Follow the Leader (1998)

Follow the Leader (stylized as FOLLOW the LEADEЯ) is the third studio album by American nu metal band Korn. It was released on August 18, 1998, through both Immortal and Epic Records. This was their first album not produced by Ross Robinson, instead being produced by Steve Thompson and Toby Wright.

The album peaked at number one on four national charts, including the US Billboard 200 with 268,000 units sold in its first week of release. Follow the Leader is the band's most commercially successful album, being certified five-times Platinum by the RIAA. Its singles, "Got the Life" and "Freak on a Leash", both charted on more than three charts, and their music videos are considered to be the first music videos retired from MTV, most notably the MTV show Total Request Live. The album generally received positive reviews by critics; AllMusic saying the album is "an effective follow-up to [Korn's] first two alt-metal landmarks." It is often regarded as the album that launched nu metal into mainstream ubiquity. In 2018, readers of Revolver voted it as the third-greatest nu metal album of all time. In 2025, Rae Lemeshow-Barooshian of Loudwire included the album in her list of "the top 50 nu-metal albums of all time", ranking it eighth.

The Family Values Tour promoted the album, along with its five singles. The song "Freak on a Leash" was nominated for nine MTV Video Music Awards, and won for the Best Rock Video award, as well as Best Editing. The music video for "Freak on a Leash" won Best Short Form Music Video at the 2000 Grammy Awards.

Recording and production

By January 1998, Korn returned to the studio to record Follow the Leader. Even though Korn was impressed by the work Ross Robinson had done on their previous albums, they decided to work with producer Steve Thompson and engineer Toby Wright. Robinson did, however, work with singer Jonathan Davis as a vocal coach for the album. According to Wright, Robinson went to extreme lengths to agitate Davis in the vocal booth, including punching him in the back repeatedly. Korn implemented a live streaming department on their website in March 1998, called Korn TV, which aired the After-School Special series. Using RealMedia software, fans could access it every Thursday from 7:30 pm to 8:30 pm Eastern time. Korn's After-School Special featured guest appearances such as Sugar Ray, Limp Bizkit, Deftones, Steve Vai, 311, and the Pharcyde. The band was shown making the record on Korn TV. Korn exposed themselves making the album to let their fans see what they were doing in the studio and behind the scenes. Follow the Leader features numerous guest vocalists, including Ice Cube on "Children of the Korn", Tre Hardson of the Pharcyde on "Cameltosis" and Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst on "All in the Family". The songs for the album were written and copyrighted in 1997, with the exception of "Children of the Korn", "All in the Family" and "Cameltosis", which are copyrighted from 1998. Mid-way through the album's production, Korn fired Thompson and Wright became the album's producer. "We weren't seeing eye-to-eye on things and bumped heads a lot. He's an awesome producer, but we thought it'd be better if he went", Davis told Kerrang!. Thompson's firing delayed the album's production as all of its vocal tracks had to be re-recorded. By June 1998, the band were mixing the album.

In a 2013 interview, the band revealed that they partied heavily during the production of Follow the Leader, with massive amounts of alcohol, drugs, and women in the studio. Davis explained further, saying that while recording the vocals for "It's On", there were "people getting blowjobs right behind me, there was girls banging each other in front of me, people getting boned in the closet right behind me, it was the craziest shit I've ever seen in my life and I sang that song." According to Davis, he only agreed to begin tracking vocals when producer Toby Wright met his demands for an eight-ball (a one-eighth ounce of cocaine).