Nu Metal Bands of the 2000s: Boom and Bust

Reading time: 9 minutes

Every genre history has a boom decade. Nu metal's is unusual because the boom and the bust fit inside the same five years, and because the whole arc is visible in the accounting. In October 2000, Limp Bizkit's Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water sold 1,054,511 copies in its first week, still the biggest opening week for a rock album in the SoundScan era. In September 2003, the follow-up, Results May Vary, opened with 325,126. Same band, same label, three years apart, and roughly seventy percent of the audience gone. This page tells the 2000s as that business story: the festival bills and TRL rotations that built the peak, the signing wave that flooded it, the 2003 to 2005 collapse, and the handful of bands that walked out of the decade intact. The bands are the evidence; the industry is the plot. For how the sound was invented in the first place, and by whom, that argument lives on the first nu metal bands page.

Disclosure, once and up front: this site belongs to the team behind Daemon Grey, a Canadian industrial goth metal artist. He is not part of this era's story, so he stays out of it; the rest of the site is his if you want to judge the music.

The Boom Years: 1999 to 2001

By 1999 the genre's founders were already veterans. Korn's debut had come out in October 1994; what changed at the decade's turn was scale, and the machinery delivering it. The Family Values Tour, the arena package Korn launched in 1998, ran its 1999 edition with Limp Bizkit headlining over a bill that mixed Staind, Filter and Primus with Method Man & Redman, Ja Rule and The Crystal Method. That lineup is the era in miniature: metal, hip hop and electronica sold as one package to the same arena crowd, with Korn themselves making surprise appearances at a handful of dates.

The same summer, Slipknot released their self-titled debut on Roadrunner Records, 29 June 1999. It became the first platinum record in the label's history, proof that the appetite now reached well past radio-friendly acts into nine masked men from Des Moines. Limp Bizkit's Significant Other and its lead single “Nookie” (June 1999) put the genre in daily rotation on MTV's Total Request Live, where, as Louder's history of the movement notes, nu metal videos sat alongside the era's biggest pop acts. A genre built on alienation was now competing with boy bands for the same afternoon countdown, and frequently winning.

Then came the numbers year. Papa Roach's Infest (April 2000) went triple platinum inside fifteen months. Chocolate Starfish posted its million-copy week in October 2000. That same week's other big rock release, Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory (24 October 2000, Warner Bros.), started slower and finished bigger: 4.8 million US copies sold in 2001 alone, the best-selling album of that year in any genre, and eventually an RIAA diamond certification. Crazy Town's “Butterfly” spent two weeks at number one on the Hot 100 in March and April 2001. Staind's Break the Cycle opened at number one in May 2001 with over 700,000 first-week copies. P.O.D.'s Satellite arrived 11 September 2001 and still went triple platinum. And System of a Down's Toxicity was the number one album in America that same week. Seven different bands with era-defining commercial results inside eighteen months: no metal-adjacent genre had ever been this liquid.

The festival economy ratified it. The Ozzfest 2001 main stage ran Black Sabbath and Marilyn Manson above Slipknot, Papa Roach, Linkin Park, Crazy Town and Mudvayne, with Disturbed promoted up from the second stage after a single night. Half of metal's biggest travelling bill was now nu metal, two summers after Woodstock '99 had already shown, in July 1999, how big and how volatile this audience could be.

The Clone-Signing Wave

What the majors did next is the most predictable chapter in the story, because it is what majors always do. With Hybrid Theory outselling every pop record in the country, A&R departments treated the genre as a formula that could be restocked: a seven-string riff, a rapped verse, a melodic hook, a DJ. The years 2000 to 2002 produced a flood of signings built to that spec, bands rushed from demo to major-label debut while the window was open. A few earned their place. Most were interchangeable by design, because interchangeable was the brief.

The musicologist Catherine Hoad has argued that nu metal spent its whole life as metal's despised “other”, the subgenre the rest of the scene defined itself against. That status explains both halves of the wave: labels could gold-rush it precisely because it was a pop phenomenon rather than a protected scene, and the culture could abandon it just as fast, with no purist rearguard to defend it. The bands who kept the genre's ideas alive below the mainstream, on independent labels and local circuits, are a separate story, told on the underground nu metal bands page. Up at the majors, the maths was simpler: too many near-identical products, one shrinking shelf.

Crazy Town make the cleanest case study, because their whole arc is documented in chart positions. “Butterfly” hit number one in spring 2001. The follow-up album, Darkhorse, released on Columbia in November 2002, peaked at number 120. The band was dropped by the label in 2003 and went on hiatus. Eighteen months separate the number one single from the drop. That compression, hit to unsigned, is what the collapse looked like from inside a contract.

The Collapse: 2002 to 2005

The headline act tells the same story at scale. Results May Vary, Limp Bizkit's fourth album, arrived 23 September 2003 and opened at number three with 325,126 copies, numbers most bands would take, and a catastrophe next to the million-copy week of 2000. The record's harsh reception marked the moment the genre's biggest name stopped being a guarantee. Labels read first-week numbers the way markets read earnings, and the earnings said the era was over.

What replaced it on radio and MTV was already queued up. By 2004 and 2005 the mainstream rock lane belonged to the MySpace generation: emo and pop-punk acts like My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy, whose 2004 breakthroughs were built on a social network rather than a festival bill, and, on the heavier end, the metalcore wave that had been developing in the clubs all along. The infrastructure that had made nu metal enormous, TRL, rock radio, the compact disc itself, was simultaneously weakening, so the genre's decline got tangled up with the decline of the machine that had sold it. The copycat class was dropped first; the mid-tier followed; and by 2005 “nu metal” had become the label bands publicly distanced themselves from.

The Survivors

Who walked out intact? The pattern is consistent: the bands that survived treated nu metal as a starting point rather than a spec sheet.

Slipknot answered the collapse with Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses), released 25 May 2004 and produced by Rick Rubin, the only Rubin album in their catalogue. It pushed toward melody and full-band songcraft precisely when the genre around them was contracting, and it kept Roadrunner's flagship franchise growing straight through the bust. System of a Down had the best 2005 of any heavy band on earth: Mezmerize and Hypnotize, released six months apart, both debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, making them at the time one of only four artists, alongside the Beatles, 2Pac and DMX, to land two chart-topping albums in a single year. Linkin Park spent the collapse collecting certifications: Hybrid Theory reached RIAA diamond status in 2005, the same window in which the genre that produced it was being written off. And Korn, the band whose 1994 debut started the whole lineage, simply kept releasing albums through the decade and beyond, outliving the boom they triggered and most of the bands signed to imitate them.

There is a coda the 2000s could not have predicted: the genre's critical rehabilitation. Nu metal now receives sustained scholarly treatment in The Cambridge Companion to Metal Music (Cambridge University Press, 2023), the kind of university-press attention that was unthinkable when the term was an insult. The bands that held their nerve through 2003 to 2005 turned out to be holding a catalogue the next two generations wanted.

The Decade in Dates

Date	Event
29 June 1999	Slipknot's debut lands on Roadrunner; it becomes the label's first platinum album
Summer 1999	Family Values '99: Limp Bizkit headline over Staind, Filter, Method Man & Redman and more
April 2000	Papa Roach release Infest; triple platinum by July 2001
24 October 2000	Hybrid Theory released; Chocolate Starfish posts a 1,054,511-copy first week the same month
March–April 2001	Crazy Town's “Butterfly” spends two weeks at #1 on the Hot 100
8 May 2001	Staind's Break the Cycle opens at #1 with 700,000+ copies
Summer 2001	Ozzfest main stage: Slipknot, Papa Roach, Linkin Park, Disturbed, Crazy Town, Mudvayne
4 & 11 September 2001	Toxicity hits #1; P.O.D. release Satellite
November 2002	Crazy Town's Darkhorse peaks at #120; Columbia drops the band in 2003
23 September 2003	Results May Vary opens at #3 with 325,126 copies, down from 1.05M in 2000
25 May 2004	Slipknot's Rick Rubin-produced Vol. 3 carries the band through the bust
2005	Mezmerize and Hypnotize both debut at #1; Hybrid Theory certified diamond

Where each of these bands came from, and which record started it all, is mapped on the main nu metal bands index, the parent page of this one.

Frequently Asked Questions

What were the biggest nu metal bands of the 2000s?

Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, Slipknot, Korn and System of a Down led the decade commercially, with Papa Roach, Staind, P.O.D. and Disturbed close behind. Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory was the best-selling US album of 2001 in any genre, and Limp Bizkit posted the SoundScan era’s biggest rock opening week in 2000.

Why did nu metal decline in the mid-2000s?

Oversaturation, mostly. After 2000 the major labels signed waves of soundalike bands, and when their records underperformed the drops came fast; Crazy Town went from a #1 single in 2001 to dropped by Columbia in 2003. Flagship releases like Results May Vary (2003) underperformed too, and radio moved on.

What replaced nu metal on radio and MTV?

By 2004 and 2005, mainstream rock rotation shifted to the MySpace-era wave: emo and pop-punk acts such as My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy, plus the rising metalcore scene on the heavier end. The platforms changed at the same time, as TRL-driven video rotation and CD sales both lost their force.

Which nu metal bands survived the 2000s?

The bands that evolved past the formula. Slipknot grew through Vol. 3 (2004), System of a Down put two albums at #1 in 2005, Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory went diamond that same year, and Korn kept releasing albums through the decade. The copycat signings of 2000 to 2002 largely did not.

Sources

• Catherine Hoad, “Significantly Othered: Limp Bizkit and the Politics of Nu Metal ‘Otherness’”, Rock Music Studies 10, no. 2 (2023): 119–139. DOI
• Jan-Peter Herbst, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Metal Music (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Cambridge Core
• “How Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, Korn and the rest took nu metal from hated subgenre to the biggest thing on Planet Earth”, Louder.
• “Limp Bizkit, Nickelback, Rob Zombie, Pantera first-week sales revealed”, Blabbermouth (2003).
• “25 Years Ago: Limp Bizkit Explode With ‘Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water’”, Loudwire (2025).