Follow the Leader by Korn

Follow the Leader, the third Korn album, crashed in on August 18, 1998, through Immortal and Epic, and it was the first time they'd made a record without Ross Robinson at the board. Steve Thompson and Toby Wright produced it instead, and the result hit number one on the Billboard 200, moving 268,000 copies in its first week and going on to become the band's biggest seller, certified five times platinum.

It's the sound of a band scaling its sound up to arena size. Head and Munky's guitars churn and wobble like a tectonic plate grinding, Fieldy's bass pops and clanks, David Silveria keeps a loping, hip-hop-bent groove, and Jonathan Davis sings, snarls and sobs through the whole thing. "Got the Life" is a swaggering, groovy stomp, and "Freak on a Leash" is the showstopper, twitchy and nasty and oddly catchy.

That video for "Freak on a Leash" picked up nine MTV Video Music Award nominations, won Best Rock Video and Best Editing, and then took Best Short Form Music Video at the 2000 Grammys; it and the "Got the Life" clip are considered the first videos ever retired from MTV's Total Request Live. The Family Values Tour and five singles pushed the album further, and it's often credited with dragging nu metal into the mainstream. In 2018 Revolver readers voted it the third-greatest nu metal album ever. Issues came next.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.