Eighteen months ago, Korn reminded us at Download Festival that they were a force to be reckoned with. Tonight’s the final night of the UK leg of their European tour – Korn’s first visit back since 2025, and their first arena tour over here in a decade – and with rumours flying that they’re wrapping up a new album, the bar for this show is high enough to practically be floating above the O2, interfering with air traffic control at London City Airport.
If we’re talking Download headliners though, it seems fitting that this year’s Apex closers Architects join Korn tonight. They’re a bombshell of pure rowdy class, bringing us to our knees quite literally on ‘Whiplash’ ahead of ‘When We Were Young’s shockwaves. Moments of high drama split the floor in two, with ’Doomsday’s refined emotion and incandescent release best lighting the way for new fans. ‘Animals’ reigns heavy and glorious before a moment of emotional vulnerability from frontman Sam Carter. Phone lights pierce the atmosphere on ‘Everything Ends’, before the hope and determination on ‘Machine’ make for a softer exit. This might be one of those rare shows where the support are the same calibre, if not higher, than the headliner.
A glitching intro, and ‘It’s On!’. Rather than providing an update to their sound, Korn are going for sheer authenticity, their industrial groove in full force powered by their synchronised headbang flow. Jonathan Davis clearly delights in his own rasped voodoo, and the gimmicks which dominated earlier shows have been thrown out in favour of just being ‘the most Korn’ they can be, the absolute best versions of themselves. There’s no menace to ‘Reward The Scars’, but there is a startling realism that the band are people, just like us, who are determined to just put on a really good show.
“D’y’all wanna hear some old school ‘Life Is Peachy’ shit?” screams Davis in a rare instance of his natural speaking voice, and that’s when their set gets real. We’re here for the heaviness that dominated our teenage years, and Korn too feel like they’re infinitely more passionate about the older tracks. Davis intones like a gutter prophet speaking in tongues through ‘Twist’s stalking innovation signalling a loosening of their MTV-era savagery and ‘Chi’s heady chemical bite. The dark loneliness of ‘A.D.I.D.A.S’ drops into a remembered time when Korn didn’t pack stadiums, the scaffolded frames unfolding above their heads to punctuate the song’s narrative.
Even the bagpipes and whimsy that characterise ‘Shoots And Ladders’ can’t distract from how Korn have absolutely refined what they do best. The slice of mastery that is ‘Coming Undone’ bolsters an oozing, jostling pit, the song grainy yet strangely revelatory. It’s an unpredictable setlist tonight, the tone switching rapidly, but when the supersonic bass boom signalling ‘Did My Time’ hits, we’re struck by the unlikely beauty that they pour into the melody live. By the time the venting of ‘Y’All Want A Single’ closes, any personal issues we might have been holding onto have well and truly been slammed out of us.
As we well know, Korn backload their sets, either because they’re aiming for a crescendo or they secretly want us to miss the last train home. The encore is what you’d show to someone to convince them that Korn are still on top: twenty minutes of the culmination of an award-winning career in heavy music. As the chimes of ‘Falling Away From Me’ are sucked into dirty riffs, we flop forward in unison on the drop before we’re staggered by a bassline on ‘Blind’ that you can feel through your whole body. If you take yourself out of the show for a second and try to analyse what you’re experiencing, you realise how many threads in this song have been picked up by other bands over the years, and quite how many people have been inspired by Korn at their best. Finishing with ‘Freak On A Leash’, the quintessential Korn track and a generational moment for so many of us here, is expected but still incredibly welcome. It arrives without fanfare and is handed to us to control like a gift, extended luxuriously for our enjoyment.
Tonight is a show where the music is the flair, a refined focus on the sound rather than flashy banter or dramatic effects, and a celebration of what drew us to Korn in the first place. In the last decade they’ve focused back on themselves, and this evening shows that their arena tour was well worth the long wait to experience a set from a band who are still ready to pull out the same level of grit that we remember.
Kate Allvey