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KoRn’s Munky Says the Band Have 40 Songs in the Pipeline as He Addresses Fieldy’s Exit
KoRn’s Munky says the band have written nearly 40 songs for a new album and reflects on Fieldy’s 2021 departure.
KoRn guitarist James “Munky” Shaffer says the band have already written close to 40 songs for their next album, a process that has stretched on since the release of 2022’s Requiem. In a new interview with Rolling Stone Brasil, he painted a picture of a record that’s been repeatedly pulled apart and rebuilt, a long grind that speaks to how carefully the Bakersfield nu-metal veterans are protecting the shape of their sound.
“It’s taking a fucking long time,” he said. “We’ve gone through… I swear to God, we’ve written probably almost 40 songs, and gone through ’em, and rewrote ’em, and got rid of ’em, and tore ’em apart, and rebuilt ’em.” That kind of perfectionism is hardly new for a band with nearly three decades of history, but Munky suggested the stakes feel especially high now. “We’re very critical about what we do now. We’re very particular, in… because we wanna keep our original sound. You can’t really get away from that – when we start playing, it sounds like KoRn, especially with all five of us.”
The interview also touched on one of the band’s more awkward modern realities: bassist Fieldy’s departure in 2021. Munky framed it less as a dramatic break than a slow drift, describing a period in which the bassist seemed unable to stay locked in during writing sessions. “Trying to get him engaged was a little bit difficult, just to stay in the room while we’re writing,” he said. “He would always just kind of leave… and he’d be in there for a few minutes and then kind of just not focused, and he just kind of lost his ambition, I guess.”
He was careful not to turn that into resentment. “But it’s okay. It happens. People, everything, goes in cycles. We’re definitely not mad at him or anything, we want him to be happy. And it didn’t really feel like he was happy being a working musician at the time. So it was kind of like it was a mutual sort of – I wouldn’t say split – because I still use the word hiatus.”
Fieldy, for his part, said last year that he hasn’t spoken to his former bandmates since 2019. At the time he stepped away, he said he had been “dealing with some personal issues that at times have caused me to fall back on some of my bad habits and has caused some tension with the people around me”.
KoRn have already started testing the waters of this new era in public. Last month they released “Reward The Scars,” their first new music in four years, written for the video game Diablo IV: Lord Of Hatred, and shared a gory animated video for the track. Jonathan Davis and co. also played it live for the first time to a crowd of 50,000 at Sick New World in Las Vegas.
The song arrives as the band prepare to return to the UK and Europe later this year for their first run of shows on those shores in more than 10 years. They headlined Download last year, but this new tour marks a much rarer stretch of dates in the region. The full list of dates is available here.
Requiem, released in February 2022, remains the band’s most recent studio album. In a four-star review, NME noted: “It would be a push to call this Korn’s first ‘happy’ album. More accurately, ‘Requiem’ has brought something new to a discography that, until now, has been an exploration of human suffering. It’s led to the band’s most nuanced record to date.”
