New nu metal
Sung and screamed. Clean singing and harsh vocals trade off, often chorus against verse.
In short
The generation raised on Korn and Slipknot brings back low tunings and electronic textures with today's production.
How it sounds
- Very low tunings and modern production with electronic and trap elements.
- Short structures built for streaming and vertical video.
- Vocals switching rapidly between rapping, processed singing and screaming.
Hear what that means
- Sincerity without irony
Sleep Token - Take Me Back to Eden
Nu metal's emotional register with pop production and sudden genre shifts. What these bands took was the willingness to be direct about distress.
Open on YouTube - Hyperpop meets the seven-string from 15:36
Glitch, trap patterns, blast beats and nu metal groove inside one song, all digitally assembled.
Open on YouTube at 15:36 - Texture over riff from 7:26
Loathe - I Let It in and It Took Everything
Shoegaze guitars and djent tunings on a record filed under nu metal, which shows how little the label now constrains.
Open on YouTube at 7:26
Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 2 of 3 are cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.
The specifics
- Tempo
- 90-150 bpm
- Song length
- 3-5 min
- Tuning
- Down-tuned seven- and eight-strings, with the tunings borrowed from djent rather than from nu metal's originals.
- Production
- Digitally maximal: hyperpop production techniques, extreme dynamic contrast and vocal processing borrowed from pop rather than from metal. Nothing here sounds like a band in a room.
- Written about
- Mental health, directly, Alienation, Online life, Sincerity, unironically
What each part is doing
- Guitar Nu metal's spacious two-note riffs played on modern extended-range instruments, with djent's precision applied to them.
- Electronics Glitch, hyperpop synthesis and sudden genre shifts used structurally — the electronics are as load-bearing as the guitars.
- Drums Programmed or heavily edited, moving between trap patterns, blast beats and nu metal groove within one song.
- Vocals Rapped, screamed, sung and pitch-shifted, frequently all in one track, with pop-standard processing that metal has historically refused.
What it isn't
That it is a nostalgia movement. The bands are mostly too young to remember nu metal's commercial peak, and what they took was the emotional register rather than the era — the willingness to be direct about distress, which metal had spent two decades avoiding. Sleep Token and Loathe sound nothing like Korn, and what they share is the refusal to be ironic about feeling bad.
Told apart from
- Nu metal New nu metal plays the original's vocabulary sincerely rather than as pastiche, and mixes it with hyperpop and emo rather than with hip-hop.
- Progressive metalcore Both are modern, digitally produced and dynamically extreme. Progressive metalcore comes from metalcore; this comes from nu metal.
- Djent The tunings and the precision come from djent, and the songwriting instincts do not.
- Emo pop Both are sincere about mental health and both borrow pop production. This is far heavier and far stranger.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
After 2018, a generation that never experienced nu metal first-hand began recycling it without irony. Tallah and Vended — which includes children of Slipknot members — carried the formula forward, while Sleep Token combined the weight with R&B and deliberately constructed mystery. The genre's rehabilitation happened largely on TikTok.
Descended from
Siblings on this branch
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- Black 'n' roll 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Heavy metal
- Pagan / Viking black metal 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Heavy metal
- Viking metal 1.0 apart by rating · meets it at Heavy metal
Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.