You can hear it in the way he says it. Not as hype. Not as a victory lap. More like a band standing in a rehearsal room surrounded by ghosts of riffs they’ve already killed.
KoRn is deep in the kind of creative grind that doesn’t look glamorous from the outside. According to guitarist James “Munky” Shaffer, the band have already written around 40 songs for their next album, and torn through them with the kind of intensity that only comes from a group refusing to settle.
“It’s taking a fucking long time,” Munky said in a new interview with Rolling Stone Brasil. “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.”
Since their 2022 album Requiem, the band has been circling new material with a level of self-criticism Munky says has become part of their identity. The goal isn’t just to make music, it’s to make sure it still sounds unmistakably like KoRn when it lands.
“We’re very critical about what we do now,” he explained. “We’re very particular… 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.”
That “all five of us” line lands differently when you look at the band’s recent history.
Munky also addressed the absence of bassist Reginald “Fieldy” Arvizu, who stepped away from the band in 2021. His departure, Munky says, wasn’t fuelled by anger, but by distance and drift.
“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.”
But he was careful not to turn it into a break-up story.
“But it’s okay. It happens. People, everything, goes in cycles,” Munky added. “We’re definitely not mad at him or anything, we want him to be happy.”
Fieldy himself has previously said he hasn’t spoken with his former bandmates since 2019, describing his exit as tied to personal struggles and stepping back from the pressures of being a working musician.
Meanwhile, KoRn isn’t slowing down. New material has already started leaking into the live environment, with the band debuting “Reward The Scars” at Sick New World in Las Vegas, in front of a massive 50,000-person crowd. The track was originally created for the video game Diablo IV: Lord Of Hatred, and marks their first new release in four years.
Their last studio record, Requiem, arrived in 2022 and was described as one of their most emotionally nuanced chapters to date.
Now, with 40 songs in the chamber and a lineup shaped by both history and absence, KoRn is once again sitting in that familiar space between chaos and control, trying to decide what survives and what gets torn apart next.
