The second album from the California band Korn opens with a minute of near-wordless noise. The opening track, Twist, is built around improvised guttural singing, with the single word "twist" repeated as the only lyric. It is a strange way to start a major-label record, but it was an honest introduction to Life Is Peachy, the follow-up to a debut that had already made the group a force in the new sound called nu-metal. Korn released Life Is Peachy on October 15, 1996.
Recording sessions at Indigo Ranch
The record arrived on October 15, 1996, through Immortal Records and Epic Records. The band had recorded it from April to July of that year at Indigo Ranch Studios in Malibu, California. The sessions were not peaceful. The musicians drank heavily and used drugs, including methamphetamine, just as they had while making their first album. Arguments were constant, and the singer, Jonathan Davis, sometimes bit his bandmates while drunk.
Producer Ross Robinson, who had also worked on the debut, tried to get the group to stop drinking so they could focus on writing and rehearsing. The chaos, however, did not stop the work. Davis recorded sixty to seventy percent of his vocal parts on the first take. The drummer, David Silveria, used a 20-inch bass drum and a piccolo snare, and his drum parts were a mix of planning and improvisation: sixty percent worked out, forty percent made up on the spot.
Fourteen tracks and a hidden Twist
The album contains fourteen tracks, not counting a hidden one. That hidden track is an a cappella version of Twist, placed after the song Kill You. The title itself came from the bassist, Reginald "Fieldy" Arvizu, and the music sits firmly in nu-metal and alternative metal. The whole record cost 150,000 dollars to make, a modest sum for a band that was about to become one of the biggest metal acts of the decade.
The commercial response was immediate. Life Is Peachy entered the Billboard 200 at number three, selling 106,000 copies in its first week in the United States. It also went to number one in New Zealand. By January of 1997, the album had gone gold, and by December of that same year it was platinum. The industry took notice: in 1997, the record won the Kerrang! Award for Best Album.
Singles, Grammy nod and Metallica tour
Three singles were released from the record: No Place to Hide, A.D.I.D.A.S., and Good God. All three reached the UK Singles Chart, with Good God climbing to number 25. The song No Place to Hide was also nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance at the 40th ceremony. The band was no longer a cult act; they were headlining tours and supporting Metallica in the United States.
Looking back, the members have mixed feelings. In 2015, Jonathan Davis said the album felt rushed because of the pressure of constant touring, but he still called it a "killer" record. The bassist, Fieldy, had said years earlier that he came to appreciate the album more over time, calling it a "good angry record." That anger, born from exhaustion and excess, is exactly what made Life Is Peachy sound the way it did.
The record stands as a document of a band at a breaking point that somehow held together. The guttural opening, the hidden track, the fights in the studio, and the rapid rise up the charts all belong to the same story. Korn made an album that was messy, aggressive, and unpolished, and it became one of the defining releases of nu-metal.
Korn made an album that was messy, aggressive, and unpolished, and it became one of the defining releases of nu-metal.