KORN's JONATHAN DAVIS Says Making 'The Nothing' Album Was 'A Very Cathartic, Dark Experience'

KORN frontman Jonathan Davis spoke to Kerrang! magazine about the band’s new album, “The Nothing”, which will arrive on September 13. Asked how the disc differs from 2016’s “The Serenity Of Suffering”, he said: “It’s just a completely different beast. Musically, I think it’s leaps and bounds from that. The guys had fun working with [producer] Nick Raskulinecz again, but you could tell my level of involvement from that to that. I mean, shit, on this record there’s some songs that’ve got 20-something vocal tracks on it — I went full-on QUEEN and ELO [ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA]! They were some of my influences and I wanted to do some of those big vocal beds. I took my time; I was really into making the vocals sound amazing. I did all kinds of recording shit that I learned over the years, so this wasn’t a week like the last record.”

Davis, whose estranged wife Deven died last August, said that the album reflected events in his life, explaining: “I was dealing with all the darkness that was around me. Life has been very dark, so it was just me going through the grieving process with losing my wife. It was hard. I haven’t had a chance to reach my full potential on KORN records for years, because I’ve always been so busy with stuff at home — taking care of my son Zeppelin, who’s got type 1 diabetes, and Deven had really bad mental illness that I was hiding and dealing with. I did the best I could, but I never could put myself 100 percent into [recording]. Sitting down and working out what I was going to do with this record was a process, and this is the longest I’ve ever taken making a record. I went through working with a producer, different engineers and shit, and I finally got fed up. I’m like, ‘Fuck you all, just leave me alone; when it’s done it’s done and I’ll give you it.’ So it was just me and an engineer. I did it myself and it was a very cathartic, dark experience.”

Asked if the music and lyrics came quite naturally, Jonathan said: “I’ve never hurt like that ever, but when you’re hurting like that, shit just comes out. It wasn’t going to be an album necessarily about, ‘Oh, woe is me.’ This whole [record] is about this dark thing. I’m not going to say demons or devils or whatever the fuck it is, but this dark energy has chased me for so long. It’s just me dealing with it and talking about it, and I’ve always felt comfortable there. Why in my life have I had so much fucking heartache? Why do I always get dealt the things I get dealt? That’s me dealing with it.”

KORN guitarist Brian “Head” Welch recently described the sound of the band’s new disc as “a continuation of our last record. It’s really guitar-heavy and energetic — there’s a lot of energy,” he told The Pulse Of Radio. “We came back to the root of what KORN is, in our sound, in the lyrics and in the feel of the songs. And so what KORN started out to be, I feel like we’re doing that right now.”

KORN and ALICE IN CHAINS will embark on a co-headlining amphitheater tour across North America this summer, starting on July 18 in Del Valle, Texas and hitting nearly 30 cities before wrapping on September 4 in Mountain View, California.