diverging roads. And yet, after everything, here are the members of Thotcrime, fucking trying.
For this girl at least, a huge part of the appeal of earlier releases like 2020’s ønyøurcømputer and 2022 follow-up D1G1T4L_DR1FT was the sense of freewheeling chaos. There was pain there, of course, a well of heartfelt emotion and beautifully resonant moments, but a near-boundless humor as well. We live in a funhouse and it may feel like hell, but we can run through the halls at full speed and laugh at the walls’ insistence that we could ever be the distorted images they have the audacity to reflect at us. Connection Anxiety is a departure, because at this point in the game it couldn’t be anything else. We’re still in the funhouse, but there are no surprises this time. Just three trans women left standing at the center of the hall of mirrors, staring at the totality of where they’ve been, how far they’ve come, where they could go next. The track “Garden Court” functions as a microcosm of the album as a whole, as vocalist Hayley Elizabeth reflects on her decision to leave her home in Philadelphia and join her bandmates in Chicago, the coffee shops and family she misses, the chaotic sprawl viewed from SEPTA cars, the good memories and the ones she’d much rather leave behind. Connection Anxiety is an album for the crossroads, for the times when the future is at once uncertain and painfully inevitable. For the times where you need to take a step, and another, until we’re closer to somewhere worth living. Thotcrime gave us an album that takes you by the hand, tells you it understands. The road is hard. But friend, we’re still here. Let’s take this next step, together.
-- Gabi Brown
5. Linkin Park – From Zero
This feels like an easy choice, but for me, it comes down to the journey I went on with the singles leading up to the album’s release. “The Emptiness Machine” felt like a statement of reassurance, as if to say “not only are we back, but it’s gonna be alright.” Then came the anthemic “Heavy is the Crown,” with a monster of a scream from new co-vocalist Emily Armstrong that may rival the iconic scream in the bridge of “Given Up.” The feels came in heavy on “Over Each Other,” which started to turn the page on how this new incarnation of Linkin Park would sound.
Then came “Two Faced,” which absolutely would have fit in along with the offerings of either of the band’s first two studio albums. It feels lifted from the same blueprint laid for “One Step Closer,” right down to the aggressive bridge.
When taking the disc as a whole, it’s a tale of two stories: the first is of where the band has been, and the second where the band is going, and in that respect, this comeback album is exactly what it should be given the circumstances. It honors the departed Chester Bennington and celebrates what he did for music with Linkin Park, while picking up the baton he left and going in a new, fresh direction with it. Whatever the second Armstrong-era record sounds like may be the real make-or-break for the new Linkin Park, but the first impressions made by From Zero were more than satisfactory.
-- Lucia Z. Liner
See our full reviews here and here.
4. Fever 333 – Darker White
After a 4-year pandemic hiatus and a lineup change, Fever 333 came back this year with a bang. Known for his politically-charged lyrics, Jason Butler still knows how to write catchy radio rock songs, and Darker White levels things up from 2020's Wrong Generation. The album is pummeling, with good tension and release and great songwriting that pushes political messages forward without being too heavy-handed.
"NEW WEST ORDER" transcends its intention as an anthem for POCs in the heavy music scene ("Way before my gang of three I was the weird rock n**** from the ING Ridin' a skateboard with all eyes on me Rockin' 2Pac tees and bumping Morrissey") by speaking to any and all misfits who struggle to fit into subcultures due to factors like homophobia and transphobia. "NO HOSTAGES" is as haunting in its catchiness as it is effective in it's ACAB messaging, "Guns don't kill people/People kill people/Guns don't kill people/Cops kill people". If you won't listen to Darker White for yourself, listen to it to piss off r/metalcore.
-- rosiegothicc
3. Memorrhage - Anyo
At this point, I feel like we need to cement Garry Brents within some sort of nu-metal hall of fame for his incredible contributions to the genre. Last year he made waves in the space with the release of Memorrhage’s self-titled debut, which soon had him being named as an artist to keep an eye out for amongst the growing contemporary nu-metal scene. And by Jove, he’s done it again with Anyo.
Anyo is an absolute barrage of some of the best brutal nu metal you’re going to come across. Each song truly feels like a blitzkrieg on the ears in the best way possible, with “Structural Damage Capacity” and “Removal Process” being some great standouts. At times the tracks take death metal and industrial turns. Once more, Brents vocal work is fantastic throughout, and the album even boasts some incredible features like Destin Taylor of Hitbox and Captain Dugog on the turntables. That’s another thing that I really love about Brents’ projects; though he’s the mastermind behind the music, concepts and execution, you’re always going to find a list of collaborators who help in making all this magic happen. Just through the sheer intensity, creativity and uniqueness alone, Anyo’s easily one of the best, if not the best, nu-metal albums of 2024. It’s more than worth your time if you haven’t come around to it yet.
-- Cain Borgia
See our full review here.
2. Chat Pile – Cool World
The “Davis” ragers. “Garbage Man” pandemonia. Wailing shared ache for live “Lake Time.” The gotdamn “Rainbow Meat” grinder aphonia days post-show. If you’ve two-stepped to “Pamela” or possibly contracted ringworm on the ochlophilic brink of a “Tropical Beaches, Inc.” HAUNT ME brawl, seeing catchier thrown around to describe Chat Pile’s sophomore LP might hackle a little. But true, the band is selling out the usual standing room venues in no time and squeezing in double dates. Folks are stoked to congregate in sweaty congested space to belt They don’t wanna hear what I have to say (“Frownland”) and Most are dragged kicking and screaming out (“The New World”), to have amid late-capitalist American imperialism’s unfailingly inhumane aims their malaise affirmed through Raygun Busch’s horror autofiction/persona poetry, their historically eventual murderer-victim existential mania reanimated with Luther Manhole’s unsettling dexterity, and the falsely individual complex of it all ground and founded into communal gravity by Stin and Cap’n Ron’s fraternal rhythm section.
Cool World spins 43 minutes sans features, hidden tracks, solo indulgences, or voicemails. Its most radio-friendly singalong, “Masc,” is just as well the bedroom face of the atrocity accomplice soldier son in “Funny Man.” The album’s real catch is its absence of hubris: the first-person lyrics suffer no righteous proselytizing, the music entertains no escapist conceptual detours from scoring bad sleep plagued by bloody hands. But whatever catchier involves, understanding the gifts of accessible heavy music—and its pitfalls in popularity-cum-inertia and plunder—requires contending with why it matters that Cool World is catching, and why this album is essential enough to make Chat Pile, arguably, endangered*. It’s difficult to dodge the anxiety that Cool World and its reception feels like an asterisk event, like something this fuckin honest, attentive, and appreciated isn’t long for the world. But in an empire that makes art like this appropriate, what right do we have to preciousness?
*Before nu metal could mature to awareness of the conditions creating the seemingly anomalous yet wall-to-wall spiritual distress it confessed, that rage and dismay were commercially reproduced and reduced to vapid holograms from white guys who were making enough money to insulate themselves against the collective horrors of being poor, or else addiction quite intentionally rendered them unreliable in the War-on-Drugs-era court of public opinion, while the cult of personality mopped the rest up into a bucket of anarco-eclectics whose “weirdo” politics couldn’t keep their bands intact.
-- justin like the song
See our full review here.
1. Cheem - Fast Fashion/Faster Fashion
Riding high after 2022’s infectiously and unabashedly fun nu-pop-punk mission statement Guilty Pleasure, Nu England favorites Cheem came back swinging this year with not one, but two EPs. Taken together, March’s Fast Fashion and its November follow-up Faster Fashion are less a cohesive project than a collection of experiments from a band that’s already captured lightning in a bottle and is now gleefully figuring out who else they can zap with it.
For all their admittedly expert pop posturing, at least half these guys are confirmed prog heads who’ve name-dropped acts like Primus and Intronaut in interviews, and they are locked the hell in with each other. Y2K pop culture nostalgia and hook-laden boy band worship share space with jazz progressions, breakbeats, and even an entire song of drop-tuned djent riffing that somehow seamlessly incorporates all the aforementioned elements.
A lot of great albums dropped in 2024, but out of everything that came out this year I’ve found myself coming back to these EPs the most. They’re just nostalgic enough to land in a nu metal best-of list, but Cheem’s increasingly gleeful and forward-thinking genre agnosticism makes them a breath of fresh air in a scene that too often gives in to depressive navel-gazing, both emotionally and stylistically. Sam Nazaretian and Skye Holden are still electrifying as dueling vocalists, keeping their pop-punk spin on the Shinoda/Bennington dynamic but continually finding new ways to harmonize and play hot potato with the mic. If that’s not enough, Cheem also have one of the tightest rhythm sections in the game right now, and they continue to execute some truly catchy grooves across both projects. These songs will ride hook after insistent hook straight into your brain and refuse to leave, leaving you tapping your toes on park benches and train platforms months later. If you’ve ever wondered what nu-metal would sound like if its buddies knew it’s been really down lately and took it out for a karaoke night where everyone realizes they still know “Bye Bye Bye” by heart, it would sound like Cheem. These EPs are the future of nu metal.
-- Gabi Brown
