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Heavy Song of the Week is a feature on Heavy Consequence breaking down the top metal, punk, and hard rock tracks you need to hear every Friday. This week, we highlight the new single “Reward the Scars” from Korn.
Korn have endured for a reason. Even for those incredulous of nu-metal both as it emerged and during the recent resurgence, there is an undeniable creativity to the group. It helps, of course, when you are credited as one of the primary founders of a style when it comes to knowing how to evolve it without becoming self-pastiche.
The group has evolved to something sleek, bleak and coyly progressive ever since 2007’s untitled album, an arc they have only dialed more into during their artistic renaissance starting with The Nothing. The surprise new single “Reward the Scars” keeps that up, marrying murky avant-gardeisms with an emotionally direct chorus. The band may have been typified by a kind of emotional over-the-top lyricism, but this one, like much of their recent work, shows a sophistication that people who’ve checked out of the acclaimed band may be surprised by.
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“Reward the Scars” also showcases why the band has gotten so much love from the world of underground heavy music lately, with everyone from progressive bands to hardcore groups to death metal and industrial performers openly citing the often quite forward-thinking troupe.
Honorable Mentions
AFI – “Nooneunderground”
Those clued in are well-aware of the sonic chameleon nature of AFI. Here, like on all of their newest record Silver Bleeds the Black Sun…, the veteran California band embrace a cold gothic sound closer to Alien Sex Fiend and Clan of Xymox than Black Veil Brides. The mood is chilly and paranoid, frantic and hollow-eyed, like a pale-faced shivering figure on the verge of a breakdown. There’s enough punk rattling through the goth rock to give it necessary propulsion, like a corpse launching itself from the grave. It also sees the band continue their nervy gothic post-punk arc they’ve been in ever since Burials over a decade ago.
At the Gates – “The Dark Distortion”
At first blush, the song is perhaps merely good, another well-executed piece of death metal of the more melodic bent by its greatest practitioners. But as the song goes on, “The Dark Distortion” feels more and more longing, death-haunted, something vaguely implicated by it’s title which serves as its refrain. In its final moments, when it opens up into ethereal synthesizer work before fading away to nothing, the scent of death hits pungent in the nose. It wasn’t just departed vocalist Tomas Lindberg but all of the band who deserve commendation for being brave enough to take us to this place they all were sitting in, watching the progression of cancer and waiting. That it is a powerful moment is almost a given.
Devin Townsend – “Home at Night”
Beautiful can be heavy, too. Especially when it’s a song so sweetly poetic about dying. Townsend sometimes struggles to land the emotional punch, sometimes being a little too jokey or a little too sincere in a way that can read as performative (as though there’s any music that isn’t). Here, however, he threads the needle, with an obviously outré performance given the natural theatrics of orchestral music but with a sobriety to the emotional side. It is, after all, a song from the voice of someone dying comforting the living and doing so without pulling the punches of what’s happening, gazing into the abyss at the bottom of the mouth of the grave while also bidding as warm a goodbye as possible.
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