Korn

The question couldn't have been clearer: "Arrrre youuu readddy?" To which a million Korn fans answered, "[i]Hell[/i], yeah," treating the opening seconds of "Blind" as one massive battle cry. Both a nu-metal survivor and co-founder, Korn has turned mosh pits into minefields for the past 15 years through nursery rhymes and some rather menacing bagpipes ("Shoots and Ladders"), slight disco ball breaks ("Got the Life"), and electrical storms ("Falling Away from Me," "Liar").

The twitch and scat outburst of "Twist" opens our Next Steps for a reason. It's a perfect curtain raiser to Jonathan Davis' primal screams and personal therapy sessions, as scored by junkyard drum sets ("Ball Tongue"), sidestepping, teeth-gnashing melodies ("Ya'll Want a Single"), and enough down-tuned guitars to trigger a Richter-registering earthquake (clearest on considerable thrash-and-bash jobs, like "Good God" and "Clown").

As Korn's choice of collaborators and extensive collection of baggy Adidas tracksuits suggest, the Bakersfield band has one foot planted in the mosh pit and the other in the streets 2Pac and Biggie once walked. Speaking of the Notorious one, he's resurrected on the gloomy graveyard jam "Wake Up," while "Freak On a Leash" gets a Morricone metal remix by hip-hop pioneer Dante Ross, and snap rap leaders Dem Franchize Boyz lean in and lend an extra bounce to "Coming Undone Wit It."

Before turntables and ironic cover songs took over the sudden subgenre of nu-metal, Korn was opening up for Ozzy and seizing America's pissed-off kids by the throats with their signature wrecking ball blend of floppy funk bass lines, batter-thick power chords, head-slapping grooves, and hip-hop-inspired drums. While some members have exercised their Gothic (vocalist Jonathan Davis, who scored the movie [i]Queen of the Damned[/i]) and gangsta rap (bassist Fieldy) inclinations in side projects, the group has outlasted the subgenre they helped start by experimenting with everything from industrialized techno to "chopped & screwed" hip-hop straight from Houston.