This Wednesday, May 24, the long-running alternative rock band Incubus is set to play Township Auditorium on a tour that also has them playing large outdoor amphitheaters across the country.
The group, which began in the mid-90s and peaked commercially at the height of the nu-metal heyday around the turn of the millennium, is a surprising survivor of that musical period.
A quirky, oddball rock band clearly inspired by Primus and Faith No More, it took the funk-metal templates common to the era but stuck out amid their more dour nu-metal brethren thanks to flashes of musical esoteria and the neo-hippie lyrical flourishes of frontman Brandon Boyd.
They also had a fair bit more of pop appeal than the typical alternative rock group (the band blew up largely due to an acoustic re-working of their hit “Pardon Me” and the strummy AOR-friendly tune “Drive”), and Boyd’s long locks and penchant for appearing shirtless didn’t hurt either.
The combination of those two things is likely what made 1999’s Make Yourself and 2001’s Morning View as successful on MTV’s TRL as on rock radio.
What is probably just as pivotal, though, is that the records that came after that were quite successful as well, even as the group receded from the center of music culture. As Chris Molanphy notes in his history of Billboard’s Modern Rock charts, Incubus was one of the five bands that dominated the top slot during a six-year period between 2003 and 2008.
While songs like “Megalomaniac” and “Anna Molly” didn’t have the reach and sparkle of earlier hits, they arrived at a time and in a format that was both shrinking and consolidating.
“It was the era of the known quantity,” wrote Molanphy. “Any act providing the right mix of familiarity and ‘edge’ would be rewarded with permanent residence.”
The band’s success in this period made Incubus and Linkin Park the two commercial survivors of the nu-metal era and gave them a staying power even as the band became less active in the 2010s. For all of the critical huffing over the band during their commercial heyday, when critics skewered Boyd’s lyrics specifically and the often-clumsy genre mashups of nu-metal in general, the band has now made a lengthy career out of a style that many saw as a flash-in-the-pan.
Funnily enough, there has now been a bit of a reclamation project of nu-metal aesthetics, if not much of the music, among many younger Gen Z artists, with indie pop wunderkinds like Grimes and Rina Sawayama freely borrowing from the sounds and styles of that era.
Even more unlikely artists like Solange have freely claimed them as influences (the R&B star actually took the stage with Incubus to perform their 2001 album cut “Aqueous Transmission”).
Of course, it seems unlikely that many of these younger folks are going to be turning out for Incubus themselves. The band has been doing the classic legacy act move of touring heavily behind the 20th anniversaries of their breakthrough efforts, and many recent setlists lean heavily to both of those turn–of-the-century efforts. This is a show purely for the geriatric Millennial crowd (late 30s/early 40s), along with that narrow slice of modern rock radio diehards.
Just old enough so that the dippy uncoolness of lines like “a decade ago, I never thought I would be/at 23, on the verge of spontaneous combustion, woe is me” has passed from insightful to cringe to pure, unadulterated nostalgic joy.
Pardon us while we rise above the flame.
