...TO BE LOVED By PAPA ROACH

Nu metal was out. Eye liner and rock’n’roll bangers were in. Here’s how Papa Roach took the left turn that would keep their career on track

of 2003, the writing was on the wall for nu metal. That summer, Limp Bizkit had been chased offstage at a Metallica gig in Chicago by a hostile crowd chanting “Fuck Fred Durst!” A few months later, they’d struggled to replicate the success of 2000’s ‘nu metal’ bands,” admits frontman Jacoby Shaddix. “I was like, ‘This is fucking weak.’ When we were dubbed nu metal, we hated it. We did everything we could to rebel against it. I didn’t want to be compared to every other band and be stigmatised. I wanted to prove myself as a valid rock singer and

was a turning point for our band, especially with a song like [2004 soft rock ballad]

You listen to that song and you don’t think of nu metal. You think, ‘Fuck that’s a great song!’”

Not everyone was convinced that there was life after nu metal; for one, the band’s label, Geffen Records, was far from enamoured when Papa Roach turned in

“DreamWorks Records got bought out so we went over to Universal and got pushed over to Geffen,” Jacoby recalls. “The president of the company was not impressed with the album. He was like, ‘I think this band’s had its time and is essentially over.’ We did not feel that way. We’re always evolving – that’s been something even before we put out [2000 breakthrough] We were like, ‘We think we’re sitting on an album that’s amazing and you are using your preconceived notions