Trust me on this, there is far more to this band than just that single. In fact, Alien Ant Farm is one of the true originals on Nu-Metal, coming together the year after Korn changed the face of heavy metal with their self-titled debut album.
The band was something pretty unique within the scene itself, a band that had a sense of humour about themselves. For one, their band name came to original lead guitarist Terry Corso through a surprisingly existential thought.
He wondered whether all life on Earth had come from an experiment done by, in his words “entities from other dimensions”, and that we were being monitored by those same creatures like we were living in some kind of Alien Ant Farm.
I’m sure it was a train of thought that had nothing to do with certain smokeable substance whatsoever. At all. Anyway, they stood out at a time when Nu-Metal was a mainstream concern, so of course they were going to be big. It was at that point that “Smooth Criminal” was released; in the lead up to their first major label release “ANThology”.
It went to number one in Australia and New Zealand, top three in the U.K and topped the Modern Rock charts in the U.S. If you were alive and not living under a rock in the summer of 2001, you definitely heard it many times.
Since then the band has released a handful of albums. The band toured solidly through the 2000s as well, performing shows with the likes of Hoobastank, Fuel and on the Vans Warped Tour. There are fewer bands around with more live experience than them. And a night out with Alien Ant Farm, will surely be a night to remember.
Anybody who only knows Alien Ant Farm for their classic cover of Michael Jackson’s ‘Smooth Criminal’ back in 2001 - that’ll be most people, then - might be surprised to know that they’re still a going concern; the truth is, though, that they’d already carved out a significant cult fanbase long before one of them decided it’d be a good idea to record a version of the King of Pop’s classic that would pay tribute to him and parody him in equal measure. After forming to play live in 1995, their first record, the cheekily-titled Greatest Hits, was an underground success four years later, by which time they were already deep into the kind of nu metal sound that would define their second, DreamWorks-released album, Anthology, a global success. In keeping with the tone of their songs, and indeed music videos, Alien Ant Farm live shows are lighthearted affairs, with bassist Tye Zamora taking on the role of class clown and proving that the bassface was alive and well long before the girl from Haim took it to the masses. They haven’t toured the UK in a while - a Manchester show in their 2002 heyday met with a one-star review from The Guardian - but with Always and Forever, their first record in eight years, slated for later this year, a long-overdue return could be on the cards.
Joeg_67
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