31st July 2026
Christopher Nosnibor
We really do seem to be experiencing a Nu-Metal renaissance right now. And of all the genres I would have put money on sinking without trace, it’s Nu-Metal, which felt like a flash-in-the-pan fad in the late 90s. The idea of crossing rap and metal wasn’t entirely new even then. Aerosmith’s collaboration with Rum DMC may have sown the seeds, but it was most definitely a meeting of rock and rap. The collaborations which featured on the Judgement Night soundtrack in 1993, however, very much brought rap and metal together, and set the precedent for what Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park would go on to do. Helmet and House of Pain? Faith No More and Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E.? Slayer and Ice T? These were some fierce collisions of rap and metal. This was radical. But that was 1993 – and what a time to be alive! And now it’s 2026. Thirty-three years have elapsed. Holy shit. It’s not exactly ‘nu’ anymore. Is it? Perhaps it’s time for a rebrand. And since we’ve had Post-punk and even The New Wave of New Wave, how about Nu-Nu Metal, or ‘The Nu-Metal Revival’ or ‘The Nu-Metal Renaissance’?
But while the Nu-Metal scene of the late 90s was dominated by blokes venting versions of adolescent rage (although Fred Durst was nearing 30 when Limp Bizkit released their debut album, and there always felt like a sense of arrested development hung around the genre – older guys making records for disaffected teens), the current scene is altogether more diverse, and most significantly, we’re seeing female-fronted acts like Eville breaking through and kicking arse.
Smutclub Ldn share some common ground with Eville, as is happens, with whacked-out pop autotune colliding with skull-crunching riffs. And as such, ‘Elephant’ is a brain-melting identity crisis of a single: clocking it at precisely three minutes, it’s a mental mash-up of nu-metal, emo, and pop, all brought together and heated under compression, with explosive results.
The verse riff is a gnarly, churning beast which chugs and undulates menacingly, the chorus sounds like it belongs to a completely different song, and the breaks and bridges are something else again. How do you switch between hands-in the-air anthem and brutal slam-dancing and back again, and again, in just three minutes? ‘Elephant’ is positively schizophrenic, and love it or hate it, it’s the most inventive thing you’re likely to hear in 2026.
AA
Aural Aggravation 