“Last Resort” by Papa Roach

"Last Resort" was Papa Roach's first single, and it did more than launch them: it has come to be seen as the song that defined nu metal in the 2000s, and plenty of fans rank it among the genre's best. Its first home was the Ready to Rumble movie soundtrack in 2000; soon after, it became the lead single from Infest, the band's second studio album.

Jacoby Shaddix, Jerry Horton, Tobin Esperance and David Buckner wrote it together, and Jay Baumgardner produced and mixed it, with David Ahlert engineering, for DreamWorks. It opens on a nervy, circling guitar figure that sticks in your head on first listen, then the rhythm section kicks the door off its hinges and the whole thing becomes a frantic mix of rapped verses and screamed release, raw and desperate and impossible to ignore.

It sat at number one on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart for seven weeks and got to 57 on the Hot 100. Overseas it cracked the top 10 in Germany, Austria, Portugal, Britain and even the Dominican Republic, and it has never really left rock radio since.

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